Towards the wave – Newspaper Kommersant No. 50 (7495) dated 03/24/2023

A kind of mini-retrospective of François Truffaut has started in cinemas in thirty Russian cities. It was opened by the film “Four Hundred Blows” – one of the many in world cinema dedicated to childhood, but completely special. Its enduring charm and long life explains Andrey Plakhov.

A film without a pink veil and tenderness with childish pranks. But not as tragic as Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. Instead of tragedy – drama, even with elements of comedy: the drama of a vulnerable child’s soul. Truffaut’s hero is himself, bred under the name Antoine Doinel, a twelve-year-old boy whose mother is busy with her personal life and life; both she and her stepfather have no time to delve into the problems of their son. Not better at school: the teacher only punishes the “difficult teenager”. Antoine attends classes less and less, and then runs away from home, ends up in a correctional institution.

Truffaut was an illegitimate child, whom his mother first left in the care of his grandmother, then, having married, she persuaded her husband to adopt and give her last name. His real father’s name was Roland Levy, he was a Jew. François’s childhood was very similar to that of his films, even if the details and the era in which the action is placed diverge: selfish parents keen on mountaineering; an estranged child who took refuge in movie mania; a young adventurer who ended up in a colony for theft and debt while trying to open a cinema club.

It is not at all necessary that the viewer has experienced something similar in reality. Let your childhood be spent in love and care and in no way resemble the one that Truffaut spoke about, nor his own. All the same, childhood is childhood, it is always a drama and often a comedy of the collision of a young being with the adult world. Very few people in cinema have managed to convey the state of growing up as sharply as Truffaut did.

The reason is probably that he himself, already being successful and famous, has largely remained a child. And film criticism, which Truffaut first dealt with, and how he found a “surrogate father” in the person of the film theorist Andre Bazin (Four Hundred Blows is dedicated to him), and the formation of a new wave, the first sign of which was this film, is a continuation of children’s games, pranks and hooligan kicks to adults, this time “dad’s movie”. Having shot his debut film at the age of 27 and received the Cannes Film Festival award for it, Truffaut turned to the image of Antoine Doinel four more times (in the films Antoine and Colette, Stolen Kisses, Family Hearth and life in a series, a kind of reality show. The lead actor Jean-Pierre Leo appeared on the screen as a teenager, then matured before our eyes, and after Truffaut’s death he quickly and ugly grew old. Still not knowing what the sequels would do, Truffaut refused to destroy the material that was not included in the Four Hundred Blows. In future films about Doinel, the director uses these old footage as flashbacks, and the appearance of Leo in adolescent form in scenes never seen is magical.

This is nothing but ethical realism, so skillfully imitating authenticity that the refined cinephilic irony of the device is completely dissolved in the effect of innocence. The moral code of the new wave demanded just such a relationship between the director and the actor or actress. Some married their muses, like Claude Chabrol to Stephane Audran, or openly lived with them, like Godard and Anna Karina, but it is in the non-standard case of Truffaut and Leo that this organic connection between authors and heroes is especially obvious.

Parallel to the cycle about Doinel, the director creates another – a series of “passion protocols”, or, as Truffaut himself called them, “declarations of love.” This second cycle, begun by Jules and Jim and completed by The Last Metro and The Neighbor, was tragically cut short each time (the spirit of death hovered over the characters invisibly) and revived anew. This series of films involves national stars – Jean-Paul Belmondo and Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, Francoise Dorléac and Fanny Ardant, who no longer belong to Truffaut to such an intimate degree, even if he had affairs with all the actresses. But even in these films we see a continuation of the theme of “Four Hundred Blows”. Truffaut’s dramaturgy is based on the principle: men against women, children against adults, art (cinema) against life. Men in Truffaut’s world are strikingly different from women. Men, acquiring worldly experience, remain retarded in their development. They are rather pitiful, often cowardly, hiding in the shadows in difficult situations and endowed with a natural “tender skin” (the title of one of the director’s best films). Truffaut’s women radiate activity that leads to a tragic outcome for themselves and those around them, but still this activity is able to inspire and delight. And in almost every film, at least on the periphery, a child appears. In Truffaut’s world, children survive in a hostile environment, and then turn into weak-willed men and passionate women, living out childhood traumas all their lives.

The name “Four Hundred Blows” is read differently in France than in Russia: this idiom dating back to the 17th century means behavior beyond the bounds of decency, terror of others. Of course, Truffaut uses it in relation to the actions of his hero in an ironic sense, because in fact evil is rooted not in him, but in his parents and teachers, and the name of this evil is selfishness and indifference.

The finale of the film is played out on the seashore, Antoine runs along the wet sand towards the oncoming wave. This is a new wave of French cinema, the next foray of which will take place in a year: the film will be directed by Jean-Luc Godard from a script by François Truffaut and will be called Breathless.