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François Truffaut, 1959
“I heard you were looking for a fresh guy, so I came.”
In September, 1958, French film critic-turned-director François Truffaut auditioned a motley collection of 13 year old boys, all amateur actors. He was looking for a star for his first feature film, and they had responded to an ad he'd placed in the newspaper. In callback after callback, one boy stood out. Although a lot of them had come at the insistence of their stage-struck parents, or out of curiosity, Jean-Pierre Léaud desperately wanted the role. The audition consisted of improvising answers on camera to a series of Truffaut's questions. “What brought you here?” Truffaut asked. “I heard you were looking for a fresh guy, so I came,” the cocky boy answered. And the character of Antoine Doinel was born.
And it was the beginning of a collaboration that would last decades. Between them they would create one of the most indelible characters in the history of cinema. Over 20 years, from 1959, with The 400 Blows, through the short “Antoine and Collette” (1962), and the subsequent features, Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), to Love on the Run (1979), Truffaut and Léaud would bring Antoine from age 13 to age 33, through adolescence, marriage, an affair, divorce, and at least the beginnings of re-examining his life, in an exquisite balance of comedy, poignancy, and humanity (all the while giving us a wonderful portrait of changing Paris in the 1960s and 1970s). The circle is completed in Love on the Run when Truffaut uses clips from the other films (most notably The 400 Blows) as the women in Doinel's life force him to revisit his relationships with them and with his own parents. (The whole cycle can now be seen thanks to its recent release as a Criterion DVD set.)
At times, the line was so blurred between Truffaut, Léaud, and Doinel that many Parisians thought Léaud was Truffaut and vice versa - they were constantly taken for each other on the street, at film festivals, etc. But their collaboration didn't end with the Doinel films. Léaud appeared in two other projects for Truffaut, Two English Girls, and Day For Night, and in countless other films, including those of Truffaut's New Wave buddy, Jean Luc Godard. Although it's a little-known fact, Léaud also assistant directed several of those critical 60s Godard films, such as Pierrot le fou, Weekend, and Alphaville, having caught the directing bug from Truffaut. A most notable (and amusing, Doinel-esque) performance of Léaud's can also be found in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Léaud continues to act in film to this day, long after we've lost the great Truffaut to an unexpected death (a brain tumor) in 1984.
Having been one of the strongest voices of the French film criticism magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, Truffaut had publicly championed such French cinematic icons as Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo (whose Zero for Conduct very much influenced Truffaut and 400 Blows), Andre Bazin and others, while also idolizing the American cinema giants John Ford, Howard Hawks, and his particular hero, Alfred Hitchcock. By the late 1950s, it was time for the highly opinionated Truffaut to put his own ass on the line as a filmmaker - it was one thing to be a critic, but could he make films himself that were worthy of the kind of high benchmark he set for others?
The short subject that most paved the way to his first feature was Les Mistons or “The Mischief Makers” (1958), a 23 minute adaptation of a novel by Maurice Pons. It is, in many ways, a perfect film, not a false note in it. A group of five young children harass a young woman whose fiancé is away at war, and from what ensues, they take a step toward maturity. Making the film showed Truffaut just how much he liked working with children, and what a kinship he felt for them. He decided the next project would be another short, perhaps the first of a series that would become an anthology film, Antoine's Fugue. Soon, however, it was clear to Truffaut and his collaborator at the time, Marcel Moussy, that this short, an attempt to show childhood not from the standard nostalgic haze, but as the painful experience it can be, would need a full 90 minutes to develop. The expression “making 400 blows” (faire les quatre cents coups) is a reference to “raising hell” or rebellion, as the only way children have to deal with an unjust world.
“When I was 13, I was desperately anxious to grow up quickly so that I might finally misbehave with impunity,” Truffaut wrote in 1971. “As I saw it, the life of a child was made up of guilt-bearing malfeasances, whereas adult offenses were regarded as simple accidents. If I happened to break a plate while doing the dishes, I would steal down the stairs and furtively throw the pieces in the sewer; that very evening I would hear some friends of my parents laughingly tell of how they had smashed their car against a tree. At the age of 15 I was arrested for vagrancy and locked up in the Center for Juvenile Delinquency at Villejuif. It was shortly after the war; juvenile delinquency was at its peak and the children's penal institutions were packed to capacity. I experienced first hand what I show in the picture: the cages in the police station with the prostitutes, the ride in the police van, the criminal-records routine and the prison cells; without going into all the ugly details, I can testify that what I went through was considerably tougher than what I show in the film.”
For myself, I remember my life changing that night I sat in the Uniondale Mini-Cinema on Long Island in the late 1960s, seeing for the first time The 400 Blows together with Les Mistons, and Stolen Kisses. As the scratchy music track started, and the tracking shots of the Eiffel Tower unwound before me, I opened myself up to the experience of Paris, as seen through the eyes of a 13 year old boy, and I was never the same. I began a lifelong love affair with Paris, with Truffaut, with Doinel. One of the things that astounded me was that 400 Blows could be so fun and irreverent on the one hand, but ultimately so poignant and profound at the same time, affecting me down to my bones, and that its sequels could be such sweet comedies - also filling me with a sweet sorrow. Although never having been in reform school or “juvie,” I think there's something universal in this film, something I think every teenager recognizes in the portrayals of the constrictions and heartlessness of school, the random cruelty of the adult world, and in the child's rebel heart. Teenagers always respond to this film.
Truffaut always maintained that childhood is, for most, a time of great pain, and a lack of control over one's own destiny. “Even today,” Truffaut has said, “When I hear an adult reminiscing regretfully about his childhood, I tend to think he has a very poor memory.”
The final frame of the film, coming as Antoine finally confronts the sea he has always wanted to find, has become an icon of world cinema. Why does this boy's face continue to haunt us, 45 years later? Could it be because it represents the inevitable fact that whatever it is we seek for so long always entraps us when we finally find it? Or is it the young actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud, looking out at us in the dark, out over his own future, telling us, he - and Antoine Doinel - will be back?
By Kenn Rabin
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