A Sunday Afternoon for ‘The 400 Blows’
My first introduction to Francois Truffaut’s movies was with ‘Shoot the Piano Player’. But, my lack of cinematic intelligence prevented me from recognizing the masterpiece that it is, at least according to more learned people. I just felt the movie was too dialogue heavy and tries a little too hard to be of a shock value. If you are a bhakt of that movie, please accept my apologies, I don’t even remember the movie too well.
Thankfully I will not remember Truffaut with ‘Shoot the Piano Player’. After today, ‘The 400 Blows’ will be in my best movies list anytime. If you haven’t seen it yet, go get that DVD. It will simply blow (pun unintended) you away. The rest of this post will be a shameless attempt to convince you, dear reader, further.
Watch it for the musical experience.
The original music by Jean Constantin is used sparingly in the movie to the most haunting effect. If you are not left listening to it again and again long after the movie is over, believe me, you need a heart transplant. OK, fine, here it is, but really, you should experience it with the movie for the best effect. But maybe you have already seen it and your motivations might be nostalgic.
Watch it for the brilliant acting.
Jean-Pierre Léaud in his first role as Antoine Doinel, a twelve year old boy is magnificent as the protagonist who keeps getting into trouble and whose life goes from bad to worse. Truffaut places him at the center of almost every scene in the movie and you can’t but feel emotionally connected to the search for identity of this wayward and unfortunate young boy in the movie. The clip below starts with the scene which is probably one of the most famous and hard hitting scenes of the movie. Jean-Pierre reportedly improvised the answers that he gave in the scene based on some ideas which were given to him by Truffaut.
And don’t miss the special features.
The DVD that I watched it had two full length commentaries, interviews of Truffaut and Leaud, trailers and Cannes footage (The movie won the Best Director award for Truffaut in Cannes, 1959) and clips of auditions which were conducted for the leading role. All of them are quite enchanting. It took me five hours to go through all that material.
A Sunday afternoon well spent, don’t you think?
Tags: French cinema, Jean-Pierre Leaud, new wave, The 400 Blows, Truffaut
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
A sunday afternoon certainly well spent!
Thanks Indraneel! I was beginning to think I might achieve a first for PFC- a post without a single comment! :p
@dazedandconfused: hehehehe…i hold tat dubious record already, of not having a single comment
in one of my posts
u wud have equalled it, if at all.
now u have 3 comments…none of which add value to the post as such
i know how it feels :(
rals- which post was that? Let me know. Such injustice shall not be allowed!
wow you are making me feel bad for not liking 400 blows that much. i thought it was average.