Rida’s review published on Letterboxd:
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 famous freeze-frame at the end of The 400 Blows. After my second viewing of the film, I was ready to think of a million ways to explain what I thought it represents, but it turns out that Truffaut ended the film that way because his actor turned away from the camera too quickly for Truffaut to do anything but freeze the camera on the facial expression he wanted to end the film with. Talk about life influencing art. Or is it the other way around?
The 400 Blows is essentially plotless. It is also devoid of melodrama or sentimentality, and shot with something like a documentarian eye, focusing more on little moments, lingering on faces, and providing a sense of unbounded joy whenever the beautiful score starts to play. Truffaut's accuracy at depicting the joyful terror of being a child in an adult world is nothing short of miraculous.
The young Jean-Pierre Leaud, who plays Antoine Doinel with great solemnity, is a cinematic stand-in for Truffaut, but he is allowed to let his own personality come through as well, making Antoine a happy synthesis of both Truffaut and Leaud. In one of the most electric moments in the film, he is asked questions by a psychologist and answers them in a brutally truthful way. Truffaut himself asked Leaud these questions, allowing Leaud to answer as he wished, and later looped in a dubbing of the voice of the female psychologist. In those moments, Antoine was Leaud, and it's fascinating to behold Truffaut and Leaud merging reality and art in such a revelatory way.
There are far too many moments I loved in The 400 Blows for me to describe them all, but I've hardly ever watched anything more personal than the scene in which Antoine and his family go to the cinema and come home in their car dazed and laughing, happy to be in each other's company. My family's relationship with the movies is very much the same, and their reactions to movies allow me to understand them in entirely different ways.
Then there is the wondrous scene in which a room full of children is watching a puppet play. The puppets are ragged, the voice acting is terrible, and yet the children are in ecstasy - some are close to tears, several others are laughing, and they often look around and see their reactions mirrored in others' faces. They briefly recognize that they are, for a short while, at least, experiencing something together.
Few of us have had it as rough as Antoine or Truffaut, but all of us have gone through the growing pains of adolescence and impending adulthood. The 400 Blows is a deeply personal film, but it is about more than Truffaut; it is about anyone who has sought refuge outside their home, or inside their head, in words and moving images and ultimately, in the infinite possibilities of art.