Blu-ray Review: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows on the Criterion Collection

One of the initiating sparks of the French New Wave, The 400 Blows ultimately boils down to the film’s trendsetting coda, perhaps the most exclamatory question mark in movies. (Only Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, which similarly ends in the surf, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse come to mind as potential rivals.) A mischievous but misunderstood adolescent boy, having run for about three or four languorous minutes of screen time (that is, after spending about 95 minutes innocently getting on his parents’ and teachers’ bad sides), reaches a beach and dips his foot into the waves of low tide. He halts, looks around, about-faces, and momentarily looks into the camera. Freeze. Zoom. Fin.

Implying nothing in particular even as it cuts young Antoine Doniel’s (Jean-Pierre Léaud) options until motion is no longer available, the lack of finality in former Cahiers du Cinéma critic François Truffaut’s “Fin” is a perception-altering moment. It’s one that suggests the cinephiliac relationship that Truffaut and his ilk (meaning you too; meaning anyone born into a life of cinema) all share with the movies, the thrilling sensation that it isn’t just life experience that informs movies but, inversely, that movies themselves give birth to life experience. Antoine’s freewheeling, vivacious spiral into a rather pathetic sort of juvenile delinquency is undoubtedly Truffaut’s life filtered back into the nourishing medium of movies. But what emerges isn’t a painful, isolated experience, but a life refined by its pop potential.

Compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (which Truffaut co-wrote), 400 Blows is aesthetically precious. If you watch either today, looking for the details that ostensibly ignited cinematic revolution, Truffaut’s rough-hewn but decidedly soft-hearted sentimentality have nothing on Godard’s jump cuts and pugnacious allusions. In contrast to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg’s pseudo-egghead pillow talk, Antoine can’t even differentiate between tribute and plagiarism. Godard’s characters bleed indifferently. Truffaut instructs his cinematographer, Henri Decaë, to linger over the enraptured faces of cherubs taking in a Punch and Judy show. Such are Truffaut’s seemingly counterintuitive attitudes that he even attributed 400 Blows’s most memorable stylistic coup—“Fin”—to the fact that the camera simply ran out of film.

So why does 400 Blows vibrate like it straddles the cinematic generation gap? Moreover, how does a critic who was apparently so vicious that he was banned from attending Cannes 1958 turn out a film so loveable that he won a best director citation at the festival the following year?

Look no further than the concept of “the movies.” When the Doniel family seems at the cusp of detonating, they catch a war flick and are, for a stolen moment, magically convivial. Their experience has been briefly enhanced by movies. When Antoine gets carted away to the big house, the glittering lights of nighttime Paris and Jean Constantin’s xylophone-heavy music transform what’s otherwise a rock-bottom moment into a transcendent cinematic interlude, a sequence ripe with photogenic pathos. Truffaut’s internal battle between nostalgia and anarchy is compelling (and probably reaches an early climax with Antoine’s graviton ride), but the vitality of 400 Blows, what keeps it potent long after many of its New Wave antecedents have come to appear stale and dated, comes from the symbiosis between real and reel life.

Image/Sound

This release isn’t an upgrade per se, but a repackaging of the perfectly great Blu-ray release Criterion issued in 2009, with their now-standard dual-edition DVD thrown in as well. So a double dip isn’t necessary, but for those of you who missed the window last time around and are considering pulling the trigger now, what I said before still applies to the Blu-ray transfer: “This isn’t a perfect-looking image. You won’t get an image that looks as though it could’ve been filmed yesterday. The 400 Blows remains a dog-eared film. But it’s never looked this much like a film. The print damage and imperfections (such as the confetti of white flecks you can see sprinkled over every fadeout) need not be considered a liability, and even if they’re minor distractions, you still have a phenomenally balanced array of silvers and grays. Maybe just short of the jaw-dropping image I was hoping for, but entirely thrilling nonetheless. The sound will never match the image on older films, and the disparity is maybe a tad more notable on Blu-ray, where the wavering on Jean Constantin’s music-box score seems even more apparent. But the uncompressed monaural presentation is as good as the film could conceivably sound.”

Extras

The features included in this release have been floating around for quite a while now, some dating back not only to the last Blu-ray edition, but all the way from the film’s first release in laserdisc. Has no one along the way thought someone could add a new perspective on the film that wasn’t covered by the original release’s commentary tracks (one, by Brian Stonehill, for the film scholars, and another, from Robert Lachenay, for those interested in Truffaut’s background)? Or at the very least supplement Annette Insdorf’s very astute but all-too-brief booklet essay with a few other opposing viewpoints? What’s there in the way of bonus features is good as have ever been offered…because they’re all what’s already been offered.

Overall

If any movie in the Criterion Collection deserves to be released time and again, Antoine Doniel’s first adventure is as good a candidate as any. Ideally, next time they might see fit to throw bonus-feature addicts a bone.