1959 ‘Les Quatre Cents Coups’ Directed by François Truffaut
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
Jean-Pierre Léaud Claire Maurier Albert Rémy Georges Flamant Patrick Auffay Robert Beauvais Yvonne Claudie Pierre Repp Guy Decomble Daniel Couturier François Nocher Richard Kanayan Renaud Fontanarosa Michel Girard Serge Moati Bernard Abbou Jean-François Bergouignan Michel Lesignor Jean-Claude Brialy Jeanne Moreau Philippe de Broca François Truffaut Jacques Demy Bouchon
The Four Hundred Blows, I quattrocento colpi, De vierhonderd slagen, 四百下, 胡作非为, 400 batów, På vei mot livet, Les 400 coups, Os Incompreendidos, 大人は判ってくれない, Los 400 golpes, Nikdo mne nemá rád, 四百击, Sie kuessten und sie schlugen ihn, Os 400 Golpes, 400번의 구타, 400 המלקות, 400-те удара, Nikdo mě nemá rád, Ung flugt, Sie küssten und sie schlugen ihn, Τα 400 Χτυπήματα, Los cuatrocientos golpes, چهارصد ضربه, 400 kepposta, Négyszáz csapás, I 400 Colpi, Os Quatrocentos Golpes, Четыреста ударов, De 400 slagen, 400 Darbe, Чотириста ударів, 四百擊
Underdogs and coming of age Moving relationship stories school, teacher, student, classroom or kids family, emotional, emotion, touching or kids surfing, teenager, friendship, adolescents or kids artists, biography, musician, songs or emotional emotional, emotion, family, moving or feelings Show All…
I think people overlook how hard it is to be a kid. All kids at one point feel unwanted, unloved, or uncared for. It's universal, which is why this movie is so incredible. It takes something as simple as a broken household and makes it for everyone, something anyone can relate to.
The acting and score in particular are outstanding. The cinematography is gorgeous, and you can tell it has inspired many filmmakers today. Many aspects of this film also reminded me of Mommy and I Killed My Mother, both Xavier Dolan films (which is a great thing). I honestly am in love with this film and it's true, brutal, and heartbreaking story.
The little scene where he stands in the police car driving away, looking out of the window with the bars in front of him and tears in his eyes just killed me...
How do you explain what it's like to lose yourself in a film? The 400 Blows describes it particularly well. Francois Truffaut was an expert cinephile, after all: sneaking into theaters via washroom windows, gravitating closer and closer toward the screen so that for a few hours his world was only moving images shedding diffused light on hundreds of faces turned up to the screen.
But perhaps Truffaut wasn't intent on forgetting the rest of the world when he started sitting so close to the screen; perhaps he was simply dealing with weakening eyesight. That would be quite like him and his work, anyway: mundane realities finding their way into cinema in a manner that renders them achingly poetic.
Take…
The final freeze-frame says it all.
Antoine has arrived on a vast and lonely coastal shore, liberated from the clutches of family and authoritarianism, with nothing to restrict him but the infinite possibility of the ocean. Days of crime, reform and hooky-playing are miles behind him. Detention centers are a thing of the past. Police can’t arrest him. Teachers can’t chide him. Parents and absent role models will no longer hurt him. And in this moment of idealization he feels alive, wild and perfectly exhilarated. A tabula rasa waiting to start anew. Then something happens.
Something shifts. Stranded between land and water, past trouble and future uncertainty, Antoine’s great escape slowly morphs into something else. It is the first time,…
remember when the french new wave tried to save cinema from 1958 to the late 1960s and it did
liberating, all we want is to run away from childhood and get a taste of what’s next in life just to realize we can never run back.
As you're watching it, there are some shots that you just feel will always be stuck into your memory forever. One particular instance of this is from a scene near the end, when Antoine was riding in the coach and shots of the Parisian nightlife were passing by. His tears were revealed by the streetlights that illuminated his face. Don't know why that affected me so much, but I can't stop thinking about it. Films about kids have a way of intensifying my film-viewing experience, because feeling pain, hardship, and happiness through the eyes of children is the closest we'll ever get to pure, undiluted truthfulness in film.
"Your parents say you're always lying."
"Oh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I'd tell them the truth and they still wouldn't believe me, so I prefer to lie."
Ever been excited on your first day of school and talked too much to a friend or laughed too hard at a joke? Or maybe you fidget too much in your seat and can't pay attention to what's on the board. Your teacher interprets this as misbehavior and hereafter labels you a troublemaker. That's blow one.
Ever had your parents fight behind closed doors and you can't help but hear them shouting through walls? They've fought before, but not quite like this, and you become scared about what might…
if you haven’t made a shrine to balzac that caught fire and nearly killed your entire family, slept in the same room with a taxidermy racehorse and seven cats, smoked hand-rolled newspaper cigarettes in jail, and faked your own mother’s death, have you even lived?
