400 Blows review

Authority’s View on Cages:
After a half-hour of reflecting upon the movie, how I should answer the first question finally came to me. I nearly shouted: “Eureka, I have found it!” but as that would have raised the eyebrows of my parents, I refrained. My opinion of the film was that it was very effective in conveying how Francois Truffaut felt during that time in his life. He constantly creates a negative mood whenever an authority figure was present. For example, his teacher was constantly yelling whenever Antoine was in school, which didn’t exactly give you a happy feeling. He similarly made the mood much lighter when authority wasn’t present by adding music in some parts, like when his youthful self was playing hokey with Rene. However, the movie wasn’t effective in the sense that I need to question how accurately the brutality of some of the authority figures was portrayed. The one person that sticks in my mind is the teacher. I guess it is possible that someone could be so cruel to a bunch of boys, but I have trouble believing it was that bad for Truffaut. Granted that this is a memoir so it is acceptable for him to exaggerate, but it takes away from the film (in my opinion) because it hampers the knowledge of how life really was back when the movie was made.
Truffaut’s emotion and values are portrayed best by the themes he chooses to incorporate in the movie. For example, the theme that authority can never understand that a child needs to be a child, shows just how he thinks authority acts. In the observatory center, he portrays the people in charge of him as insensitive, almost monster like humans. They place children so young that anything they could have possibly done to put them in a jail was done so with innocence enough to excuse them. The characters he creates also help illustrate how he feels about authority. The teacher is an extremely unfair, strict, almost cruel person who is always bullying Antoine. He punishes him for being a kid and he takes away the one thing a child his age needs when he is in school: recess.
The dramatic aspects of the film generate thought and understanding of what Truffaut was thinking. The casting of the characters was well done in the sense that they portrayed what was necessary. What I mean by that was they showed his opinions of what type of person they were and what their opinions of him were. For example, his mother had affairs with men other then Truffaut’s stepfather, and she was only nice to Truffaut when she thought he liked his father better than her. Claire Maurier (who played his mother) looked like how I imagined her and she played her role so well that she made the move more interesting because you began to wonder what the mother’s ultimate goal was. Georges Flamant did a good job of acting very angry and disgusted with the boys at school. He also looked like someone who would be grouchy; he wore suits that looked old and he had an attitude that made him defer only to the principle. Jean-Pierre Leaud made the understanding of how Truffaut thought very clear by acting like a child who was mischievous. When he was smoking, he always had a smug look across his face which told the viewer that he was very pleased with himself. The lighting of the scenes played a critical role in expressing how Antoine thought about the people around him. When he is in the school with the teacher who always yells at him, the lighting is darker. When he is skipping school, the scene is much lighter because he enjoys the companionship of Rene.
The camera movement and the duration of the shots were critical to the expression of Truffaut throughout the movie. For most of the scenes, the camera maintained a certain distance from the characters it was filming. An example of this type of shot is when Antoine and Rene are walking together when they are going to school. It is not too close to them, but it focuses only on what they are doing in the scene, everything else in the scene is trivial. So when Truffaut wants to emphasize something he thinks is important, he breaks this pattern of camera distance and usually zooms in on someone’s face. The duration of the shots played an important role in the movie because the longer the shot, the more freedom Antoine is experiencing. For instance, when Antoine is running away from the observatory, Truffaut takes two back to back scenes of just him running away. Both these scenes last at least two minutes! This shows how important Antoine’s running away is to him. The scene where the mother is kissing her boss is short because it provides a little more characterization of the mother, but more importantly Antoine loses a little freedom because now his mother knows he is not in school.
The 400 Blows and Black Boy are similar because both Richard and Antoine rebel due to the fact they feel that they are being cornered. Because of this, they feel that authority can never understand them and they basically start to do what authority doesn’t want them to do. In Black Boy, Richard rebels against his grandmother by writing a short story that she thinks is “the devil’s work”. In 400 Blows, Antoine rebels by trying to run away and live on his own. But Antoine’s way of rebelling is the barrier that separates him and Richard. Antoine tries to rid himself of authorities stare by running away. Richard on the other hand can’t bend himself to kneel at the feet of authority and doesn’t take flight either. He tries his best to live side by side with it.
I believe that if someone is looking for a film that expresses emotion and opinion without cheesy lines or over-the-top characters, then I think you might like this movie. It incorporates ingenious usage of basic features of film making to express emotion and opinion. It also shows how good acting and pretty straightforward plot line can be used to narrate an excellent story even though it doesn’t have the special effects we had today.