Cast: Jeanne-Piere Léaud, Albert Rémy

Director: François Truffaut

Screenplay: François Truffaut

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Genre: French Film/Drama



CRITIQUE:

Right up the pantheon of French New Wave cream-of-the-crop is this supremely made semi-autobiographical childhood tale of auteur François Truffaut himself, Les Quatre Cents Coups (which literally means “to raise hell”) or The 400 Blows, its English title counterpart. His debut film, which won him Best Director at Cannes Film Festival, charters a fresh-faced yet delinquently rebellious child Antoine Doinel (a wonderful central performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud), as he meanders around Paris away from the clutch of his indifferent mother and ham-fisted step-father, and even becomes a renegade at school. He may appear like a younger James Dean, but he is a rebel with poignancy. Writing on walls, stealing a typewriter from an office, from a disregarded kid to a delinquent institution detainee, Truffaut does not glorify the story and rather tells it straightforwardly without over-sentimentality, drawing a portrait of juvenile delinquency in naturalistic strokes. He captures Paris beautifully in a mobile cinematography that uses an array of filmic techniques: panning, tilting and tracking, a plethora of visual panache. Standout shots are the restrained camera movements in the classroom scenes, the amusing dissolution of a PE class in the streets, Antoine and Remy’s nostalgic escapade around Paris, and that striking, affecting shot of Antoine’s silent tears falling into the night behind the bars of a police van – a pure magic of cinema rarely seen in celluloid. Along with Godard’s sassy and revolutionary Á Bout De Souffle, this embodies the spirit of the nouvelle vague, masterful, emancipated, reflective, witty, blissful and beautiful.


VERDICT:

For the record, this is one of the greatest childhood films ever captured. That wonderful feeling after watching this film is the pure joy of cinema.



RATING: A+