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Les quatre cents coups (1959)
 
Review
Francois Truffaut's
unanimously hailed magnum opus is still graced with a fragile beauty,
but after over 50 years as a cinema classic, it feels like exactly that:
an old classic. Unlike À
bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard's masterpiece from 1960 (co-written by Truffaut, incidentally), Les quatre cents
coups is no longer vibrant, radical or particularly relevant. It's a classically
told story about a mild juvenile delinquent, his struggling parents, and
their lives in 1950s Paris. The film is stylistically and narratively
run-of-the-mill, and the themes, which may have been pertinent back
in 1959, have been seriously dulled by the ravages of time. Today, the
film feels academic and overly pragmatic; almost lifeless. Truffaut
follows his alter-ego Antoine relentlessly, ostensibly trying to
extract meaning from his every move, but he has little to communicate
artistically. The kid's story is interesting enough, but Les quatre
cents coups is not quite, unless you're a film history student.
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