400 Blows: My Favorite French New Wave Movie

I love watching French movie, especially French New Wave genre. This is a genre that I believe doesn't follow any rule of making movies. It is like mixing of many genres together in one movie. And 400 Blows is one of my favorite.

Source: IMDb

Directed by François Truffaut, 400 Blows had a very dark and sorrowful story. Unhappy family had led to the miserable life of Antoine Doinel ending in the juvenile system. In the very first scene, we can see that Antoine had different characteristics unlike others characters in the movie. He was very rebellious and very mature and he did not follow any rules that apply during that era. He decided to cut school to hang out with his friend, then lied to his teacher that his mother died, and the climax of the movie was when he could not take it anymore, he had to leave and stole his father’s typewriter.

I don’t know how you guys feel but before this scene I did not like Antoine because he was such a naughty boy and did not listen to his parents. Until this scene, I realized that Antonie had not had a perfect and happy life with his family. His mom had an affair, his dad did not care so much about him. His eyes were so sad or might have regretted something. He wanted to take it back but it was too late. Director Truffaut used the close up to Antonie’s face and moved to the views of the city at night as a reminder of something had lost, had belonged to memories and to the past. Later the audience could understand why it led to the action of Antonie with his action. An unhappy family with his mother hated him so much because Antonie was her mistake that she could have the life she ever wanted.

Unfortunately, Antonie knew this inconvenient truth. Like Antonie, an unhappy family could make a child become bad, uneducated and an unexpected criminal.

One of the ways the French New Wave used was camera stylo. Meaning using a camera to express the character’s expression the way they are using a pen. The camera will focus on that character’s face to show their expression like guilty, regret, happy or angry. Before that era, if we notice in some movies, the directors did not do that on their characters instead they used lines to tell what the characters were thinking or what they were about to do. But in French New Wave, instead of letting their characters speak, they would only use close up to their faces to see the changes of expression on their face. In 1960, there was one movie that we all know. Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock. In the scene where Marion was driving to escape, the camera closed up her face with some lines not from her but from others who might think about her and her face expression changed all the time. From nervous to satisfying. In the above scene in 400 blows, the character did not speak anything. He only looked out to the night of the city with sadness and regret on his face. But also I can see some hopes in his future that his parents would not be an obstacle. Director Truffaut was also creative when he let all scenes of Antonie in completely dark that you could not see Antonie’s face. It was a metaphor for his life as it is always dark and no light.