Francois Truffaut's first feature, and like many first features it's semi-autobiographical. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. As Joyce advised, "Wipe your glosses with what you know." There are only two cautions to be observed. One is that your first story, about yourself, doesn't turn you into a moral paragon. The second is that, having gotten that initial material out of your system, you have the industry and talent to go on to other things -- not necessarily less personal, but less heavily invested. Truffaut managed to rise well above his beginnings.
Jean-Pierre Leaud is the boy of about twelve who lives in a shabby and cramped apartment in Paris with a mother who, though she sometimes tries her best to act otherwise, doesn't really want him and never has. Leaud's father doesn't mind the kid, but things are tough. Both parents work. The mother is being unfaithful and the father is distant.
So Leaud begins to get into trouble at school. (And what a run-down, working-class school it is.) He writes graffiti, gets caught, gets punished, but seems to learn nothing from it, nor from forging a note excusing his absence by claiming that his mother has died. He winds up running away from home, stealing a typewriter, getting caught, and sent to an "observation camp" where he's subject to tough love and interviews by a social worker. He runs away from the camp too and the last scene is of Leaud chugging along a wide strand, splashing through the tiny waves of icy sea water.
Truffaut doesn't give Leaud easy excuses. He's gone through tribulations, certainly, but so have many of the other kids in his class. And at least Leaud wasn't sexually abused as a child -- the kiss of death in movies these days. But his story isn't one of a born delinquent either. He takes no pleasure in destroying things or in hurting or disappointing others. He exploits nobody.
And the parents themselves aren't evil or weak. Their foibles are recognizably human. His parents only rarely indulge him but they never beat him. The boy may live in a bare apartment with cracked walls and not enough furniture or heat, but so do his mother and father, so they're subject to the same physical stressors.
In fact, there's nobody in the whole movie who is entirely evil or entirely good, despite the fact that the film is in black and white.
There is a vein of comedy in it too. Their language teacher is trying to get them to pronounce English correctly. "Where is the girl?", he asks one student in clear and precise tones. "At the bitch," replies the student, and the teacher explodes in a volcano of insults in French -- and he stutters! Overall, what you're most likely to get out of this film is a sense of Truffaut's abiding pity for the human condition. Take the Punch and Judy show that we see a couple of dozen young kids watching. The camera pans slowly across their faces, and we see them laughing and yelling -- and we see their misshapen heads, their diminutive chins, their crossed eyes, and those ears that kids of that age tend to have, like African elephants sticking out from their skulls, all ready to flap with excitement. You have to love kids to love that kind of ugliness.
The style is grainy and documentary with only occasional touches of art that are noticeable enough to call attention to themselves. Two kids sit on a bench in a wintry garden and talk about their hated parents while the camera deliberately lifts itself to a syrupy statue above them in which a loving mother is kissing a cherub.
And that last shot -- a freeze frame of Leaud on the beach at the end of his tether, unable to go forward into the sea, unable to retreat to the camp he's just escaped from. The image is still and Leaud is captured staring into the camera lens, waiting, as it were, for the audience to judge him. We, the jury.
Truffaut was one of the New Wave of French directors, most of them formerly critics for a French magazine. (They gave us the term "film noir.") Jean-Luc Goddard was another. But I think Truffaut leaves Goddard in the dust. Goddard is far more fashionable because of his on-screen pyrotechnics. He up-ended the grammar of film, as if to say, "Look at me, Ma!" What he did to editing alone was what Sinead O'Connor did to the Pope's photo. And he was political in the right way for the time. But he lacks Truffaut's essential humanity or, let's be honest, his humility. Maybe it's just me but compassion seems a more evolved emotion than aggression. I wonder if Truffaut ever read Rousseau.
Jean-Pierre Leaud is the boy of about twelve who lives in a shabby and cramped apartment in Paris with a mother who, though she sometimes tries her best to act otherwise, doesn't really want him and never has. Leaud's father doesn't mind the kid, but things are tough. Both parents work. The mother is being unfaithful and the father is distant.
So Leaud begins to get into trouble at school. (And what a run-down, working-class school it is.) He writes graffiti, gets caught, gets punished, but seems to learn nothing from it, nor from forging a note excusing his absence by claiming that his mother has died. He winds up running away from home, stealing a typewriter, getting caught, and sent to an "observation camp" where he's subject to tough love and interviews by a social worker. He runs away from the camp too and the last scene is of Leaud chugging along a wide strand, splashing through the tiny waves of icy sea water.
Truffaut doesn't give Leaud easy excuses. He's gone through tribulations, certainly, but so have many of the other kids in his class. And at least Leaud wasn't sexually abused as a child -- the kiss of death in movies these days. But his story isn't one of a born delinquent either. He takes no pleasure in destroying things or in hurting or disappointing others. He exploits nobody.
And the parents themselves aren't evil or weak. Their foibles are recognizably human. His parents only rarely indulge him but they never beat him. The boy may live in a bare apartment with cracked walls and not enough furniture or heat, but so do his mother and father, so they're subject to the same physical stressors.
In fact, there's nobody in the whole movie who is entirely evil or entirely good, despite the fact that the film is in black and white.
There is a vein of comedy in it too. Their language teacher is trying to get them to pronounce English correctly. "Where is the girl?", he asks one student in clear and precise tones. "At the bitch," replies the student, and the teacher explodes in a volcano of insults in French -- and he stutters! Overall, what you're most likely to get out of this film is a sense of Truffaut's abiding pity for the human condition. Take the Punch and Judy show that we see a couple of dozen young kids watching. The camera pans slowly across their faces, and we see them laughing and yelling -- and we see their misshapen heads, their diminutive chins, their crossed eyes, and those ears that kids of that age tend to have, like African elephants sticking out from their skulls, all ready to flap with excitement. You have to love kids to love that kind of ugliness.
The style is grainy and documentary with only occasional touches of art that are noticeable enough to call attention to themselves. Two kids sit on a bench in a wintry garden and talk about their hated parents while the camera deliberately lifts itself to a syrupy statue above them in which a loving mother is kissing a cherub.
And that last shot -- a freeze frame of Leaud on the beach at the end of his tether, unable to go forward into the sea, unable to retreat to the camp he's just escaped from. The image is still and Leaud is captured staring into the camera lens, waiting, as it were, for the audience to judge him. We, the jury.
Truffaut was one of the New Wave of French directors, most of them formerly critics for a French magazine. (They gave us the term "film noir.") Jean-Luc Goddard was another. But I think Truffaut leaves Goddard in the dust. Goddard is far more fashionable because of his on-screen pyrotechnics. He up-ended the grammar of film, as if to say, "Look at me, Ma!" What he did to editing alone was what Sinead O'Connor did to the Pope's photo. And he was political in the right way for the time. But he lacks Truffaut's essential humanity or, let's be honest, his humility. Maybe it's just me but compassion seems a more evolved emotion than aggression. I wonder if Truffaut ever read Rousseau.