The 400 Blows Analysis

Without getting too excited, and before embarrassing myself thoroughly with clichés, let it be stated that The 400 Blows changed the lives of many, my own included. It is for the French youths what On the Road was for the jazz-crazed beatniks — a definitive bible of sorts. One shouldn’t expect a bildungsroman arc from the works of Truffaut. If anything, this film is more of an anti-narrative. It is a film about a juvenile delinquent named Antoine Doinel; it is a film about you; it is a film about anyone and no one in particular. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows defied the traditional filmmaking canon and, arguably, set the French New Wave in orbit. Five minutes into the film, we should accept that there will be no pseudo-intellectual pillow talk, but
Throughout the film, moments of heartbreak are interlaced with quaint solitude and at times, comical encounters. Two of which in particular appear jarring and disrupts the lethargic pace of the the film. They are, perhaps, Truffaut’s way of mirroring life’s mundane rhythms. When Antoine skipped school with his friend, he enters a revolving wheel at an amusement park. The speed of the wheel’s circulative motion accelerates the pace of the film and the viewer’s sense of time. It is a subtle defiance against the literal and figurative gravity of life at school and home — a fleeting, weightless joy, only to return to normalcy when the ride ends. The juxtaposition of motion and stillness points to the contradictory paradoxical nature of one’s experiences, such that one finds a peculiar middle ground: melancholic joy, elated sadness. After Antoine accidentally sets fire to a curtain by lighting a candle for the great Balzac — an idolatry sans substance — the scene is followed by an almost meta-cinematic interlude where the Doinels head to the cinema and, for a stolen moment, are happy. The happiness is tangible but nevertheless