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400 Blows© John Nesbit
When I taught film appreciation at the high school level, one of my goals was to get my students to enjoy foreign film. I didn't want them to have an instant negative reaction the first frame an English subtitle appeared on the screen. So I used The 400 Blows, figuring that my students could relate to Truffaut's semi-autobiographical film. I was right-after all, they had had clueless teachers and had ditched classes before, for starters.
Truffaut had begun as a film critic and had been promoting his "auteur theory" for creating a more personal cinema. The 400 Blows is Truffaut's first feature length film and is regarded as the beginning of the French New Wave cinema. It's definitely very personal, and we can correctly guess that Truffaut faced similar troubles during his adolescence. The film opens with a visual tour of Paris accompanied by strings until we settle into a French classroom and see Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) immediately get into trouble as soon as he receives the pinup girl that has been passed around the class. It won't be the last time he gets into trouble. Antoine can't help but become the scapegoat at school. When he is kept in at recess, he turns poet and writes on the wall: "Here suffers poor Antoine Doinel, unjustly punished for a pinup that fell from heaven." This ticks off the teacher, who assigns Antoine to write an essay as punishment, but gets distracted from doing it. He then skips school, and makes up the phony excuse that his mother has died in order to gain the teacher's sympathy. This works fine until Antoine's stepfather (Albert Remy) and mother (Claire Maurier) show up at the classroom. Things deteriorate from there on. Eventually Antoine is expelled from school for plagiarizing Balzac, and he is turned in to the police by his stepfather when he attempts to return a stolen typewriter. Antoine's parents aren't drawn as completely in the film, yet we do get to see them as struggling Parisians who are attempting to scratch out an existence. The father is a pleasant man with a good sense of humor until he catches his son in lies. The mother has her own issues to deal with, including having an affair with an office worker -- Antoine knows about this and witnesses his mother lie out of the situation. Neither parent is a consistent force in Antoine's life. We see everything through Antoine's eyes. Thus, we see the family dysfunction and know the cause. Note the scene where his parents argue when Antoine is in bed-the same day that Antoine has seen his mother with the office worker. Later we see his parents get upset when Antoine's Balzac shrine nearly sets the apartment on fire, but for "punishment" his mother convinces her husband to take them out for ice cream and a movie. It is the most pleasant night of young Antoine's life. Go To Page: 1 2 |
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