400 Blows - My Thoughts

Truffaut’s 400 Blows. I have seen the movie thrice, the first time being when I was sixteen, and it never ceases to make me feel disturbed.
I could relate myself very much to the young protagonist of the movie – Antoine, because like him, I myself used to have a trail misunderstandings following me everywhere – at home and at school.
Of course, I have grown out of these feelings now, but still I feel touched by the subtle way the entire film, with all it’s complexities of children moving apart from their parents and the emotional ties and attachments disappearing in the post World War II European societies, with the nuclear families becoming the norm and individualism and existentialism being the catchword, nay, the shibboleth , of the urban middle and lower middle class families.
The character of Antoine is a representative of all the children in such similar situations – childhood being converted into a scapegoat to be sacrificed at the alter of existentialism. It was, and still is, an age of innocence being lost, and morality being spat upon in the face, by children and grown-ups alike. Antoine never thinks twice before giving the false alibi of his mother’s death as the reason for his missing class. Or maybe, just maybe, he does think twice, he does hesitate for a while, signifying the battle between morality and the morbid individualist existentialism…
What Camus’s Meursault, in The Outsider, had while declaring the death of his mother in the famous opening lines of the novel was honesty – naked honesty, and Truffaut’s Antoine had the same honesty too. Because to him, his mother is dead indeed, or may be that she never existed to him, and, looking at the picture from the other side of the glass, he never existed to his mother. This is because he had overheard his mother telling his stepfather that she wanted to have an abortion, only that her mother didn’t let that happen…
Maybe that’s what this state of Being and Nothingness all about… The underlying theme of 400 Blows is existentialism. But unlike Bergman’s Silence, which, too, was shown from the perspective of a child, this one is presented in a light manner. And all the despair and hopelessness and pathos in the movie remains hidden behind a cloak of childish innocence and exuberance. But at times the cloak gets lifted, and we can see the nude flesh, like when Antoine, while skipping his class and walking around the city with a friend of his, sees his mother locked in the arms of her office colleague, walks past casually as if nothing has happened and when his friend asks him “that wasn’t him (your father)?”, Antoine nonchalantly replies – “never saw him before”…
And the scene of three little girls, hardly four of five years old, locked up in an iron cage and staring at the older boys playing at the Juvenile correctional centre – complementing and perhaps supplementing the earlier scene of three grown up women, presumably prostitutes, locked up in the police station, is bound to send streams of slow and ice-cold shudders running through the spines of the viewers. Together, these two scenes represent innocence, being locked up in a secluded cage, staring at guilt and the ennui of hopeless fear, as described aptly by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal – “C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire”. This was perhaps the underlying theme of the entire movie. And I say ‘perhaps’ because this movie is like life itself – open to perspectives and interpretations – the objectivity of the flesh and blood
The scene of young Antoine being interviewed at the correctional home is another visual masterpiece. I’ve heard that for this particular scene, no written script was provided to the boy who played Antoine’s part. His facial expressions, the sudden quick glances, the gestures and movements of his hand – everything were real – there was no acting involved.
And one more piece of cinematic magic was the the medley of whirling faces staring down at the rotating chamber at the carnival. This scene reminds me of the immortal lines from The Hollow Men – “Shape without form, shade without colour / Paralysed force, gesture without motion…”. This was a celebration of life and lifelessness, like a brother and a sister, abandoned, standing on the roadside hand in hand and staring at all the geometrically vorticistic movements of straight lines, parabola and hyperbola – men and motorcars…
The essence of the movie is pure humour – something that brings out our smiles and tears simultaneously – like good old Charlie Chaplin staring out of the frame of City Lights – smiling and biting his finger with a rose in his hand. 400 Blows, to me at least, embodies all these feelings – those of smiles and tears, of the stream of never-ending hopelessness and despair, and the absurd happiness creeping out of all these like Camus’ Sisyphus…
The character of Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows is a confluence of Ray’s Apu from Pather Panchali and Bergman’s Johan from Tystnaden (The Silence) and what we get as a result is not merely a product of cinematic genius of the highest order, but an embodiment of life in itself – with mirth and melancholy flowing like an eternal river. Many of the shots, scenes and sequences reminded me of yet another masterpiece by yet another master – Bari Thekey Paliye by Ritwik Ghatak…
And perhaps my vocabulary is not sufficient to describe the last shot of the movie, where Antoine has ran away from the Labour Station and on reaching the sea and realizing that there is no escape route from there, turns back and faces the audience and the camera freezes…It is as if he is staring at the audience, at the people, and his eyes search for their cold hearts…He is punished and caged – not merely by the Correctional Home or the Labour Station, not merely by the unfeeling society, but by the world at large – by the lack of empathy, and the infertile detachment of our existence – imprisoned by the stone corridors of eternity, stone corridors that have no life and no feeling, he has no option but to stare at the lifeless insides of us – the hollow men, the stuffed men – devoid of all feelings and compassion, leading an existence of nullity… All the modern man has is a chain of present-moments – no past and no future, and an intense fear of the unknown, Antoine in 400 Blows, like Johan in Tystnaden explores these innermost fears…The innocence of these little children is something that is feared by the those who have embraced this existentialist mode of living (or maybe, not-living)…for innocence strikes like thunderbolts and declares a jihad against the guilt-ridden interiors of a fading morality… and the cold, lifeless whispers of this fear, of this intense horror wake us up in the middle of dead nights… at the Hour of the Wolf, and make us break into cold sweats…
The Horror…The Horror…