We have so few portraits of innocence like that of Antoine Doniel, who in his inarticulate stare alone combined undigested emotional damage with a spirited will toward childish anarchy that no amount of stern punishment seems able to fully repress. With his neglectful parents, impatient teachers and paucity of friends, he’s essentially alone in the movie, receiving lasting consolation only from the camera, or mise-en-scène if you prefer, itself, which fixed so memorably, so dazzlingly, on his physiognomy in that famous final shot, freezing the child in time just as he wades out to sea, escaping from the accumulation of bad turns alluded to in the film’s marquee-ready title. He’s played by the remarkable Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got the part by answering an ad in the paper. He was 14 at the time, pretty young to make this kind of impression, but his director trumped him—he was only 27.
One of a remarkable triumvirate of movies that gave birth to the French New Wave, The 400 Blows (1959), the autobiographical feature debut of critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut, is creeping up on its 50th birthday, yet it possesses a freshness and sense of freedom that still radiates from the screen. The sentimentality that clung to certain later Truffaut's can be sniffed out—Jean Constantin’s lovely music emphasizes this—but here it feels appropriate. The experiences addressed are raw enough to render the movie nimble, and frequently fun. We root for the preservation of Antoine’s delinquency. We watch him pass through his rituals of truancy and mis-education, of familial obligation and alienation, of developing awareness of adult unhappiness and dread, and Rebel Without a Cause (55) seems like it must have been from another age, or maybe it would have felt more palpably real if they’d shaved a decade off its lead. Maybe the French simply knew how to get at a brutishness in youth that Hollywood naturally molded into melodrama. Brilliant melodrama, but melodrama nonetheless.
I saw both The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim (62), Truffaut’s third feature, when I was around 20. The former meant everything to me, while the latter struck me as more kooky or historically important than truly moving. When I see the films now my response is almost the reverse, with the former playing as still affecting if relatively less startling, and the latter revealing more depth and wisdom than its formal exuberance and inspired artifice initially promised. Both hit Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend in a Truffaut double-bill, so I guess comparison is inevitable, even between such heights. There’s a scene in Jules and Jim where the three central characters traipse through the wilderness playing a game which has them searching for the last signs of civilization. If given the choice between finding a copy of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim to carry with me through some post-civilized world, I’d have to go with Jules and Jim.
The source material comes from Henri-Pierre Roché, whose artistic flowering occurred at the opposite end of adulthood from Truffaut’s—he was 73 when he wrote Jules and Jim, his first novel. Like Truffaut’s first film, Roché’s debut was autobiographical, but its telescopic perspective, looking 50 years into the past, laces the events with a heady mix of vitality and nostalgia, partially because its able to regard suffering with sheer admiration for youthful folly. The story, which begins on the cusp of World War I, is only partly about the titular characters. Jules (Oskar Werner), a German, and Jim (Henri Serre), a Frenchman, meet and become nearly instant friends, inseparable, even dressing alike, forming something like a platonic marriage. They meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, whose extraordinary beauty was complicated by the darkness around her eyes that made her never seem exactly young), who enters the movie as a sort of magical creature, the living embodiment of an ancient sculpture the friends both adored. On their first afternoon adventure with Catherine she dresses in drag and Jim draws a moustache on her face. It is clear from the start who’ll wear the pants in this threesome.
Years later, after the friends fight on opposing sides in the war, Jules will marry Catherine and move to the country, while Jim tries to maintain an ostensibly bohemian bachelorhood. But the friends need to share everything, and when Catherine’s instability comes to wreak havoc on Jules’ quiet life the time comes for the romance between Catherine and Jim that always seemed inevitable. For a time the three live in uneasy harmony, in a house with many bedrooms and a daughter who takes her abundance of parents in stride. The actors are so beautifully cast that they make this chaotic equation, a prelude to the sexual inhibitions to come later in the decade, feel utterly natural. The movie is partly about Moreau’s siren-like, enigmatic allure, which it never dares to penetrate, and in fact needn’t. But it’s just as dependent on the friends’ unnerving sense of individual completion only through merging, something so well conveyed that by the time Jules it left alone in the world it’s impossible to imagine how he’ll go on. Maybe that’s why the movie ends so abruptly.
Truffaut’s recklessly inventive approach was a masterstroke. With a deliriously fragmentary editing strategy he careens through the story’s lengthy chronology at a galloping pace, while making constant stops to revel in epiphanies. He makes a clamorous parade of Thérèse (Marie Dubois) playing “steam engine” with her cigarette. He lets us luxuriate for the entirety of the song performed by Moreau and Boris Bassiak. He takes the reception of a letter as an opportunity to stage a strange, dreamlike sequence where Moreau’s face appears in the centre of a sweeping shot of a passing rural landscape. And he cuts through the frenetic with a voice-over that, juxtaposed against moments of stillness, reminds us how uncontainable the past can seem. In some ways it’s even more youthful and undisciplined than The 400 Blows, but its dizzying detours are so elegantly of a piece, a full expression of a very particular method of storytelling that makes a whipped-up jazz of life and finds an emotional truth in the very blur of things. It stops you in your tracks, hoists you up on the ride and sends you over the edge before you’ve caught your breath. A treasure.
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