Les 400 coups [The 400 Blows aka Wild Oats] (1959)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) Sitting down to watch Les 400 coups for the first time can be imposing if you’re coming at it from the cinephile angle. It’s not only legendary writer-director François Truffaut’s first feature film: It’s considered his best film. It’s a retelling of his own difficult childhood. It’s a defining movie of the French Nouvelle Vague, of French cinema, of world cinema. It’s widely and wildly acclaimed, often included in the shorter best-movies-of-all-time lists and a favourite of many top-notch directors. With hype like that, it can feel churlish to watch the film, acknowledge its qualities, but then wonder about the fuss. Part of the disconnect, I suspect, has to do with the objectives of the movie. Unlike other movies with genre-driven goals or overt cinematic ambitions, Truffaut sets out to deliver a carefully focused character-driven story, with small stakes and matter-of-fact cinematography. Our protagonist is a juvenile delinquent, but this is not a crime movie. It’s not exactly a triumphant film—but it ends with escape and one of the most celebrated sequences in 1950s French cinema. Still, its specificity is the key to its universality—while Les 400 coups is rarely pulse-pounding, it gradually makes our battered young protagonist understandable until we can sympathize with him. His parents are guilty of severe neglect, so he takes to the streets as a learning experience. I’m not that interested in that kind of material and there are several Truffaut movies that I like a lot more (most notably Jules & Jim, La nuit américaine and parts of Fahrenheit 451). But if I don’t quite get what makes the film so acclaimed, I also suspect that it’s because there have been a lot of similar movies about likable teenage hoodlums since 1959—the success of European neorealism was to open the doors for many similar features, but if you’ve seen those films before the original, the source won’t have the same impact. Still, I’m glad that I’ve seen Les 400 Coups, and as a little bit more than another checkmark on a list.