The 400 Blows

My Best Flick Ever is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) [1959]. It tells the tale of Antoine Doinel’s (Jean-Pierre Leaud) painfully distressed and yet deliriously joyous ride on the cyclone of his own early adolescence. Home and classroom—customary habitats for the archenemies of many an adolescent—are here the joint headquarters for a pincer movement which drives Antoine through a gauntlet of humiliations that complicate and confound his struggle to define himself as an individual, a young man, a human being. Though trammeled by forces beyond his control, his will to determine his own destiny leads him into a friendship with a classmate, Rene Bigey (Patrick Auffay), and between them—kindred spirits—they forge a life of their own creation. Emboldened by mutual understanding and trust, they eschew the degradation and unhappiness of home and school by living life, adolescent-style, “on the hook,” falling timelessly from adventure to misadventure to yet another adventure, always with imagination, pleasure, and a deepening affection for each other (Rene was, in Truffaut’s actual life, Robert Lachenay, his lifelong friend and creative collaborator.). Antoine’s story begins in a Paris classroom—all boys—in what here in the United States would be an intermediate or junior high school. He’s drawing a moustache on the face of a pin-up girl that the kids are passing from desk to desk. Caught in the act by his teacher (Guy Decomble), he’s punished by having to forego recess and remain in class, writing repetitions on the blackboard of “I must not…” in regard to his miscreant behavior. Instead, he writes a denunciation of his teacher, whom he dubs Sourpuss. His troubles accelerate thereafter. Home from school, he’s now writing-out a further punishment, this time for his blackboard jeremiad. His mother (Claire Maurier) returns from work, sits down on Antoine’s bed—situated in the foyer which serves as his bedroom—draws her skirt up to her thighs and rolls down her stocking before Antoine’s captive and captivated eyes, all the while reprimanding him for having forgotten to buy some food item on his way home. Returning to school the day after a hooky jaunt with Rene, Antoine’s teacher asks him for a note from his parents explaining his absence. Flustered, desperate, searching for something to say, he blurts out, “My mother, she’s…she died,” which generates from his teacher the requisite compassion; until, that is, a knock is heard on the door at the back of the classroom. What we already know is that on the previous afternoon the class snitch saw Antoine and Rene pick up the bookbags they had hidden behind a doorway that morning, thereby freeing them to walk about the city unhampered, and on this morning he had gone to see Antoine’s parents, whom he asks—unctuously and insidiously—if “Antoine is feeling well enough to return to school today.” Antoine turns his head to the door of the classroom and sees, through the door’s window, both his parents and the school’s headmaster. Antoine’s father (Albert Remy) calls him to the back of the room and smacks him across the face before the entire class. And further, while playing hooky, Antoine caught sight of his mother lustfully kissing a man who was a stranger to him, and she saw that he had spotted her. Between his consternation about this encounter and his mortification at his father’s hands, he decides to truant from his home. Rene sequesters him at his home and keeps him secreted from his (Rene’s) parents in a back room, bringing him leftover food from the family dinner table. Back at school, Antoine is charged with having plagiarized a passage from Balzac, which confounds him because he had become so enamored of Balzac that he had committed the passage to memory and wrote it in class as if it came from his own mind. Despondent now, and without any money, he steals a typewriter from his father’s office but is unable to hock it. Guilt-ridden, he chooses to return the typewriter rather than simply abandon it, and in so doing is caught in the act, which results—at his parents’ request—in his incarceration in a reformatory My adolescence…exactly! Not, of course, in its particulars, but in its ethos. How could I not recall, for example, when watching the typewriter scene, the time I stole a pack of bubblegum baseball cards from the candy store, only to come back in a few days to buy another 5-cent pack and drop a dime on the counter and hasten away before I was asked if I wanted any change? The 400 Blows is no coming-of-age movie. It is adolescence. Pure adolescence. Show me an adolescent who has come of age and I’ll show you a miracle. Antoine, dazed and confused by the fusillade of humiliations raining down on him from both flanks of the pincer, is not about to put it all together. Too much of the-life-he-does-not-want-to-live impinges on his drive toward a more wished-for life, derails him from but at the same time becomes entwined with his quest for self-integration. Where can Antoine—the archetypal adolescent—go but into a state of mind that is crystallized in the movie’s final scene, which just happens to be the first of its kind—a freeze-frame (Ah, for the wonders of DVD, which in this instance includes a running commentary by Brian Stonehill, from which source I learned of this film-first.). So what’s to be seen in that final frame? We’re taken to it by a pan shot that’s more than a minute long. Antoine is successfully escaping from the reformatory. Having eluded his pursuer by hiding under a bridge, he’s loping along a dirt road that takes him to the sea, something he’s earlier made known he has never seen. At the shore he jogs—shoes-on—into the wavelets, pauses, turns back toward shore, pauses again, and there…right there…that’s where he’s frozen. This freeze-frame, this photograph, taken in the context of the moving picture in which it plays its part (and taken on its own as well, perhaps), serves me in late adulthood as the emblem of my early adolescence, the beacon of orientation that viscerally and resonantly illuminates my own journey through what was to be my second and final phase of timeless life. Its very immobility galvanizes scenes of paralyzing irresolution into memory. Antoine’s eyes radiate bewilderment, but also in evidence in those very same eyes is his ferocious determination to carry on, to find a way out. And conflated in that space, somewhere between the image on the screen and the one thrown off from behind the lens of my own projector (see Arlow), do I not also discern in those selfsame eyes an ember aglow with mischief, an undying ember without which life as it had to be lived then would have been unendurable? When I saw the movie must have everything to do with how much it means to me (nor could it have hurt that Leaud, in the film’s sequels, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, grew up to be my look-alike). The 400 Blows was released in 1959, which is when I saw it for the first time. In a theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was about to become a non-teenager. Not that I was out of my adolescence, which, in my case, had a considerably longer shelf life. I was still thick into the ups and downs of adolescence, but I did have a hair’s breadth worth of distance from it; enough to allow me to watch Antoine in rapt fascination, knowing that I knew him and that he knew me. We had everything in common. Any disparities were negligible, readily flicked off. We both had an unhappy home life, though the dice did roll more in my favor in that I was not the object of parental lovelessness, as was the case for Antoine. For me, all I had to suffer was the detritus from the inveterate antipathy my parents had for each other. School? I, like Antoine, had to write a full blackboard’s worth of “I must not…” after a visit to my third-grade class by another third-grade class whose teacher singled out some of the best and worst of her students, and for the very worst she pointed to my buddy Jules, saying, “Who could possibly want this one?” and I said I did, walked up to him, grabbed his arm and pulled him with me to my seat. Mrs. Birmingham, who’d actually fall asleep at her desk while sucking on the ink-end of her fountain pen, didn’t appreciate my gesture. I’d love to have played hooky with Antoine. I’d first join him at his amusement park for a ride on the Rotor—a spinning cylinder that splayed you by centrifugal force against its outer wall, where Antoine ecstatically pulled his legs off the cylinder’s floor by spreading them apart and then turning himself sideways to three o’clock—on which ride he was joined, a la Hitchcock, by Truffaut himself. Then I’d take him over to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, where we’d encounter yet another cylinder, this one about thirty feet high, and drop into it feet first and then slide out the bottom of it onto something like a roulette wheel that was whirring one way while a half dozen wheels within the wheel turned in the opposite direction, and you’d be wheeled from one wheel to the next, doing all you could not to slide off into the trough. Or we could, as I used to with Joe—my very own Rene—check out of Stuyvesant High School—the old one, on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, the Stuyvesant whose gym had a circular track as its balcony, under which were printed, black on silver, the names of the great Stuvesant jocks, like (speaking of film) one James Cagney, who in the early 1900's was the New York State diving champion—and mosey over to Julian’s Billiard Parlor on Fourteenth and Third for an hour or so of racks, then finish off the splendid day at another parlor, this one for ice cream, beneath the Third Avenue El at 28th Street, where Double-Dip, the gentlemanly proprietor with the white apron, would fashion-up a couple of banana splits. Where could I go with Antoine to in any way replicate the wondrous experience he had when he and Rene ambled into the back row of an auditorium filled with four-and-five-year-olds and watched along with them a Punch and Judy show, while we in the movie’s audience gasped in unison with the real-life four-and-five-year-olds who were filmed (unknowingly) as they witnessed—spellbound and in amazement—life’s joys and horrors enacted before their eyes by the puppets? Where could I go with him but to the movies? There was a time when I ran groups for parents who were having a hard time with their adolescent kids. I'd invariably ask them if they would want to relive their adolescence. At least ninety per cent of the time the answer would be no. I can only wonder as to how many of these parents would reconsider their answer were they to expose their adolescence, despite its inevitable travails and agonies, to The 400 Blows.

Tedari39
Age 69

Jefferson, NY 12093 My Best Flick Ever is Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) [1959]. It tells the tale of Antoine Doinel’s (Jean-Pierre Leaud) painfully distressed and yet deliriously joyous ride on the cyclone of his own early adolescence. Home and classroom—customary habitats for the archenemies of many an adolescent—are here the joint headquarters for a pincer movement which drives Antoine through a gauntlet of humiliations that complicate and confound his struggle to define himself as an individual, a young man, a human being. Though trammeled by forces beyond his control, his will to determine his own destiny leads him into a friendship with a classmate, Rene Bigey (Patrick Auffay), and between them—kindred spirits—they forge a life of their own creation. Emboldened by mutual understanding and trust, they eschew the degradation and unhappiness of home and school by living life, adolescent-style, “on the hook,” falling timelessly from adventure to misadventure to yet another adventure, always with imagination, pleasure, and a deepening affection for each other (Rene was, in Truffaut’s actual life, Robert Lachenay, his lifelong friend and creative collaborator.). Antoine’s story begins in a Paris classroom—all boys—in what here in the United States would be an intermediate or junior high school. He’s drawing a moustache on the face of a pin-up girl that the kids are passing from desk to desk. Caught in the act by his teacher (Guy Decomble), he’s punished by having to forego recess and remain in class, writing repetitions on the blackboard of “I must not…” in regard to his miscreant behavior. Instead, he writes a denunciation of his teacher, whom he dubs Sourpuss. His troubles accelerate thereafter. Home from school, he’s now writing-out a further punishment, this time for his blackboard jeremiad. His mother (Claire Maurier) returns from work, sits down on Antoine’s bed—situated in the foyer which serves as his bedroom—draws her skirt up to her thighs and rolls down her stocking before Antoine’s captive and captivated eyes, all the while reprimanding him for having forgotten to buy some food item on his way home. Returning to school the day after a hooky jaunt with Rene, Antoine’s teacher asks him for a note from his parents explaining his absence. Flustered, desperate, searching for something to say, he blurts out, “My mother, she’s…she died,” which generates from his teacher the requisite compassion; until, that is, a knock is heard on the door at the back of the classroom. What we already know is that on the previous afternoon the class snitch saw Antoine and Rene pick up the bookbags they had hidden behind a doorway that morning, thereby freeing them to walk about the city unhampered, and on this morning he had gone to see Antoine’s parents, whom he asks—unctuously and insidiously—if “Antoine is feeling well enough to return to school today.” Antoine turns his head to the door of the classroom and sees, through the door’s window, both his parents and the school’s headmaster. Antoine’s father (Albert Remy) calls him to the back of the room and smacks him across the face before the entire class. And further, while playing hooky, Antoine caught sight of his mother lustfully kissing a man who was a stranger to him, and she saw that he had spotted her. Between his consternation about this encounter and his mortification at his father’s hands, he decides to truant from his home. Rene sequesters him at his home and keeps him secreted from his (Rene’s) parents in a back room, bringing him leftover food from the family dinner table. Back at school, Antoine is charged with having plagiarized a passage from Balzac, which confounds him because he had become so enamored of Balzac that he had committed the passage to memory and wrote it in class as if it came from his own mind. Despondent now, and without any money, he steals a typewriter from his father’s office but is unable to hock it. Guilt-ridden, he chooses to return the typewriter rather than simply abandon it, and in so doing is caught in the act, which results—at his parents’ request—in his incarceration in a reformatory My adolescence…exactly! Not, of course, in its particulars, but in its ethos. How could I not recall, for example, when watching the typewriter scene, the time I stole a pack of bubblegum baseball cards from the candy store, only to come back in a few days to buy another 5-cent pack and drop a dime on the counter and hasten away before I was asked if I wanted any change? The 400 Blows is no coming-of-age movie. It is adolescence. Pure adolescence. Show me an adolescent who has come of age and I’ll show you a miracle. Antoine, dazed and confused by the fusillade of humiliations raining down on him from both flanks of the pincer, is not about to put it all together. Too much of the-life-he-does-not-want-to-live impinges on his drive toward a more wished-for life, derails him from but at the same time becomes entwined with his quest for self-integration. Where can Antoine—the archetypal adolescent—go but into a state of mind that is crystallized in the movie’s final scene, which just happens to be the first of its kind—a freeze-frame (Ah, for the wonders of DVD, which in this instance includes a running commentary by Brian Stonehill, from which source I learned of this film-first.). So what’s to be seen in that final frame? We’re taken to it by a pan shot that’s more than a minute long. Antoine is successfully escaping from the reformatory. Having eluded his pursuer by hiding under a bridge, he’s loping along a dirt road that takes him to the sea, something he’s earlier made known he has never seen. At the shore he jogs—shoes-on—into the wavelets, pauses, turns back toward shore, pauses again, and there…right there…that’s where he’s frozen. This freeze-frame, this photograph, taken in the context of the moving picture in which it plays its part (and taken on its own as well, perhaps), serves me in late adulthood as the emblem of my early adolescence, the beacon of orientation that viscerally and resonantly illuminates my own journey through what was to be my second and final phase of timeless life. Its very immobility galvanizes scenes of paralyzing irresolution into memory. Antoine’s eyes radiate bewilderment, but also in evidence in those very same eyes is his ferocious determination to carry on, to find a way out. And conflated in that space, somewhere between the image on the screen and the one thrown off from behind the lens of my own projector (see Arlow), do I not also discern in those selfsame eyes an ember aglow with mischief, an undying ember without which life as it had to be lived then would have been unendurable? When I saw the movie must have everything to do with how much it means to me (nor could it have hurt that Leaud, in the film’s sequels, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, grew up to be my look-alike). The 400 Blows was released in 1959, which is when I saw it for the first time. In a theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. I was about to become a non-teenager. Not that I was out of my adolescence, which, in my case, had a considerably longer shelf life. I was still thick into the ups and downs of adolescence, but I did have a hair’s breadth worth of distance from it; enough to allow me to watch Antoine in rapt fascination, knowing that I knew him and that he knew me. We had everything in common. Any disparities were negligible, readily flicked off. We both had an unhappy home life, though the dice did roll more in my favor in that I was not the object of parental lovelessness, as was the case for Antoine. For me, all I had to suffer was the detritus from the inveterate antipathy my parents had for each other. School? I, like Antoine, had to write a full blackboard’s worth of “I must not…” after a visit to my third-grade class by another third-grade class whose teacher singled out some of the best and worst of her students, and for the very worst she pointed to my buddy Jules, saying, “Who could possibly want this one?” and I said I did, walked up to him, grabbed his arm and pulled him with me to my seat. Mrs. Birmingham, who’d actually fall asleep at her desk while sucking on the ink-end of her fountain pen, didn’t appreciate my gesture. I’d love to have played hooky with Antoine. I’d first join him at his amusement park for a ride on the Rotor—a spinning cylinder that splayed you by centrifugal force against its outer wall, where Antoine ecstatically pulled his legs off the cylinder’s floor by spreading them apart and then turning himself sideways to three o’clock—on which ride he was joined, a la Hitchcock, by Truffaut himself. Then I’d take him over to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, where we’d encounter yet another cylinder, this one about thirty feet high, and drop into it feet first and then slide out the bottom of it onto something like a roulette wheel that was whirring one way while a half dozen wheels within the wheel turned in the opposite direction, and you’d be wheeled from one wheel to the next, doing all you could not to slide off into the trough. Or we could, as I used to with Joe—my very own Rene—check out of Stuyvesant High School—the old one, on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan, the Stuyvesant whose gym had a circular track as its balcony, under which were printed, black on silver, the names of the great Stuvesant jocks, like (speaking of film) one James Cagney, who in the early 1900's was the New York State diving champion—and mosey over to Julian’s Billiard Parlor on Fourteenth and Third for an hour or so of racks, then finish off the splendid day at another parlor, this one for ice cream, beneath the Third Avenue El at 28th Street, where Double-Dip, the gentlemanly proprietor with the white apron, would fashion-up a couple of banana splits. Where could I go with Antoine to in any way replicate the wondrous experience he had when he and Rene ambled into the back row of an auditorium filled with four-and-five-year-olds and watched along with them a Punch and Judy show, while we in the movie’s audience gasped in unison with the real-life four-and-five-year-olds who were filmed (unknowingly) as they witnessed—spellbound and in amazement—life’s joys and horrors enacted before their eyes by the puppets? Where could I go with him but to the movies? There was a time when I ran groups for parents who were having a hard time with their adolescent kids. I'd invariably ask them if they would want to relive their adolescence. At least ninety per cent of the time the answer would be no. I can only wonder as to how many of these parents would reconsider their answer were they to expose their adolescence, despite its inevitable travails and agonies, to The 400 Blows.

Tedari39
Age 69
Jefferson, NY 12093
ira@landess.net