Boulevard (1960)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

The contrast between the styles of the French New Wave and the old guard of quality French filmmakers is brought into sharp relief when one compares this 1960 film from Julien Duvivier with François Truffaut's contemporaneous Les 400 coups. Both films star the young Jean-Pierre Léaud (who could be described as the Marlon Brando of French cinema) playing a rebellious adolescent with a knack of getting himself into trouble, and both are set in a renascent Paris that has finally shaken off the yoke of post-war gloom and austerity.  Beyond that, the films could hardly be more different.

The spontaneity and raw authenticity which Truffaut brings to his film are far less discernible in Duvivier's.  Boulevard is made according to the old rules - polished performances, a conventional narrative and a cinematographic approach which had hardly changed since the 1930s.  The film is technically well made, but in comparison with Truffaut's, it fairly soulless, never attaining the emotional impact of Les 400 coups.  It doesn't help that most of the characters in the film are the most grotesque stereotypes, including a shrewish step-mother that looks like something Hans Christian Andersen created and a pair of Parisian artists who clearly never missed a day at the Quentin Crisp school of in-your-face campness.

Immaculately coiffeured and tidily dressed, Jean-Pierre Léaud resembles a sanitised version of the Antoine Doinel character he played in Truffaut's film.  You can imagine the difficulties Duvivier must have had in trying to control Léaud and get him to deliver a "conventional" performance.  The actor looks as if he has been hermetically sealed in a straitjacket for much of the film.  It is no surprise that the bulk of his film work for the next decade or so would be for the New Wave directors whose innovative style matched perfectly his expressive, idiosyncratic approach to acting.  Interestingly, the part of the boxer Dicky was originally offered to the virtually unknown young actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, but he declined and instead chose to work on Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle, a wise move as it turned out.  Boulevard serves to show how out-of-touch and out-of-date the old guard filmmakers were becoming and how much French cinema needed of a shot of revitalisation.

Film Synopsis

Driven away from home by his shrewish stepmother, 15-year-old Jojo finds a place to live by himself, a tiny garret room overlooking the Place Pigalle.  When he is not worrying about money, which he finds hard to come by, Jojo thinks only of women, which for some reason have acquired a sudden fascination for him.  He is particularly interested in Jenny, a striptease artist in a nearby nightclub, but she treats him like a child and already has a boyfriend, a boxer named Jimmy.  After this first disappointment in love Jojo contemplates suicide but then he finds he has a friend in Marietta, a girl nearer his own age.  Jojo's saga of misfortune ends when his stepmother goes away, allowing him to patch things up with his father.