debut
Jean-Pierre Léaud gave life to his alter ego, Antoine Doinel, with whom he continued to make films as he turned years
It has always been said that most directors tell their own story for their first film, especially at very decisive moments in their lives. And the great prototype of this type of first films was ‘The 400 coups’, the autobiography that François Truffaut made about his childhood, and in which he discovered his alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) with whom he would meet years and movies.
François Truffaut was born in Paris on February 6, 1932. Recognized in the civil registry as the son of Roland Truffaut, architect and decorator, he will never get to know his real father. His mother was Jeanine de Montferrand, a secretary at the newspaper L’Illustration. François Truffaut studied at the Rue Clauzel school and at the Rollin high school, although he was never an exemplary student. Starting in 1939, the young Truffaut, a passionate reader, also spends his life in the cinema, sometimes during the hours when he should be in class. Since 1946, once he leaves his studies, he survives with small jobs, founds a film club in 1947, and some thefts cause him to be sent to a correctional facility.
Thanks to the film critic André Bazin, François Truffaut starts working on Travail et Culture. He writes his first articles in 1950. After enlisting in the army, he is sent to Germany, but deserts and goes through military prison. Truffaut publishes reviews in Cahiers du Cinéma from 1953, being very critical of the French cinema of the time and passionate about the great masters of American cinema. In 1954 he directs his first short film. In 1956 he is Roberto Rossellini’s assistant director. A year later he directs his short film ‘Los golfillos’. And in 1958, he shot ‘Les four hundred blows’, which was to be a spectacular success and serve as a letter of introduction to the world of the Nouvelle Vague movement, which he led together with Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard.
Truffaut himself writes the script from his childhood memories, and made a virtue of necessity, since with hardly any budget, he managed to shoot most of it outdoors. The plot doesn’t differ too much from Truffaut’s own childhood, but the director puts humor and a lot of sensitivity in showing a childhood out in the open. The protagonist is a mixture of the personalities of Truffaut and Léaud himself, who will accompany the director and the character for several decades, in various films where we will see the character grow up, fall in love and become an adult.
Antoine Doinel, 12 years old. he lives in Paris as a loner in his own house. His parents have unresolved marital problems. The child was born unwanted and he constantly breathes this hostility, having to accept, one after another, the blows that life deals him, feeling increasingly misunderstood and miserable. On a certain occasion he is expelled from class for a week. It is then that Antoine considers achieving one of his greatest dreams: to see the sea, which he does not know. To achieve this, together with a friend, he plans to commit a robbery in the company where his father works and then escape to the coast, and they do so. After a series of police and psychiatric interrogations, Antoine will be admitted to a correctional facility. The title refers to a French expression (“faire les quatre cents coups”), whose translation could be “make a thousand and one”, which refers to all the transgressions of the character in the film, although it also plays with the strict meaning of expression, that is, with the enormous number of blows that life deals to the protagonist.
The film was shot in Paris in 1958, with shots and scenes that Truffaut had thoroughly rehearsed, and opened the 1959 Cannes Film Festival where he won the award for best director. Truffaut dedicates the film to the man who became his spiritual father, André Bazin, who died just as the film was about to start shooting. After Cannes it becomes an impressive success, and profoundly renews the stagnant French cinema of the time, based on the theoretical approaches promoted by a group of critics from Cahiers du Cinema. The film opens in Paris on June 3, 1959 and soon reaches the whole world. It arrives in Spain, duly censored, on August 28, 1960.
Truffaut will continue to narrate Antoine Doinel’s story as Jean-Pierre Léaud grows up, in successive films, already much further removed from the director’s vital adventures: An episode of ‘Love at 20 Years’, ‘Stolen Kisses’, ‘Marital home’ with Claude Jade in the role of Christine, friend and wife of Doinel and ‘Love on the Run’.
#Blows #Truffauts #autobiography