Francois Truffaut
Gli Anni in Tasca

Pocket Money, highlighting the endless possibilities that life offers to children.

In 1976, Truffaut directed one of his countless emblematic films with a documentary-like approach, almost amateurish. The cast includes mostly non-professional actors, many children and youngsters, including his daughter Eva, for a narrative that is a hymn to childhood, to be preserved and protected from an overly invasive modernity with unnatural rhythms that do not respect the need for slow thinking. We are not in Paris; we are in a small town in the Auvergne region where a teacher, expecting his first child, teaches his students the secret of a life need that is born and grows every day in their minds, seeking space among brief loves, more or less reciprocated, kicking the ball, and snippets of family life. The petite bourgeois France manifests in all its complexity of colorful emotions amid old cobblestone pavements, courtyards, huge buildings without elevators, and rows of Renaults parked along a peripheral road. Truffaut pays homage to the small age and the borderline age, adolescence, with a simple eye without delving too much into technical research such as the fall of little Gregory from the window, which resolves into nothing "children are resilient: they crash into everything, against life but they have a guardian angel. They have thick skin." Juliene is a poor child, mistreated by his family, living in a shack on the city’s margins. His arrival at the school leads the rest of the class to confront a life different from theirs, with different problems and the awareness that nothing is taken for granted and you can shout from the window "I'm hungry" to be helped. With the famous final speech by teacher Richet, Truffaut tells us about the importance of experiencing a true childhood to become strong and face life with the right tenacity. A small great film that fills one's eyes with everything, with love and hope for a different future forty years ago as today.