The 400 Blows Review

Truffaut's method is to withhold judgment on everyone, which is why the film still stings. Antoine's mother is unfaithful and cold but visibly trapped; the teacher is a petty tyrant with thirty boys and no help; the stepfather is decent for whole stretches. Nobody is villainous enough to blame, so the machine that grinds the boy down has no operator. Jean-Pierre Leaud was cast off an open call and improvises much of the psychiatrist interview, shot as direct address to an unseen questioner and joined with rough dissolves that hide the cuts, and it is the most alive scene in the film precisely because it stopped being written.

Henri Decae shoots Paris in widescreen from street level, following the boys as they skip school past cinema posters, and the rotor ride at the fairground pins Antoine to a spinning wall in what amounts to a mission statement. The structure is episodic and the middle drifts. Then the escape from the reform camp, a long lateral track along a field to the sea he has never seen, and a freeze-frame that asks the audience the question.