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

This presentation suggests there’s a whole new world of black-and-white cinematography to be discovered in high-definition.

The 400 BlowsOne 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.

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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

Did I just mention certain movies looking “stale and dated”? I imagine quite a few more will appear so after taking in Criterion’s crisply detailed black-and-white transfer on Blu-ray. That said, I’ll get one thing out of the way upfront: This is not 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 are 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.

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Extras

All these extra features are holdovers from the previous Criterion DVD incarnation of the film, and some of those were holdovers from the notoriously hard-to-find first edition Criterion. In other words, if you’re looking to upgrade, it won’t be the extra features that make or break your decision. But to anyone buying the film for the first time on Blu-ray: Know that the platter comes with a nice selection of vintage footage of both François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud on the film’s inception and reception, as well as a generous two audio commentary tracks (one, by Brian Stonehill, for the film scholars, and another, from Robert Lachenay, for those interested in Truffaut’s background).

Overall

Criterion’s Blu-ray presentation of The 400 Blows isn’t perfection, but it suggests there’s a whole new world of black-and-white cinematography to be discovered in high-definition.

Score: 
 Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble, Georges Flamant, Patrick Auffay  Director: François Truffaut  Screenwriter: François Truffaut, Marcel Moussy  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1959  Release Date: March 24, 2009  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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