Antoine Doinel is a misunderstood 14 year old boy who lives with his resentful mother and neglectful stepfather in a small Parisian apartment during the early 1950s. Antoine is regularly ridiculed by his teachers and his multiple plans to run away from both school and home means that he spends much of the film "in trouble."One of the film's overarching themes is the innocence of adolescence. As part of a modern audience, it's hard to say that Antoine is a "bad child" but he isn't a good child. We're left with the overwhelming feeling that he's just a kid exhibiting "boys will be boys" behavior. His classmates pass around a pinup calendar but he's the one that gets caught holding it. When he fails to complete his homework, Antoine skips school and when asked by his teacher, he lies and says that his mother died only for his furious mother to make an appearance at school that very afternoon. He isn't a bully and his antics seem innocent but you can never escape from the nervous feeling that Antoine is never going to get away with this.
The connection my boyfriend felt towards The 400 Blows was obvious but my maternal reaction to the film surprised me. As Antoine spirals down the rabbit hole of poor peer-pressure-induced choices, I couldn't help but wonder what I would do if he was my kid. Truffaut does a splendid job of making viewers sympathetic towards his little hero. It's hard not to hate his neglectful mother who spends her day in the arms of her boyfriend and at night insists that her son stop doing his homework so he can go pick up groceries. It is obvious that neither she nor her husband are effective disciplinarians but Antoine's fate at the end of the film doesn't feel like a product of poor discipline. Rather, it feels like our hero was grossly misunderstood and his fate a result of neglect from his parents and school teachers. Nevertheless, Antoine is a frustrating adolescent whose choices make you want to shake him and ask "what are you thinking?"
This film was the cinema world's introduction to French New Wave Cinema, a style popularized by Truffaut, later adopted by Jean-Luc Godard, and most recently Michel Gondry. The film's most enchanting scene is a tracking shot that typifies French New Wave Cinema. In it, a class full of boys joins the physical education teacher for a run around the block and slowly in groups of two or three, sneak off into the streets until the instructor is left jogging by himself. There is no dialogue in the long tracking shot and though our hero Antoine is part of the group of boys, he is not focused on. In fact, Antoine and his friend sneak off very early in the shot and their destination is unknown to viewers. Without saying a word, Truffaut tells a very simple and playful story that is actually independent of the film's overall story line. The viewer never sees what the teacher does when he inevitably realizes that 25 of his students have run away and we never know what happens to the boys as a result of their stunt. The next time we see Antoine and his classmates, they are in school and no discipline has been doled out. In this, Truffaut establishes a common theme of French New Wave Cinema- the idea that a scene can exist as an anecdotal story and snapshot in a sequenced series of moving images.
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