The 400 Blows (1959): Truffaut's Runaway Boy Goes Unseen by Every Adult, Until the Last Shot Makes You Look

A boy sits alone, answering questions from a woman we never see, and the camera doesn't budge. Between his answers the picture dissolves, the way time skips in a memory, and each time it comes back he is a little more slumped and a little more honest: about the mother who never wanted him, about the grandmother who took his side, about the money he stole from that same grandmother anyway. For nearly all of The 400 Blows, this is how grown-ups deal with Antoine Doinel: they talk at him, about him, past him. Nobody really looks.

That is the engine of François Truffaut's 1959 debut. It's a film about a boy no adult will look at, and it saves one shot for the very end in which he turns and looks straight at you. The film scholar Kristi McKim, writing about teaching it, puts the idea in four words: "No adult sees Antoine." Anyone who was once the kid caught holding the thing the whole class passed around will know him on sight. The film won Best Director at Cannes and helped kick open the French New Wave.

The Calendar Lands on Antoine's Desk

Watch the first classroom scene. A pinup calendar travels from desk to desk, lands in Antoine's hands, and that's where the teacher finds it. He's sent behind the blackboard, makes a face at the class, and his life's pattern is set: other kids get away with things, Antoine gets caught. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays him with a solemn, watchful calm, as if he'd stopped expecting fairness a long time ago.

From there, the trouble snowballs. Cornered after skipping school, he tells his teacher his mother has died; she turns up alive and furious. He loves Balzac enough to keep a little shrine to him, then gets punished for plagiarism when an essay echoes Balzac from memory. A stolen typewriter and a night in a cell later, he's peering through the bars of a police van at the dark streets of Paris.

What lifts it above a case file is the joy Truffaut lets in. A gym teacher leads the boys on a jog through Paris, shot from high above, and they peel off two by two into doorways until he's leading almost no one. I laughed every time another pair vanished. A lovely moment comes right after a disaster: the Balzac shrine catches fire, and instead of exploding, the parents take everyone to the movies, laughing on the walk home. Those small reprieves show the family Antoine could have had.

Two Nights in a Cell at Seventeen

The story is drawn closely from Truffaut's own childhood. As a kid he sneaked into movie theaters whenever he could, and at 17, Brian Eggert writes in Deep Focus Review, his stepfather had him locked up over debts from a film club he'd started; he spent two nights in a cell and then three months in a juvenile detention center. The man who pulled him out of that spiral, and later helped him escape desertion charges after he left the army, was the critic André Bazin, who made him a writer at Cahiers du cinéma. Eggert notes that Bazin died of tuberculosis "on the first day of shooting." The film is dedicated to him.

McKim makes the connection that gives the dedication its weight. Bazin, she writes, was the one adult who actually saw the young Truffaut, and she asks her students to watch Antoine with the generosity Bazin showed. The film is that look, offered to a boy who never got one.

Money was tight. Eggert puts the budget at around $75,000, at a time when the average French film cost about $250,000. The thrift shows up as freedom: real streets, real apartments, a real school.

A Young Fourteen Who Could Play Twelve

Finding Antoine took an ad. Truffaut's daughter Laura, introducing the film at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley in 2008, recalled that "Several, many, young boys showed up," and that Léaud "was 14, but he felt he was a young 14 and could play 12 with no problem." Her father, she said, "was sneaky and secretive" as a child, while Léaud "was more extroverted," and that difference kept the story from turning self-pitying.

That psychologist scene from the opening? It looks improvised. Laura Truffaut said it "feels completely improvised but really was not." Truffaut gave Léaud the questions and told him to come up, more or less, with his own answers. So when the boy shrugs and explains himself to a voice off-screen, the off-screen voice is the film's whole adult world, and the shrug is his.

Then she told the audience something I'd never heard. "I was born during the editing," she said, and there is "a very brief glimpse of my mother pregnant with me towards the end of the movie." The director's wife, carrying his first child, walks through a story about a boy whose own mother never wanted him. I can't watch the late scenes now without looking for her.

The banned critic made a comeback, too. In 1958 Truffaut had been kept out of Cannes as a critic after his attacks on the festival in Cahiers. A year later The 400 Blows was France's official entry, and he walked away with the prize for Best Director; Eggert notes it lost the Palme d'Or to Black Orpheus.

Glances in the Background

• The director on the ride. At the funfair, Antoine pins himself to the wall of a spinning rotor. McKim identifies the ride as "the site within which Truffaut makes his own directorial cameo," and he's one of the riders spinning beside the boy.
• Famous faces in the crowd. Jeanne Moreau hunts for a lost dog, and director Jacques Demy turns up as a policeman.
• "Where is the father?" In English class, a student keeps stumbling over that phrase. For a boy whose real father is a blank, it's no random sentence.
• The stolen photo. Coming out of a cinema, Antoine swipes a lobby still. Truffaut restaged the moment in Day for Night (1973), with a boy stealing stills of Citizen Kane.
• The title. Les quatre cents coups comes, Eggert explains, from an expression meaning to "raise hell." The English title keeps the number and loses the joke.

Running to the Sea

Spoiler warning: from here the review describes Antoine's escape from the reform school and the film's final freeze-frame.

During a soccer game at the reform school, Antoine slips under a fence and runs. Truffaut and cinematographer Henri Decaë simply follow him, in one long tracking shot, down a country road, on and on, while Jean Constantin's music plays under the rhythm of his feet. Then steps, sand, and the sea, which he has never seen.

He wades into the surf, then turns toward us. The camera zooms in on his face, and Truffaut freezes it as he stares into the lens. John Conomos, writing in Senses of Cinema, sees hope in the water: "In the sea, Antoine's footsteps are erased suggesting a new beginning of self-affirmation." He also reads the frozen face as a demand, one that forces us, in the critic Jean Douchet's terms as Conomos relays them, "to react morally."

This is where the whole film lands. For 99 minutes every adult has looked away from Antoine: the teacher, the stepfather, the police, the psychologist we never see, the mother who locks eyes with him on the street while kissing another man and pretends she didn't. With the last frame, Truffaut turns him toward the one audience that can't look away, and suddenly we're the grown-ups. The film won't say what happens to him. It just makes us hold his gaze, and anyone who remembers being thirteen and invisible will feel that stare land somewhere under the ribs.

Two Tired Parents in a Walk-Up

Watch it a second time from the parents' side. The apartment is so cramped that the family is constantly squeezing past each other; the boy sleeps in an alcove. The mother (Claire Maurier) is selfish and guilty in the same breath, and the stepfather (Albert Rémy) is goofy and easy until his Michelin guide goes missing. They aren't villains. They're broke, worn out and in over their heads.

Laura Truffaut said the film was "fairly autobiographical," more than her father acknowledged at the time, because he "wanted to protect his parents to some extent." That explains the gentleness toward the Doinels: it's a son's mercy. The anger goes elsewhere, at the system that processes Antoine like a parcel: booked at the station, locked in a holding cell, driven off in a police van, filed away in an observation center. Its rage is for institutions, not two exhausted people in a walk-up.

A Gentle Door Into the New Wave

If you've never seen a French New Wave film, start here; it's warm, funny and easy to love. It runs 99 minutes, in black and white and in French with subtitles, and it was shot in widescreen, so give it a big screen. It's slower than a modern coming-of-age film and has no tidy ending, and that refusal is the point. Watch it with a teenager if you can, who may find Antoine funnier and more familiar than you expect.

If it gets under your skin, Léaud played Antoine again in four more films, through Love on the Run in 1979. For another story told at a child's height, about a boy following his father through a city that has no time for either of them, read our review of Bicycle Thieves. And when you get back to that street where Antoine sees his mother with another man, notice how fast both of them look away. They're the last two people in the film who could have seen him, and neither does.