“Cinema is the asymptote of reality.”
—André Bazin
learns from Bazin, Truffaut pays homage to Bazin with a meaningful long shot in "The Four Hundred Blows," and, one that is embedded in a bland narrative The rich factual presentation and a period of delicate and richly layered spiritual performance.
As a growing teenager, Antoine's unhappiness is obvious. In an already poor family, he slept in the small hallway outside the kitchen, listening to his parents arguing every day about bills and whether to send him to boarding school. His mother didn't care more about him than her new clothes and makeup, so he had to wear pajamas with holes and be yelled at every day to take out the trash. The stepfather seemed to care more about him than his mother, at least they would cook dinner together, and he could still think of whether to take him to summer camp, but when he knew he was truant, in front of the teacher and all his classmates, he "boom" "The ground slapped me with two slaps.
In fact, all the adults in this film, mothers, stepfathers, teachers, instructors in the reformatory, even the old people on the roadside and shameless thieves, are all vulgar, indifferent, disrespectful and rude. Antoine loves to write. He worshipped Balzac in the bookcase, but was scolded by his stepfather because of the fire, and he almost started. The teacher was always punishing him, and even if he used Balzac's essay, he was ordered to suspend the class. How adults ignore the delicate feelings of the young man, and the little pious love in this chaotic life is so brutally extinguished. A child who loved Balzac was sent to a reformatory.
One of Antoine's few happy moments, the first was when he was skipping class, sitting on a spinning wheel in the playground, and he felt dizzy and excited when the adults around the spinning wheel were blurred in the rapid rotation. The second time was when he was brought home after he left. His parents showed the rare tenderness to make up for him. His mother kept kissing him, helping him take a bath, letting him sleep on a comfortable big bed, and even letting him fall down. Garbage, will add a "baby". She coaxed him sweetly, albeit only to keep him from revealing her secret lover's secret. The third time, when he escaped from the reformatory, the famous long shot followed him running through the woods, through the grass, through the village, through the mountains, through the beach, and standing in the sea, and he looked back at the camera , I do not know whether the face is free or confused. He fantasized about dropping out of school to work in order to become an adult; however, now he has to break free from the constraints of adult society, but where does he go, where is there a life where adults interfere, where is a gentle world?
It is also a juvenile theme, which is different from the complex narrative in "Guling Street Teenage Murder Case" and the character changes of hot-blooded teenagers in white terror and gang life, and it is also different from "Dongdong's Holiday". Looking at it, "The Four Hundred Strikes" is like a cross-section of the history of youth's spiritual growth, simple and clear at a glance; it is also about the invasion of the adult society into the youth's life, and it is also full of sighs and helplessness, but it is not completely cruel, nor is it ignorant warmth. It is more like Truffaut's silent look back on his boyhood when he was rolling a cigarette, and his affectionate embrace of the boy who was free and alone by the sea.
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