1959 ‘Les Quatre Cents Coups’ Directed by François Truffaut
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
Jean-Pierre Léaud Claire Maurier Albert Rémy Georges Flamant Patrick Auffay Robert Beauvais Yvonne Claudie Pierre Repp Guy Decomble Daniel Couturier François Nocher Richard Kanayan Renaud Fontanarosa Michel Girard Serge Moati Bernard Abbou Jean-François Bergouignan Michel Lesignor Jean-Claude Brialy Jeanne Moreau Bouchon Luc Andrieux Christian Brocard Marius Laurey Claude Mansard Jacques Monod Henri Virlogeux Charles L. Bitsch Philippe de Broca Show All…
Les 400 coups, I quattrocento colpi, De vierhonderd slagen, Czterysta batów, The Four Hundred Blows, 四百下, 胡作非为, På vei mot livet, Os Incompreendidos, 大人は判ってくれない, Los 400 golpes, Nikdo mne nemá rád, 四百击, Sie kuessten und sie schlugen ihn, Os 400 Golpes, 400번의 구타, 400 המלקות, Sie küssten und sie schlugen ihn, I 400 colpi, Los cuatrocientos golpes, 400 Darbe, Четыреста ударов, Os Quatrocentos Golpes, Τα 400 Χτυπήματα, 400 batów, Négyszáz csapás, Nikdo mě nemá rád, 400 kepposta, Ung flugt, 400-те удара, De 400 slagen, 四百擊, Чотириста ударів, چهارصد ضربه, Cele patru sute de lovituri
France
Cannes Film Festival
FranceTP
Italy
Germany
USANR
UKPG
USSR
Portugal
France
South Korea15
AustraliaPG
GreeceΚ
SpainAPTA
Netherlands
Netherlands
Germany12
Australia
France
Germany
Greece
Italy
Netherlands
Portugal
South Korea
Spain
UK
USA
USSR
I think people overlook how hard it is to be a kid. All kids at one point feel unwanted, unloved, or uncared for. It's universal, which is why this movie is so incredible. It takes something as simple as a broken household and makes it for everyone, something anyone can relate to.
The acting and score in particular are outstanding. The cinematography is gorgeous, and you can tell it has inspired many filmmakers today. Many aspects of this film also reminded me of Mommy and I Killed My Mother, both Xavier Dolan films (which is a great thing). I honestly am in love with this film and it's true, brutal, and heartbreaking story.
How do you explain what it's like to lose yourself in a film? The 400 Blows describes it particularly well. Francois Truffaut was an expert cinephile, after all: sneaking into theaters via washroom windows, gravitating closer and closer toward the screen so that for a few hours his world was only moving images shedding diffused light on hundreds of faces turned up to the screen.
But perhaps Truffaut wasn't intent on forgetting the rest of the world when he started sitting so close to the screen; perhaps he was simply dealing with weakening eyesight. That would be quite like him and his work, anyway: mundane realities finding their way into cinema in a manner that renders them achingly poetic.
Take…
The final freeze-frame says it all.
Antoine has arrived on a vast and lonely coastal shore, liberated from the clutches of family and authoritarianism, with nothing to restrict him but the infinite possibility of the ocean. Days of crime, reform and hooky-playing are miles behind him. Detention centers are a thing of the past. Police can’t arrest him. Teachers can’t chide him. Parents and absent role models will no longer hurt him. And in this moment of idealization he feels alive, wild and perfectly exhilarated. A tabula rasa waiting to start anew. Then something happens.
Something shifts. Stranded between land and water, past trouble and future uncertainty, Antoine’s great escape slowly morphs into something else. It is the first time,…
remember when the french new wave tried to save cinema from 1958 to the late 1960s and it did
liberating, all we want is to run away from childhood and get a taste of what’s next in life just to realize we can never run back.
"Your parents say you're always lying."
"Oh, I lie now and then, I suppose. Sometimes I'd tell them the truth and they still wouldn't believe me, so I prefer to lie."
Ever been excited on your first day of school and talked too much to a friend or laughed too hard at a joke? Or maybe you fidget too much in your seat and can't pay attention to what's on the board. Your teacher interprets this as misbehavior and hereafter labels you a troublemaker. That's blow one.
Ever had your parents fight behind closed doors and you can't help but hear them shouting through walls? They've fought before, but not quite like this, and you become scared about what might…
As you're watching it, there are some shots that you just feel will always be stuck into your memory forever. One particular instance of this is from a scene near the end, when Antoine was riding in the coach and shots of the Parisian nightlife were passing by. His tears were revealed by the streetlights that illuminated his face. Don't know why that affected me so much, but I can't stop thinking about it. Films about kids have a way of intensifying my film-viewing experience, because feeling pain, hardship, and happiness through the eyes of children is the closest we'll ever get to pure, undiluted truthfulness in film.
if you haven’t made a shrine to balzac that caught fire and nearly killed your entire family, slept in the same room with a taxidermy racehorse and seven cats, smoked hand-rolled newspaper cigarettes in jail, and faked your own mother’s death, have you even lived?
