François Truffaut
I quattrocento colpi

"The 400 Blows" (1959) is the first feature film by the film critic François Truffaut, who moved from sharp reviews in the "Cahiers du Cinema" of his mentor André Bazin—who passed away that same year—to the camera. Alongside the contemporary works of Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette, it would initiate what, with a felicitous yet hasty synthesis, would be dubbed the French cinema "nouvelle vague".

That it was a "new" cinematic language in relation to French cinema is certainly possible, but it's not of primary concern here. That the language was new in an absolute sense, and established, at least in Truffaut, a complete break from tradition, doesn't seem as evident, or at any rate not in the more radical and subversive terms of Jean Luc Godard's cinema; the debt to tradition, especially Italian, particularly in relation to certain works by Rossellini and De Sica, has never been denied, and in this film it surfaces more than in any other.

On closer inspection, Truffaut's debut is a glance toward the future cast by a young-old with feet firmly planted in the past: that the young-old person is the director, as well as the protagonist of this cinematic bildungsroman, should not be surprising: suffice it to recall the filial devotion with which the young protagonist of the film, Antoine Doinel, creates a small domestic altar, complete with candles, to the image of Balzac, and the gaze with which the same boy captures the immensity of open spaces in the film's last poignant scene seems as much the synthesis of the story as it is the synthesis of the boy’s life, and, in a candid autobiographical play, of the director himself and his poetic vision of life.

"The 400 Blows" boils down, in a nutshell, to this: the revisitation of the traditional stylistic elements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century novel à la Hugo, à la Verne, or à la Conrad, the tale of a progressive growth that coincides with the gradual, and painful, liberation of the individual from the small chains that follow him from birth and oppress his creativity, culminating in the liberating gesture of the boy running away from the reformatory: a gesture that is not nihilistic, not destructive, but full of an even deeper premonition; the full autonomy and freedom of the individual must perhaps bear the cost of abandonment and solitude, and Antoine's race toward the beach and the boundless sea constitutes as much the beginning of a desired freedom as the awareness of the drama it entails, the intimate dismay of everyone in realizing their own desire.

Truffaut as a director, a writer in images, deeply immersed in tradition, in some ways conditioned by it in the subject’s setup, in the plot’s unfolding, and in its conclusion: Doinel is not that far from Mark Twain's boys, who discover the cost of adulthood along with adventure, in adventure, and because of adventure itself, almost conceiving their own life as an eternal adventure. He is not distant either from our Gianburrasca or the protagonist of the French comic Nicholas, even if far from the farcical tones of both, as he attempts nonetheless to blend comedy with the drama of growing up. If we want, he is not even far from the little hero of the Franco-Belgian comic Tintin, a young-adult despite himself, who finds in adventure the very reason for his existence.

Yet it would not do Truffaut justice to limit oneself to this, observing the ties with the past without evaluating the modernity, still enduring, of this film.

Modernity that is to be sought especially in the director's "touch," still unripe but already discernible: taking advantage of an expressive black and white, which Truffaut considered the true color of cinema, the expressive medium to describe reality while simultaneously detaching from it and its real colors, the director depicts both the humble interiors of Parisian petit-bourgeois apartments, the stairwells, the alleys, the cold and claustrophobic classroom spaces where Antoine-François finds himself confined, as well as the outdoor spaces where the individual takes his first steps of freedom, as happens in the evocative carousel scene in which Antoine (along with Truffaut himself in a fleeting appearance) spins inside a wooden cylinder until he loses the sense of gravity and floats in the air, released from the forces binding him to the ground, to the here and now of a difficult childhood.

Modernity that, beyond the excellent direction of actors and the splendid performance of little Jean Pierre Leaud (destined to become, over the years, an actor himself; an actor-mascot of his mentor/gemini Truffaut), is to be caught in the rhythm impressed upon the story, which flows quick and dry almost like the panels of a French comic strip.

It is sometimes said that Truffaut's cinema and that of the nouvelle vague have imparted a strong realistic charge to French cinema, recovering a naturalism unknown to most directors of the previous generation: yet I don't believe this is the director’s main merit, as in describing life through narrative ellipses he can never be, structurally, on the side of the "real," but he represents it according to his sensitivity.

This film doesn’t aim to be necessarily realistic, and perhaps not even true in the terms of the neorealists or the verists before them: it seeks to capture life in its growth and flow, with a cinematic language equally mobile and fluid, and an editing that always allows us to capture the protagonist’s action in its expansive force, in its openness to the world and the new.

A film that remains etched in memory like a sea seen for the first time, as exhilarating as a Saturday when school ends in the mind of a twelve-year-old.