#16 — The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
Steven Spielberg once attributed the initiating spark of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to none other than François Truffaut, noting that the French filmmaker told him on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (in which Truffaut had a small but important part), “I like you with keeds. You are wonderful with keeds. You must do a movie just with keeds.” Spielberg added, “He kept saying, ‘You are the child.'” This is no small praise coming from the French New Wave master who began his own career with a portrait of childhood, widely understood to be drawn from his own experience. With The 400 Blows, Truffaut was indeed the child, positioning lead character Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) as a clear analogue for himself and, by extension, all of those who were in the director’s post-World War II generation. I use all this as an entryway to writing about The 400 Blows because I find it fascinating that Truffaut connected so enthusiastically with Spielberg’s view of childhood. For Spielberg, childhood is a place of wonder and adults are either non-existent or little more that petty annoyances. Parents are absentee and other authority figures are easily bested. It’s no wonder Truffaut responded to this instinct that he senses in Spielberg. The younger director had the ability to manifest the youthful hopes of Truffaut. Spielberg’s take on children was The 400 Blows‘s exultant run of freedom across the beach without the “What now?” freeze frame.

Of course, while Spielberg’s vision might have more emotional appeal, Truffaut’s has the gut punch of greater truthfulness. In execution, there’s not much to The 400 Blows beyond Antoine’s restless efforts at escape, usually followed promptly by him being forcefully, cruelly shoved back into a place of imposed obedience. He’s bullied by parents, teachers, just about every adult in his small, gloomy orbit. Truffaut presents it with a wry sense of humor and a deep appreciation for the coping mechanisms the develop in the perpetually beset and callously misunderstood. The film has a profound sense of the interactions that take place in Antoine’s life. Part of Truffaut’s quiet brilliance with the film is the notion that all this hardship doesn’t exactly shape Antonine. Instead, the boy endures and ultimately outlasts it. Any lessons picked up in the long trudge of childhood are merely glancing or at least entirely tactical. The end goal is just getting away. Misery loves company, but it yet prefers solitude.

Truffaut returned to Antoine in subsequent films, catching him a few more years down the rue. It’s an understandable continuation of the autobiography that comprised a significant part of the director’s career, but it also seems unnecessary. The 400 Blows is such a pure, empathetic expression of human existence that it extends out in all directions: to other people, to other cultures, even backwards and forwards in a timeline of a life. Truffaut had so much more to offer in his career, especially the impish, inspired deconstruction of film grammar that serves as clearest explanation as to why the French New Wave was transformational. And yet his very first feature is one of those that is so comprehensive in its artistry that it feels like a creator saying all that needs to be said, as if there’s a the lurking suspicion that there won’t be even one more frame of film afforded to him. In the case of The 400 Blow, that’s not desperation. It’s revolution.