Cinema
Lesson in Love
By ISABEL QUIGLY The 400 Blows. (Curzon.) ANTOINE, the twelve-year- old hero of The 400 Blows (director : Francois Truffaut; 'A' certificate), hears his mother, long before the time of the film, so that he is even younger, quarrelling with his grandmother and blaming her angrily for having stop- ped her having an abortion. In other words he knows, not just that his mother wanted to kill him early in life, but that she still regrets not having done so. This bit of information is slipped in right at the end of the film, told by Antoine himself in an undramatic way with slightly self- depreciating looks at his finger-nails; but of course it is the core of the film, of his situation, of his nature. From conception on, he wasn't wanted.
Lovelessness is the one and only irremediable disaster of childhood. Later in life it becomes a joke to say : 'Nobody loves me,' but a child can say it straight, and for him to feel it means an unrepeatable sense of despair, life ended before it has properly begun, because life stunted. Antoine has no one, except his school friend Rene —no adult, anyway--to love him or want him around. At home he is treated like a parcel that space must be found for : in summer at a camp, the rest of the year in a sleeping bag in the hall of the tiny flat : no place of his own, and people tripping over him wherever he tippens to put himself. Of course a child can be emotionally all right in a sleeping bag in the hall, as a baby can do line in an orange box or a drawer, if someone wants him there; but Antoine's mother doesn't, and her husband, though ready enough to be friendly when things go well, is too feeble to want any bother when they don't, and shuffles him off on the authorities at the first sign of trouble. At school, every ache and bruise of his spirit is prodded by an impatient, unfriendly, not quite, at any rate not consciously, sadistic master.
The film, we are told, is autobiographical. Francois Truffaut, who besides directing it is co- author of the script, is now twenty-eight; like Antoine, he was sent to a reform school as a child. This is his first full-length feature film, made almost entirely on the spot, not in the studio—in the streets about Pigalle, in a real Parisian flat, as crowded and higgledy-piggledy as thousands in this most overcrowded of cities, in a real school— and it has set him high among the loosely allied new directors that the press, rather than any precise and acknowledged cohesion, has lumped together as the 'new wave,' a sillier because less explicit title than our AYMs have, and used in much the same way—popularly, and without much adequate foundation. The 400 Blows (surely the year's clumsiest English title) illustrates, by seeming to ignore technique (though in fact masterfully in charge of it), Truffaut's belief that 'a film should not be judged by its technical merit but by its sincerity, its "eri de (-Intr." ' His style is quite transparent, action speaks through it, feel- ing is what counts and shows (Antoine's, his, they interweave; yet, autobiographical though it may be, the film manages not to be bitter); the direc- tion is simple, unobtrusive, completely untricksy, with hardly a shot that doesn't look squarely and head-on at its subject. When he wants a mood, Truffaut seems to get it all from his actors, not his camera; seems—of course he co-operates (and Paris does too—there is a wonderful hop, skip and jump down the steps of Sacrd-Cceur, with a ribald call at a soutane and a great sense of airy joy; and Antoine's final run from the reforrn school is as romantic, as ardent—as romanticallY and ardently filmed, I mean—as the adolescence he is just reaching); but still the most moving Part of the film (to me) is Antoine's talk with the reform school psychiatrist, which shows nothing but the child's face against a white background, so clinical in style it might have come from .a documentary about maladjusted children, but In practice so moving, so unforgettably acted. that here, rather than in the police station scenes, one has the intended sense of sadness and disgust, the right and deepest kind of sympathY' Someone, as we came out, was complaining loudly that the film was mealy-mouthed—on the police treatment of children, which she claimed to know about after many years in Paris. MaYhe it was : it looked horrifying enough, the physical roughness, the 'criminal' treatment—photographs and fingerprints and the rest, surrender of tie and shoelaces, joint treatment with thugs and prosn' tutes. But the horrors were cumulative, verY quietly and unobtrusively added up; and always the real one, the one that really counted. was Antoine's lack of love. One doesn't like hearing the mother's husband—not, and never pretending to be, Antoine's father—talking casually in front of the child about the office in terms of who's sleeping with whom, but then quite casually again one learns of Antoine's sophistication in such matters, which shows clearly one is disliking the wrong things, or at least the unimportant.
No, what matters, what Truffaut minds and one comes out feeling grey with sympathy for, is the child's isolation, his empty world. His mother and her husband aren't wholly bad : they sometimes give him a sort of companionship (his mother's efforts to get near him with sympathy over school, for instance, showing the typical values of the un- intelligent: 'All that algebra and science, what will it ever be any use for? But French—n0W you'll always have to write letters'), but this leads only to a few minutes of cosy illusion, all the more shatteringly destroyed next time they let him down. No one, from start to finish, understands, and no one till childhood is over ever will, you feel. The unexcited way in which this is said makes most of the film's effect; and Jean-Pierre Leaud as the boy, who seems to carry, in a painfully re- served face, a twelve-year burden as well as an occasional twelve-year-old exuberance. Adults are not monstrous, as in Vigo's film about schoolboYs in as grey but more nightmarish a world, Zero de Condone, they look quite nice from the outside (the schoolmaster looks rather like Pierre Fresnay, the mother, in a good mood, is pretty, the husband is a cheerful soul and there are sonic pleasant official faces), but they are hollow and exasperat- ing when you hope for any help. Antoine isn't a 'difficult' boy : he just can't explain (and who can, at twelve?), and nobody (but Rene) cares if he lives or dies. That's all, a tragedy not of child- hood but of a lifetime, for Antoine will grow with the scars of that early lovelessness and live with them till he dies. This beautiful, tough and some- times funny film is a lesson (by implication) in love : here's what it does, being without it.
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