Les Quatre cents coups (1959)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

By the late 1950s, barely into his mid-twenties, François Truffaut had earned himself a certain notoriety as a film critic.  Through a series of high-profile articles, notably the one titled Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (Cahiers du Cinéma, January 1954), Truffaut had launched a fierce polemic against the so-called quality tradition in French cinema in which he lambasted many of the country's best known screenwriters and directors.  In 1959, the boot was on the other foot. Truffaut gave up being a critic and assumed the mantle of filmmaker, ready to challenge the world with his conception of what cinema should be.  As it happened, the world seemed to approve of what he had to offer.  The success of Les 400 coups not only established François Truffaut as a film director of some repute, it also secured him a leading position in what had come to be known as la nouvelle vague.  For good or for ill, Truffaut became as emblematic of the French New Wave as his former colleagues- turned- filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer.

Today, Truffaut's films hardly appear radical at all.  Compared with the revolutionary offerings from Godard and Rivette, which presented the audiences of the time with real challenges, the cinema of François Truffaut is so conventional that it is hard to discern any tangible difference between it and what had gone before.  If anything, Truffaut's films are merely a progression of the kind of quality commercial films that he had spent so much of his time and energy condemning as a critic.  What perhaps sets Truffaut apart from the previous generation of directors (and also many of his contemporaries) was a willingness to engage fully with the subject of his films, to bare his emotions and pour his own blood and tears into his work.  It is the warmth and sincerity, the genuine human feeling that we find in Truffaut's films which make them so popular and easy to engage with.  He may not have been a revolutionary like Godard, or a pure poet like Rohmer, but he knew how to make honest little films that would touch the hearts of his audience, capturing the fleeting pains and pleasures of life as vividly as a Renoir painting.

It was in the spring of 1958, a few months after the release of his first short film Les Mistons, that Truffaut was contacted by Paul Graetz, one of France's leading film producers, with a view to making a film about adolescence.  Yves Montand was lined up to play the lead and the script was to be written by Jean Aurenche, one of the pillars of the quality tradition that Truffaut had taken a hammer and chisel to during his manic tirades as a critic.   Needless-to-say, Truffaut and Aurenche did not see eye to eye and the project was soon abandoned.   However, the idea of making a film about the trauma of adolescence appealed to Truffaut, so he sketched out a scenario entitled La Fugue d'Antoine, drawing on his own experiences as a young teenager growing up in Paris in the mid-1940s.  The film's substantial production cost (40 million anciens francs) was met by Truffaut's father-in-law Ignace Morgenstern, a successful producer and distributor who had just netted a fortune with Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying (1957).

Truffaut hired the writer Marcel Moussy to develop his story outline into a script for a full-length film, which ended up being titled Les 400 coups.  The title derives from the French expression "faire les 400 coups", which loosely translates as "to lead a wild and undisciplined life".   The film's English language title (The 400 blows) is a literal translation of the French and makes little sense.  With its portrait of teenage rebellion in the early 1950s, the film has much in common with a number of American films which had recently been made, most notably Laslo Benedek's The Wild One (1953) and Nicolas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955).  Whilst the film was not intended as an autobiography, its does include several important episodes from Truffaut's own adolescence, most notably his being placed in a centre for delinquent minors.  The central character Antoine Doinel is obviously based on Truffaut and would reappear in the Antoine et Colette segment of the anthology film L'Amour à 20 ans (1962) and three subsequent films: Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugale (1970) and L'Amour en fuite (1979).

In his former life as a critic, one of the cinematographers that most impressed Truffaut was Henri Decaë.  It was Decaë who had brought such a distinctive look to Jean-Pierre Melville's early films, Le Silence de la mer (1949) and Bob le flambeur (1955), achieving a striking combination of fluidity and naturalism by shooting in natural light and employing graceful camera motion.  Decaë was not cheap (he was the highest paid member of the cast and crew) but he brought to Les 400 coups exactly what Truffaut had envisaged - a reality that captures the brutality and loneliness of adolescence, but with a subtle haunting lyricism that foreshadows the romanticism of the director's subsequent films.

To obtain the necessary authorisation so that he could direct the film, Truffaut had to request a derogation from the CNC (Centre national de la cinématographie), since union rules required that no one could start directing films without first having attended a three month training course and worked as both a second and first assistant director.  Truffaut by-passed the rules and obtained the consent of the CNC by hiring Philippe de Broca as his assistant.  De Broca would himself become a director of some importance having worked on this film, scoring many notable successes with such popular comedies as L'Homme de Rio (1964).

The greatest challenge that Truffaut faced was finding an actor to play the part of the 13-year-old Antoine Doinel.  After placing an ad in the newspaper France-Soir, he ended up having to interview several hundred contenders.  In the end, he selected a young actor who had been recommend by a friend and fellow critic, Jean Domarchi.  That actor was Jean-Pierre Léaud, the 14-year-old son of assistant director Pierre Leaud and actress Jacqueline Pierreux.  Léaud had recently played a small part in George Lampin's La Tour, prends garde! (1958), appearing opposite Jean Marais.  Like Truffaut before him, Léaud was going through a troubled adolescence, and it is this that cemented their friendship.  In the years that followed, they became very close, and Léaud would be the most frequently recurring actor in Truffaut's films, appearing not only in the Antoine Doinel saga of five films, but also taking the male lead in Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (1971) and La Nuit américaine (1973).  More than anything, it is the spontaneity, candour and vulnerability that Léaud brings to his portrayal of Antoine which makes Les 400 coups such an authentic and engaging film. 

For the parts of Antoine's parents, Truffaut selected Albert Rémy, a prolific actor of the 1950s who had appeared in some of Jean Renoir's films, and Claire Maurier, an accomplished actress of stage and screen.  The film also includes cameo appearances by Jean-Claude Brialy, who had encouraged Truffaut to make the film, and Jeanne Moreau, who took the female lead in two of the director's subsequent films Jules et Jim (1962) and La Mariée était en noir (1967).

On the very day that filming began on Les 400 coups, Truffaut's friend and mentor André Bazin, died from leukaemia, aged 40.  It was through Bazin that Truffaut was able to put the trauma of his adolescence behind him and established himself as a film critic.  It was indeed ironic that Bazin, France's leading film critic, should die just as the French New Wave was born.  Truffaut chose to dedicate the film to Bazin, the man he considered his adopted father.

Truffaut's anxieties about his first full-length film were laid to rest when its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1959 proved to be a triumph.  The man who had launched the most virulent attack against his own nation's cinema had acquitted himself with a film of great charm and universal appeal.  And to think it was only the previous year that the organisers of the event had refused to acknowledge Truffaut as a journalist after his repeated attacks on the Festival, which he had characterised as being stuck in a rut.  The wild child walked away from Cannes with glowing praise and the Best Director award.

Buoyed up by rave reviews, Les 400 coups soon became a box office hit, both in France and across the world.  This success (it recouped its production cost twice over) brought financial security to Truffaut's film production company, Les Films du Carrosse, and allowed Truffaut to part-finance Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1960) and Jean Cocteau's Le Testament d'Orphée (1960).  However, not everyone was happy with the film.  When they saw it, Truffaut's parents were scandalised by what they considered a grotesque distortion of their relationship with their son.  Having received an offended letter from his stepfather, Truffaut sent back a terse reply, to the effect that after the death of André Bazin he considered himself an orphan.

The final shot of Les 400 coups is the most powerful, ambiguous and intriguing of all Truffaut's films.  A homage to Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953), the freeze-framed close-up of Antoine Doinel standing alone and lost against a desolate seascape suggest many things.  It provides a powerful visual metaphor for the solitariness of the adolescent who, on the threshold of adulthood, finds himself alone and helpless.  But it also offers hope.  There is a faint glimmer of recognition in Antoine's face, a realisation that he has finally arrived at his destination.  He no longer needs to go on running and rebelling.  He sees now that he is not a child; he can now turn and face the world as a man.  When we next see our hero in (Antoine et Colette) he is a well-adjusted and likeable 17-year-old caught up in the first of his many amorous adventures.  Antoine's past is behind him, the fire of rebellion has been doused.  Now it is time to settle down and be a responsible adult - well, almost....

Film Synopsis

Antoine Doinel is a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents in a cramped apartment in Paris.  Neglected by his mother, misunderstood by his father, he starts to rebel against authority.  When he gets into trouble at school, he runs away from home and hides out with his best friend, René.  To make some money, the two boys decide to steal a typewriter from the office where Antoine's father works.  Unable to sell the typewriter, Antoine tries to smuggle it back into the office, but is caught in the act by the night watchman.  Antoine's parents are at a loss what to do with the troublesome boy.  In the end, they decide he must be placed into the care of those who know how to deal with such teenage rebels.  Antoine ends up in an observation centre for delinquent minors, but will this curb his wild nature...?