“Le Samourai” - Jean-Pierre Melville (1967)

The term “film noir” was originally coined by French film critics to refer to Hollywood B-grade films of the 1930s and 1940s that concerned stories of shady characters in a dark, gloomy, and corrupt urban environment.  But the true mastery of the film noir form came later, with the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose Le Samourai (1970) has become famous as perhaps the extreme, quintessential expression of the genre. Accordingly, the film’s renown led British film magazine Empire to rank the film 39th on its list of "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" (i.e. non-English-language films) [1].

Melville (nee Grumbach) was a self-made auteur who imbibed much of his craft by watching countless Hollywood films in his youth.  After serving in the French Resistance and the French military during World War II, he determinedly launched his film career by seeking independent funding on his own and even starting his own film production company [2].  From the outset his films were atmospheric, and he had early successes like Le Silence de la Mer (1949) and Les Enfants Terribles (1950); but his first full-fledged film noir was not until Le Doulos (1963).  From there on he was a hardcore “noir” filmmaker.

I have remarked that films noir characteristically encompass three basic characterological themes [3]:

• Fatalism
  The key characters have pasts that they would like to forget and little hope for the future. In addition, the deck seems to be stacked against them, and the world is full of traps and unanticipated disasters at every turn.
     
• Truth  
  The world is dark and obscure, and the truth is always elusive. At every turn, there is someone ready to double-cross you, and the police are as untrustworthy as the gangsters.
   
• Loyalty  
  Because everyone, including the cops, are liars, there is a heavy demand to find someone who can be trusted – and then to remain loyal to that rare person. This leads to a professional code, the “honor among thieves”, which places life-threatening demands of loyalty on the trusted partners in the story.

In Le Samourai these three notions are particularly dominant and take precedence over basic narrative concerns of realism and motivation.  The story is about an underworld hit man, Jef Costello (played by Melville favorite Alain Delon), and his surreal world of isolation and violence.  This is no ordinary gangster thug; Costello is the ultimate icy smooth professional, and the murder he is contracted to commit in this story is for a fee of 2 million francs [4].  But we become fascinated following this severely isolated and seemingly soulless individual.  He is the ultimate loner trying to make his way in a hostile environment.  Indeed at the beginning of the film, there is a displayed title that is purported to be a quotation from the Bushido code of the samurai (but actually a Melville fabrication):

“There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, . . .
. . . unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle.”

Costello is the samurai and his world is dark and dank – everything seems to happen at night in his world.  This is not gritty realism; it is an abstract expressionistic nightmare more along the lines of such noirish cartoons as Batman: The Animated Series (1992-95). Crucial to this evocation of expressionistic gloom is the cinematography of Henri Decaë, who masterfully contributed to a number of outstanding films, including several directed by Melville, during this general period – notably: Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1958); Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins (1959); Francois Truffaut’s, The Four Hundred Blows (1959); René Clément’a Purple Noon (1960); Serge Bourguignon’s Sundays and Cybele (1962); and Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles (1950), Bob le Flambeur, (1955), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970).  The atmospheric cinematography of Decaë does not slow down the relentless pace, however, thanks to the smooth cutting-on-action editing of Monique Bonnot and Yolande Maurette.

The story of Le Samourai, which is thought to have been inspired by Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942), progresses through five phases.

1.   The Contracted Killing
The film opens without dialogue for the fist nine minutes.  In an opening long shot, Jef Costello is lying fully clothed on his bed in his bare and dismal apartment and contemplatively smoking a cigarette.  The only sounds to be heard are the chirpings of his caged bird.  Costello then gets up and puts on what will be his signature attire, a white trench coat and a fedora, and goes out onto the street. Finding a parked Citroen that is unlocked, Costello gets in, takes out his large key ring with dozens of keys on it and quietly begins trying them in the ignition.  One of the keys works, and Costello drives off in the stolen car.  All the while Costello is in full view, but his expressionless countenance doesn’t attract attention.  Then he goes to a garage in a nondescript Parisian banlieue and wordlessly arranges with an underworld associate to purchase a gun and get a new license plate for the stolen car. 

Costello now starts making arrangements for his alibi.  He first visits his girlfriend Janine Lagrange (played by the extraordinarily beautiful Nathalie Delon, who was Alain Delon’s wife at the time). When he learns that she will be hosting her usual “customer” at 2 am, Costello then goes to visit some shady friends involved in an all-night poker game, so that he can secure his alibi for the rest of the night.  (Why Costello needed this second alibi was never clear to me.)

Costello next goes to Martey’s nightclub, where a beautiful jazz pianist, Valerie (played by West Indian Caty Rosier), is playing on stage.  Donning white gloves (to conceal fingerprints), he quietly goes to a backroom and ruthlessly murders the proprietor.  But as he is leaving Martey’s room, he runs into Valerie, and they exchange momentary glances.  So Valerie may become a key witness in connection with the later criminal investigation.  Then Costello goes out and dumps the gun and his gloves off a bridge and into the river.  Finally, he calmly returns to his alibi sites to cover himself.  All the while Costello has shown no emotion and barely said a word.

2.  The Police Investigate

Now the focalization shifts to the police investigation, which is led by police commissioner (“Le Commissaire”, played by Francois Perier).  In contrast to the solitary, existentialist sphere of Costello, the police counterforce is depicted as a vast, messy machine with almost unlimited resources.  The Commissaire orders the police to roundup 20 suspects from each of the city’s 20 precincts for a lineup.  And he is willing to compromise any principles in order to get things done.  As he tells Janine Lagrange when he is interrogating her at one point,

    “The truth is not what you say. It’s what I say. Whatever the methods I use to get it.”

But Janine is utterly loyal to Jef and stands by his alibi, which proves to be airtight. (This shows Janine  to be an ideal partner for a film-noir protagonist.) And, mysteriously, Valerie does not identify Costello during the police lineup, either.  The Commissaire still suspects Jef, though, and he orders the police to tail him wherever he goes.  They also go to Jef’s apartment while he is out and install a hidden radio bug.

3.  Betrayal
Costello goes to an arranged remote location to collect his payment for the murder from a criminal “syndicate” agent.  But he is double-crossed when the agent tries to kill him.  Costello is wounded and barely gets away.  The syndicate boss, Olivier Rey, is later shown telling his colleagues that now that Costello has become a police suspect, he is a liability to their organization.  So it is now clear that he is being hunted by two ruthless forces – both the police and the syndicate.

4.  Closing In

Costello still doesn’t know why the syndicate betrayed him, but he suspects the jazz pianist, Valerie, may hold the clue.  The few meaningful gazes they have exchanged with each other up to now have seemed to connect the two in some sort of mysterious affinity. Is it love? We don’t know, and probably those two don’t, either.  Jef now tracks down Valerie, and they go to her luxurious apartment to have a guarded conversation.  She tells him she will give him more information in a couple of hours.

Shortly thereafter, though, the same syndicate agent who almost killed him barges into Costello’s apartment and offers him another 2 million francs to carry out another murder.  Now things have become even more complicated.  Why the change of heart on the part of the syndicate? We don’t know yet who the targeted victim is, but apparently Costello now does.  So far, though, he has not known who his underworld contractors are. So he strong-arms the syndicate agent to learn the identity and location of the syndicate agent’s boss, Olivier Rey.

But the police are tracking Costello closely, with the Commissaire ordering 50 men and 20 auxiliaries to tail him.  Costello is aware of this surveillance, and there follows an extended cat-and-mouse chase on the Paris metro system as he tries to get clear of them.  He does just manage to elude them all, then steals another Citroen in his usual fashion, and gets ready to carry out his next contract.

5.  The Finish

Costello first goes to Olivier Rey’s apartment, which we (and presumably Costello) are surprised to see is the same place where he had conversed with Valerie.  When Costello sees Rey, he quickly shoots him dead.  Then he goes to Martey’s nightclub, where there is another surprise in store for us.  Costello’s murder target this time is Valerie. Wearing his white assassin’s gloves, he walks up to her piano, and again they exchange emotional gazes.  She urges him not to stay, but he mournfully pulls out his gun and says, “I was paid to. . .” 

Before Costello can do anything, though, there is a hail of bullets from a police ambush behind the curtains, and he is killed.  When they examine Costello’s gun at the end, they find that it was not loaded.  His last gesture was apparently an act of suicide.


There are a number of things that we never know in this story.  What were the syndicate’s motivations?  What was Valerie’s involvement with the syndicate?  Was she ultimately colluding with the police?  And what was the connection between Jef Costello and Valerie?  And, of course, what was behind Jef’s final actions?  These are mysteries that are unknown to us and probably mostly unknown to Costello, too.

What we are left with is the bleak loneliness of the film-noir samurai.  This is powerfully conveyed throughout the film by a number of metaphorical elements which seem to have an emotive significance beyond our schematic explanations:

• The chirping bird in the cage. The mournful vitality of the bird has a haunting feel to it. It may suggest entrapment, but also hidden secrets yet to be unveiled.
   
• Enclosure.  Throughout this story Jef Costello is faced with a threatening world closing in on him, such as when he is closely tracked by police spies all through the metro system, for example. The police machine is seemingly boundless and soulless.  (This metaphorical presentation of a seemingly helpless fugitive in flight from a massively resourced police machine was repeated in Melville's Le Cercle Rouge.)
   
• Jef’s attire.  His fedora, trench coat, and white gloves are always carefully donned, as if they are a crucial part of his persona.  Indeed there is something absurd about this, since this “uniform” would make him more identifiable to the authorities.  This attire, though,  perhaps represents to him the mark of his samurai-like code of conduct. 
   
• The gazes of Jef and Valerie.  Although we might think of this film’s material as concerned with extreme masculine discipline, both Jef and Valerie are androgynous figures.  Valerie, for instance, has short hair and an innocent boyish look.  Delon, whose androgynous good looks have always felt a little sinister to me, in this film also has an innocent look to him (even though we see he is a killer).  When we as viewers look at each of these two figures, we are drawn to seek empathy with them, even though we are given no information about their backgrounds, goals, or concerns.  This makes them even more fascinating to look at.  The whole effect is magnified when the two of them gaze at each other.  Indeed Valerie is one of the only people in this film whom Jef looks in the eye. Melville’s extended treatment in this film of the gaze, which is recognized by phenomenological philosophers as an essential instrument of self-consciousness [5], is one of the most aesthetically significant and interesting aspects of this film.

Thus because of these various considerations, Le Samourai stands as a great film.  It is not my favorite Melville film noir; his subsequent Le Cercle Rouge is.  But Le Samourai remains as one of the ultimate explorations of the film noir genre.
★★★★

Notes:

1. "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema", Empire, Bauer Media Group, (11 June 2010). 
2.  World Film Directors, V. II., John Wakeman (ed.),  H.W. Wilson Co., NY 1988, quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Conversations About Great Films: Jean-Pierre Melville Le Samourai 1967”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XIII:6), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (10 October 2006).   
3. The Film Sufi, “‘Le Doulos’ - Jean-Pierre Melville (1963)”, The Film Sufi, (27 February 2009).  
4. I would estimate this to be about US$ 30,000 in today’s currency. 
5. Shaun Gallagher, “Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (24 December 2014).

“Sundays and Cybele” - Serge Bourguignon (1962)

Although the ultimate nature of love is unfathomable (at least within the terms used by our modernist perspective), it does seem somehow connected to the quintessential mystery of human existence – who are we?  How can we solve this mystery?  Logic and modernist philosophy fail us here [1], so we must turn to the arts to explore this crucial area of love and being.  And within the compass of the artistic realm, the most narratively expressive art form available to undertake this exploration is the cinema.  And so far, to me, the greatest ever cinematic expression of love’s mysterious character has been the French film Sundays and Cybele (Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray, 1962).  This is not just a magical film; it is a magnificent monument to human expression.  The film won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1963 [2], but its greatness extends far beyond that specific category.

The film’s story is about a traumatized young war veteran who befriends an 11-year-old orphan girl, and it recounts their ensuing relationship.  It is based on the novel Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray by Bernard Eschassériaux (1959), but 33-year-old director Serge Bourguignon, for whom this was his first feature, introduced some crucial alterations that I think greatly enhanced the story told.  In fact the film’s script by Bourguignon and Antoine Tudal received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay [3].

Bourguignon had already gained international attention with his documentary about a Buddhist monk, Le Sourire (The Smile), which had won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.  Here on the occasion of making Sundays and Cybele, Bourguignon was greatly assisted by the contributions of gifted cinematographer Henri Decaë (Les Enfants Terribles, 1950; The 400 Blows, 1959; Les Cousins, 1959; Le Samouraï, 1967; and Le Cercle Rouge 1970) and famed musical composer Maurice Jarre.  In fact, although Jarre won US Oscars for his film scores for both Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), I feel that his moody musical score here for Sundays and Cybele (which was also nominated for an Oscar [3]) was his best work.

In addition to the excellent technical contributions behind the camera, the film benefited from outstanding performances in front of the camera, particularly on the part of the three principal players: Hardy Krüger, Patricia Gozzi, and Nicole Courcel.  Nevertheless and despite the enthusiasm with which the film was received overseas, the response to the film in France was more muted.  This was apparently partly because Bourguignon, although youthful and loosely classified as part of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), was considered to be an outsider by the critical clique at the influential journal Cahiers du Cinema, which comprised a number of new and aspirant filmmakers in competition with Bourguignon [4,5].

The main theme of the film concerns love and how it defines us.  Of course the world ‘love’ has many interpretations and comes in many guises connected with varying contexts.  This can include motherly and filial love, sexual love, brotherly love, and agape (the love God has for humankind).  But Sundays and Cybele concerns the very essence of the feeling of true love – that soul-immersing encounter when one feels a dissolution of any separation from one’s beloved.  Lustful physical pleasure is not intrinsically part of this.  The film places this experience in a poetic context that enables the viewer to see it, and feel it, from multiple perspectives.

In this respect there are two main world-view perspectives evoked in the film:

• Ego-Analytical. 
  This is the rational and logical world-view that is comprised by our modernist culture.  Of course, there are many variants to this, but they mostly advocate objective and evidence-based rational decision-making.  The rational observer sets him- or herself apart from what is observed and seeks to make sense of the world from an outside perspective.
   
• Natural-Organic.
  This is a more primitive and primordial perspectival way that sees oneself as intrinsically embedded in nature.  One must, as Martin Heidegger counseled, use hermeneutics to find “pathways through the woods” of our experiential worlds.  But we, and others, are essential and inextricable parts of this natural world.  It is a world of narratives that truly constitutes our existence.

The story of Sundays and Cybele passes through the four narrative phases as its tale is told.

1.  Pierre Meets Françoise. 
In the opening scene, which is presumably a psychological flashback, Pierre (played by Hardy Krüger) is piloting a warplane over Viet Nam in the French Indochina War.  As he strafes a local village, he sees a young local girl in his gunsight just before his plane crashes to the ground.  We will later learn through narrative technique of slow disclosure that Pierre was found half-dead by rescuers and taken to a hospital, where he kept babbling, “Did I kill her?”. 

The scene now shifts to a suburb of Paris, Ville-d’Avray, where Pierre lives with the nurse he had met in the hospital and who is now his girlfriend. Although Pierre has physically recovered from his injuries, he suffers from amnesia – presumably brought about by the anguish he felt in likely killing the young village girl.  He now doesn’t know his past or even who he is.  In Eschassériaux’s original novel, the Pierre character was a hardened gangster and not a traumatized war veteran.  I think Bourguignon’s shifted picture of Pierre is crucial to our empathizing with Pierre’s character and is a profound enhancement to the story.

One wintry evening while idling at the local train station, Pierre is disturbed to see a young girl  (Patricia Gozzi) crying while quarreling with her father.  Pierre tries to cheer her up and is charmed by the girl’s infectious smile.  Fascinated, Pierre follows the father and girl to a Roman Catholic convent, where the father dumps her in the convent’s orphanage.  Then the father runs away and disappears from the story.

Then Pierre is shown with his loving and supportive girlfriend, the nurse Madeleine (Nicole Courcel), discussing his amnesia.  Pierre also spends therapeutic time helping out a local artistic sculptor Carlos (Daniel Ivernel).  Carlos reminds Pierre that it is good for him to spend time around trees.  Pierre acknowledges that the trees are good, but that when he looks up at trees,  he experiences vertigo, a vestige of his traumatic experience in the war.  Carlos reassures him that “the day you stop getting vertigo you will be cured.”

Since Madeleine is currently assigned hospital work on Sundays, Pierre goes the next Sunday, without telling Madeleine, to look in on the young girl at the orphanage.  There he is mistakenly assumed to be the girl’s father and permitted to take her outside.  He takes her back to Madeleine’s apartment, where the girl relates to him how both of her parents have now abandoned her.  The girl is known as Francoise at the convent, but that is not her real name, which she keeps a secret.  But she impishly promises to reveal to him her true name if he would get the metal cock atop the nearby gothic cathedral steeple and give it to her.  Francoise wants Pierre to adopt her, but he tells her that would be impossible.  So she settles for his promise to come visit her every Sunday.

At this point with most of the principal characters introduced, it is appropriate to consider how they fit into the film’s thematic content with respect to the two main world-view perspectives mentioned earlier.  Let me assure you that the film is not so schematic as the following characterizations might suggest, and I offer them here only to support a deeper understanding of what transpires.

• Francoise
  Her real name, which is only revealed towards the end of the story, is Cybele, and this is symbolically important for the story.  The name Cybele refers to an ancient (and hence pre-Christian) Greek and Anatolian mother goddess.  She is the goddess of mountains, trees, earth, and fertile nature and hence symbolizes the Organic-Nature perspective mentioned above [6].  Our Francoise/Cybele in this story embodies in her own innocent way that perspective, too.
   
• Pierre 
  With his amnesia wiping out his Ego-Analytical memories of his past and who he was, he is now like an innocent child starting out all over in life.  He is ready to be captivated by Francois/Cybele’s Organic-Nature engagement with the world around her.
   
• Carlos 
  His artistic engagement with the natural world enables him to see things from the Organic-Nature perspective.  He counsels others to let Pierre find his own pathway through the natural woods.
   
• Madeleine 
  With her medical profession background, she is used to seeing things from the Ego-Analytical perspective.  But her sincere, loving nature places her on the fence and open to the possibilities of the Organic-Nature perspective when she discusses things with Carlos.
   
  
• Bernard (Andre Oumansky)
  He is introduced later and shown to be a doctor in the hospital and with amorous intentions towards Madeleine.  He is emphatically categorical and the supreme representative of the Ego-Analytical mode.
   
• Carmela (Bibiane Stern)
  She is Carlos’s briefly-seen wife and is also strictly Ego-Analytical.

2.  Meetings on Sundays  

In this section the relationship between Pierre and Francoise develops when he starts regularly taking the girl out on Sundays.  He takes her out on to the town lake where they sometimes visit an abandoned gazebo and explore their fantasies.  The two innocent souls are gradually enthralled with each other, but there is no trace of sexual attraction.  They are in their own world of imagination.  In fact Francoise frequently entreats Pierre to toss a stone into the still waters in front of them, which creates circular ripples that distort their reflected image.  When they gaze at their reflection enframed by the circular ripples, Francoise tells him, “now we are home”. 

But there are also sometimes little pouts that arise from Pierre’s occasional feelings of jealousy.  On one occasion Francoise admires a handsome rider on horseback, which disturbs Pierre.  On another occasion Francoise is playing with some children her own age and one of the boys roughhouses her a little.  This causes Pierre to smack the boy harshly, causing Francoise to look on in horror. 

But she overcomes her misgivings and takes comfort in the fact that he loves her.  And she swears that she loves him, too.  She tells him that she is almost twelve, and when she reaches the age of eighteen, she will marry him.  After they make up, she asks him to carry her through the woods, while she sings a love song to him.  She also tells him about her romantic dream of spending Christmas with him.  Despite all these romantic gestures, their love is completely innocent, without any elements of sensuality.

All the scenes showing Pierre and Francoise together in the woods are beautifully filmed, with  Decaë’s camera compositions often including distant shots of the two of them embedded in the natural sylvan environment.  Indeed it was apparently Bourguignon’s and Decaë’s intention here to evoke the black-and-white imagery of old Japanese woodblock prints with their cinematography [7].  This is a further visual conjuring of the Organic-Nature perspective, and it is enhanced by Jarre’s haunting background music that adds an interiority to what is shown.

3.  Madeleine’s Concerns       

Unbeknownst to Pierre, Madeleine arranges to take the next Sunday off so that the two of them can attend a luncheon together at the lakeside café with some other couples, including Dr. Bernard. Pierre learns about this at the last minute and is disturbed, because it is too late for him to inform Francoise that he can’t meet her.  At the luncheon, Pierre is distracted and can think only about Francoise.  At one point he looks out of the café window across the lake and mistakenly thinks he sees Francoise with the handsome horseback rider (it turns out to be another woman with a cap similar to Francoise’s).  All the while, Madeleine is lovingly attentive and tries to mollify her frowning boyfriend.

Afterwards they all stop at an amusement park where Pierre visits a gypsy fortune teller.  While the woman is not looking, he steals an African sorcerer’s dagger the likes of which Francoise had once described to him.

Then the group get into amusement park bumper cars, and each couple gets into a separate car. But the ensuing jousting chaos only elicits another vertigo attack for Pierre.  To make things worse, he spots Francoise among the onlookers watching the bumper cars just as Madeleine leans over and kisses him.  In a panic, Pierre smacks Madeleine and jumps out of the car.  This generates a chaotic brawl, and the luncheon party friends just manage to escape to their car and get away.

All this spawns Madeleine’s doubts about Pierre.  She finally realizes that Pierre has been secretly spending his Sundays with Francoise, and she discusses her concerns with Carlos.  Carlos assures her that Pierre is just innocently finding his inner self with Francoise.  But Carlos’s wife Carmela hatefully says that Pierre is a pedophile.  So Madeleine decides to investigate things herself, but following Carlos’s urgings, she doesn’t confront Pierre directly about Francoise.  She truly loves Pierre and wants somehow to win his confidence.

The next Sunday Madeleine skips going to the hospital so that she can secretly follow Pierre with Francoise.  She watches the two of them playing together by the lakeside. When from a distance she first sees Pierre holding the sorcerer’s dagger, she is alarmed, but she soon sees that it is just a game for them.  In accordance with the African legend, they stick the dagger into a tree trunk in order to listen to the mysteries of the tree spirits.  As she watches them play together further, she becomes convinced of the essential innocence of their relationship.

4.  Christmas Denouement
But can the innocent dreamworld of Pierre and Francoise continue?  Christmas is coming, and Pierre wants to make Francoise’s romantic dreams come true.  He takes Francoise to the lakeside café, where Francoise confidently orders two grenadines (non-alcoholic).  When the waiter frowns, she smoothly switches her order to two hot toddies (alcoholic).  Then Francoise again promises to tell Pierre her real name when he gives her the church steeple cock.

This idea of Francoise’s real name, Cybele, is important.  It represents her innermost self, which she wants to share only with her beloved.  She knows who she really is – Cybele.  And Pierre is discovering who he really is, too. 

The climactic ending is too dramatic to describe here.  Cybele does finally reveal her true name to Pierre.  And Pierre does go to the top of the church steeple, where he dismounts the steeple cock and, despite the vertiginous height, discovers that his vertigo has finally vanished. He is finally cured and has at last found himself. But the forces of Ego-Analytical coercion led by Bernard are working against the two innocent dreamers.   Tragedy is in the making.

Note that when it comes to understanding who we are, it is not a matter of understanding some structure with identified properties and capabilities.  That is the Ego-Analytical way of looking at things.  It is more a matter of understanding ourselves as multiple narratives-in-the-making.  This necessarily entails the Organic-Nature perspective and our responding to the opportunities of immersive engagement with the beloved other.  When we do find ourselves in love, our horizons open up to new and wondrous narrative possibilities, new pathways through the woods, in unified collaboration with our respective beloved ones.

It is the glimpse of this mesmerizing wonder of love that Sundays and Cybele and the transcendent performance of Patricia Gozzi, as Francoise/Cybele, give us.  You must see this film.
★★★★ 

Notes:

1. For a lucid discussion of modern philosophy’s shortcomings and inability to account for human conscious experience, see
• Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, (2012).
2. “35th Academy Awards”, Wikipedia, (27 August 2017).    
3. “36th Academy Awards”, Wikipedia, (8 August 2017).   
4. Ginette Vincendeau, “Sundays and Cybèle: Innocent Love?”, The Criterion Collection, (1 October 2014).   
5. Clayton Dillard, “Sundays and Cybèle”, Slant Magazine, (28 September 2014).   
6. “Cybele”, Wikipedia, (15 August 2017).   
7. Interview with Hardy Kruger, “Sundays and Cybele”, The Criterion Collection, (September 2014). 

“Les Enfants Terribles” - Jean-Pierre Melville (1950)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s second feature film, Les Enfants Terribles (1950), came well before his dazzling string of films noir that established him as that genre’s consummate master.  In addition, despite Melville’s consciously developed auteur status, this film’s auteurship is often principally credited to co-scriptwriter Jean Cocteau.  Perhaps because of these considerations, Les Enfants Terribles is often set aside from Melville’s other work and not listed as one of his masterpieces.  This I think is a mistake, and I believe the critical arguments concerning over who was the major contributor and whether this film was specifically an early herald of the French New Wave are only distracting [1].  Of course it is natural to attribute principal authorship to Cocteau, since the film’s story is based on his sensational novel, Les Enfants Terribles (1929), that was a landmark for the early 20th century French avant-garde. But Melville’s unique stylistic contributions were undoubtedly crucial to the film’s entrancing appeal [2]. 

Cocteau, whose work spanned a range of arts including writing, design, art, and filmmaking, was a superstar in French culture.  He seemed to have had close relations with all the major cultural figures during the first half of the 20th century [3].  And his flamboyant lifestyle added to his already considerable notoriety.  Evidently after seeing Melville’s first feature film, Le Silence de la Mer (1949), Cocteau decided to invite Melville to make a film out of his own famous novel rather than direct the work, himself.  It was a good decision.  Melville’s moody, expressionistic mise-en-scene blended well with Cocteau’s more abstract and outrageous declarations in his story.

The subject matter of Les Enfants Terribles concerns two young Parisian siblings who live alone and have mostly withdrawn from the world around them into their own private dreamworld. Some people may dismiss the whole tale as a depiction of two narcissistic misfits whose self-obsessions  are unworthy of our attention.  But there are aspects of this story and the way it is presented that have wider connotations and perspectives; and they draw us in.

For one thing, the story concerns how people, but especially young people, form their understandings of themselves by imagining the roles they might play in social narratives.  The principal character, Elisabeth, wants to embed herself in fantastic, self-constructed dramatic narratives in which she is a major protagonist.  Her constant collaborator in these little psychodramas is her younger brother, Paul.  So Elisabeth and Paul prefer their dramatic pseudo-narratives over the humdrum narratives of the external world, because they offer them more dramatic roles to play.

The problem is that when people fabricate narratives, they do so because they are insecure about exposing their inner selves to the outside world.  In their fantasy worlds, they are safer.  But even in those worlds, they need ways to melodramatize their stories in order to make things interesting.  In this respect there are two main emotional directions:

• Love – this can be expressed when one is open and unguarded, when one is willing to expose one’s inner self.  But this can only be expressed if the feeling is not a forbidden love, i.e. a love that is not acceptable to the society at large.
   
• Hate – this can be expressed by the fearful and guarded. 

Both Elisabeth and Paul have forbidden loves, and so they confine their mini-stories, which they call instances of “the game”, to those of resentment and hate.

In truth, the feeling of love is a new and astonishing emotion for all young people, and they probably experience the feeling of forbidden loves much more often than our public society is willing to acknowledge.  In Les Enfants Terribles, there are five principal characters, and they all have feelings of love that they are reluctant to express.

• Elisabeth (played by Nicole Stéphane) is the older sibling.  She has an incestuous passion for her younger brother, Paul.
• Paul (Edouard Dermithe), Elisabeth’s brother, has a homosexual passion for his schoolmate Dargelos.
• Dargelos (Renée Cosima), Paul’s androgynous and ruthless friend, may have unexpressed feelings for Paul.
• Agathe (Renée Cosima), Elisabeth’s friend, has a secret passion for Paul.
• Gerard (Jacques Bernard) has an unexpressed love for Elisabeth.

Forbidden love was a subject very much on the table for the makers of this film, too.  Cocteau was a flamboyant bisexual: Dargelos was the name of one of Cocteau’s boyhood passions, and the name frequently appears in Cocteau’s works.  Edouard Dermithe was Cocteau’s lover at the time of this film’s making [1].  Nicole Stéphane had affairs with women. And Melville always had an ambiguous profile in this area, as well.

The story of Les Enfants Terribles moves through thee major acts.

1.  Elisabeth, Paul, and Gerard

In the opening scene, there is a schoolyard snowball fight in which Paul is seriously injured by a snowball thrown at him by Dargelos.  Paul’s friend Gerard takes him home to his apartment, where his sister Elisabeth is angry to learn that she now has to look after both Paul and their ill mother.  A doctor arrives and after diagnosing Paul with a weak heart, orders him to stay home from school for the time being.  That is fine with Elisabeth, because her main interest is to play “the game”, their fantasy dramas in which the two siblings express feigned resentment towards each other.  They call this “getting lost” in the game.  They also like to collect and keep in their “treasure chest” some weird, useless artifacts that have meaning only for their pseudo-narrative contexts. Watching them eagerly in all this is the solicitous Gerard, who is usually dismissed or scorned by Elisabeth but is still sometimes a prop in their games.

During one of their rowdy dramas, Paul and Elisabeth happen to run into their sick mother’s room and discover that she has just passed away.  Their mother’s death doesn’t evoke much emotion from the two of them, and it seems to be just another narrative event to add color to their lives.

Incidentally, the doctor, along with all the other adults in this story, represents good-tempered responsibility and support.  These are the kind of people who comfortably fit in well with the existing mature social framework. The doctor and Gerard’s obliging rich uncle arrange for them all to take a trip to the seaside.  There the young people engage in more impudent naughtiness for its own sake, like stealing worthless (to them) objects from a local store or antagonizing small children.

When they return to Paris, Elisabeth, now freed from looking after her mother, decides to get a job as a model at a couturier studio.

By this point in the story, it is already evident that Gerard secretly loves Elisabeth, and Elisabeth secretly loves her brother Paul.

2.  Agathe Enters the Picture
At the fashion studio Elisabeth befriends fellow model Agathe and invites the girl to come live in her apartment.  Upon meeting Agathe, Paul is disturbed to see how much the young woman looks like his schoolboy crush, Dargelos – (Melville having achieved this striking resemblance by casting Renée Cosima in both roles).  And so Paul displays hostility towards Agathe. 

Elisabeth’s modeling activities lead her to meet a wealthy young American, Michael (Melvyn Martin).  (The actor Melvyn Martin, by the way, was an American singer, and he composed the music and lyrics for the romantic song he sings to Elisabeth in the film [4].)  In no time at all Michael proposes to and marries Elisabeth, and then he dies in a road accident the day after their wedding.  Again, Elisabeth seems not to be very emotionally moved by the loss of her husband, and is more affected by the sudden dramatic change in her lifestyle and thus her life narrative.  She is now a wealthy widow and owner of an 18-room mansion. 

With rooms to spare, Elisabeth invites Paul, Gerard, and Agathe to come and live together with her in her mansion.  But soon her new wealth has become boring to her.  She confesses to Paul that she finds the freedom of being rich leaving her in an empty void.  She longs for the confinement and involvement of “getting lost” in their gameplay.  That opportunity will soon arise.

3.  Endplay

In the final act everything comes to a head.  Paul reveals to Elisabeth that he has overcome his loss of Dargelos and has fallen in love with Agathe.  Soon Agathe also confides to Elisabeth that she secretly loves Paul, but that he is scornful of her.  Now Elisabeth has a serious problem: her own love for Paul is jeopardized by Agathe, and so too is her life of game playing with Paul.  So she takes action by spreading a series of lies, which are her own desperately contrived pseudo-narratives:

• She convinces Paul that Agathe actually loves Gerard.
• She convinces Gerard that Agathe loves him.
• She then convinces Agathe that Gerard loves her and wants to marry her.

Disturbed by what she has just done, Elisabeth looks at her hands with horror and tries to wash them – reminiscent of the “Out, damned spot” scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth.  But she wants Paul all to herself.

Gerard and Agathe, fooled by Elisabeth’s lies, settle for each other, and they are soon married and off on a honeymoon.  When they return, Gerard reports to Paul that on their trip he ran into Dargelos, who now works for a car company and travels a lot.  Gerard reports further that Dargelos, remembering that he and Paul used to share a fascination with poison, gave some exotic poison he had acquired to Gerard to give to Paul.  Paul, though still grieving over his loss of Agathe, momentarily likes the gift, and Elisabeth adds it to their “treasure chest.”

The viewer can see where this is headed. Elisabeth’s nightmare of Paul’s death soon becomes a reality.  Just before his death and finally knowing the truth of Elisabeth’s wicked machinations, Paul calls his sister a monster.  She tells him simply that she didn’t want to lose him.  And then she offers her final cryptic explanation of her own self-destructiveness:

“I have to make life unbearable, make it sick of me. I have to make the game despise me. . .”

What elevates Les Enfants Terribles above the level of mindless solipsism is the way it explores and reveals, in admittedly exaggerated form, a fundamental problem that we all face: the search for authentic involvement with life.  We abhor getting bogged down in the boring routines of the everyday, so we withdraw from those potential involvements in search of something more meaningful.  And our exposure to culture brings to our attention the possibilities of our being involved in wonderful and exciting narratives. So we withdraw from the everyday and become isolated.

This is the paradox.  Elisabeth and Paul were educated, but their education led them to their isolation. And this is what is happening today. Although the paradoxical isolating process may have been accelerated with the advent of television, it seems to be even more magnified in the modern era of social media.  These media are supposed to connect everyone, but instead we see many people withdrawing into their pseudo-narrative shells.  And, as I mentioned earlier, for those who are guarded and worried about losing their exciting-narrative opportunities, the pseudo-narratives they most easily construct are based on hatred and resentment.  Thus we now have the quasi-fascist Alt-right grouping in the US that spreads its resentment-filled pseudo-narratives via social media and fake news stories.  This leads to segregation and mutual hostility, and it can also lead to people politically supporting bigoted demagogues whose simplistic pseudo-narratives cannot possibly accommodate the diversity that feeds a fruitful society.

We need better social media that do not to keep us individually looking into “the cloud”, but instead help bring about more, and more meaningful, face-to-face interactions.

Telling a tale such as this is not easy.  There is the fundamental difficulty here of presenting an authentic drama (which inherently must be conveyed by role-playing) that is fundamentally about the dangers and false seductions of role-playing.  We must have actors and a film director who can realistically present someone who is staging false theatrics and accomplish this by means of believable staged theatrics.  In this respect I would say that Nicole Stéphane (in the role of Elisabeth) and Jean-Pierre Melville both succeeded brilliantly.  Stéphane’s acting is one of the most entrancing screen performances I have seen. 

The film acting was effectively combined with three other key elements of the production to maintain a sense of affective interiority.  Jean Cocteau’s voiceover narration sustained a level of reflective commentary on what happened.  The nondiegetic music, featuring Bach’s “Concerto for Four Pianos” and Vivaldi’s “Concerto Grosso”, also cast an inward-directed mood over the film.  And Melville’s atmospheric and dynamic expressionism – using variously (a) moody high- and low-angle shots, (b) contextually evocative tracking shots, and (c) dramatically appropriate camera-facing closeups – is beautifully implemented by cinematographer  Henri Decaë.  It all works perfectly to convey the feelings of narrative desperation.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Gary Indiana, “Les enfants terribles: Hazards of a Snowball Fight”, The Criterion Collection, (9 July 2007).   
2. Neel Chaudhuri, “Into the Realms of Light and Darkness: Les Enfants terribles”,  Cinémathèque Annotations on Film, Issue 39, Senses of Cinema, (5 May 2006).  
3. Kevin Jackson, “Enfant Terrible, Jean Cocteau: A Life By Claude Arnaud”, Literary Review, (6 December 2016).   
4. Variety Staff, “Review: ‘Les Enfants Terribles’”, Variety, (31 December 1949).   

“Le Cercle Rouge” - Jean-Pierre Melville (1970)

Film noir master Jean-Pierre Melville’s penultimate film, Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle, 1970), was perhaps his greatest and most satisfying work.  One of the reasons for this is that, even with the always grim film-noir outlook notwithstanding, the film cast a relatively more positive light on its principal characters.

Of course like all the hard-core films noir, as I have discussed in my reviews of Melville’s Le Doulos and other films [1], the viewer doesn’t really get to know much about the main characters in these stories. There are no backstories concerning these characters.  All we know about then is that they are lone outsiders whose desperate lives are dominated by

• Fatalism – they have no long-term goals and only seek an escape from their current desperate circumstsance
• Truth – the world is dark and deceptive, with many people ready. to doublecross you.
• Loyalty – the greatest virtue is to remain loyal to the precious few one can trust.

In many of Melville’s films, some of these dark protagonists’ cynicism and  unprincipled behavior (outside of their “honor among thieves” loyalty) may lessen our ability to empathize with their characters. They are just too despicable.  However, in Le Cercle Rouge all of the four principle characters are of interest and merit our concern.

Each of the four main characters embodies a different persona:

• Corey (played by Melville favorite Alain Delon) is cool and calm.  But he is not a coldly detached narcissist, as the Delon character is in some of Melville’s other films.  In this film Corey is tough-minded and willing to accept the situation he faces; but he is also many times trusting and loyal to the people he meets.  When people let him down, he moves on without being obsessed by revenge.  He embodies loyalty.
   
• Vogel (Gian Maria Volontè) is an escapee from police custody.  He is more overtly passionate than Corey, but also coldly ruthless when the occasion demands it. He embodies the desperate fight against fatalistic inevitability.
   
• Jansen (Yves Montand), the former policeman, is a loner and embodies the goal of principled self-reliance.
   
• Mattei (André Bourvil), the police inspector, is a tough cop, but he believes in social harmony and the institutional instruments that promote such harmony.  He seems to believe in the inherent goodness of all people (and cats).  Incidentally Bourvil, who was a much-loved French comic actor, was to die of a fatal illness in the year Le Cercle Rouge was released (and Melville’s premature death occurred shortly thereafter), so an extra aura of fatalism was to hang over this film when it was viewed by the public.

The film focalizes on all four of these characters, and the audience can empathize with each of them.  Though Corey, Vogel, and Jansen are at odds with the law, we cannot help but see things from their existential point of view.  This being a Melville film noir, however, means that their ultimate outcomes are unlikely to be anything but disastrous.  Their dim fates are predetermined. To signify this fatal future, the film opens with an epigraph (composed by Melville, not by Buddha):

“Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: ‘When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.’”

This highlights Melville’s inclination to portray expressionistic nightmares.  As he once said [2],

“A film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact recreation of it.”

This dreamworld is presented visually. There isn't much dialogue in the film, and one can basically understand the entire film through the visuals alone. This leads me to mention another feature of Le Cercle Rouge that makes it stand out in the Melville oeuvre: the outstanding cinematography of Henri Decae (The 400 Blows, 1959; Les Cousins, 1959; Sundays and Cybele, 1962). Decae’s work involved not only providing the film with an overall expressionistic tenor, but also the careful composition of many closeups and medium shots that are artfully edited together to create the existential tension that permeates the film.

The story of the film proceeds through four phases or acts.

1.  Corey and Vogel
The first third of the film’s running time is devoted to showing in parallel the separate activities of Corey and Vogel.  There is no real backstory on either of them, and the viewer must piece things together as revealed by slow disclosure.  The film jumps back and forth between the two threads, and they don’t connect until 43 minutes into the film [3].

Corey is about to be released from prison, presumably in Marseilles, after serving a five-year term. On the day before his release, he is informed by a corrupt prison guard about another criminal “job” that he could take up once he’s out.  Corey is less than enthusiastic about undertaking anything that could put him back in jail, but he can’t help listening to what’s on offer.

Meanwhile Vogel is some sort of criminal associated with political unrest who is being transported by train from Marseilles to Paris by Inspector Mattei.  Vogel manages to get out of his handcuffs and jump from the train, with Mattei and others in mad pursuit.  The filming of these scenes is very evocative of the seemingly hopeless circumstances of Vogel, as he runs helter-skelter through the bush.

Corey meanwhile pays a visit to a criminal associate named Rico who was connected with the crime that sent him to prison.  Thanks to Corey’s loyal silence, Rico escaped capture on that occasion and then stole Corey’s girlfriend in return.  Corey grimly accepts his girlfriend’s unfealty, but he needs cash, so he strong-arms Rico and grabs his gun and a handful of money and departs. 

After getting past a confrontation with two of Rico’s hit-men who have been sent out to recover Rico’s money, Corey uses the money to buy a car. (Melville always likes to evoke American gangland culture in his films, so his characters drive the decidedly un-French American models.  On this occasions Corey buys a Plymouth.)  He then heads off towards Paris and stops on the way at a roadside restaurant.

Vogel somehow manages to escape a massive police manhunt and, running past the restaurant where Corey has stopped, begins looking for a possible hiding place by checking to see if any trunks are unlocked among the parked cars.  As fate (or karma) would have it, Corey’s trunk is unlocked, and Vogel gets in and hides.  In fact there are many improbable and unlikely events that occur throughout this story.  I won't list them, and we will just have to assume that they have all been dictated to occur by fate.

Corey drives away knowing there is someone hiding in his trunk, and he stops in a lonely field to find out if his suspicions are correct: that his hidden passenger is the recently escaped prisoner that he has heard about on the road from Marseilles to Paris.  Vogel gets out of the trunk, and the thieves’ brotherhood takes over – Corey and Vogel quickly become friends. This is crucial, because they are soon again confronted by Rico’s hit-men, and Vogel saves Corey by killing the two men.

2.   Planning the Caper
Now with a partner, Corey can go ahead with preparing for the criminal job that he had heard about while in prison.  This section shows various details of that, including their apparent need to find an expert marksmen, as well as a fence to whom to pass some goods that they will steal.  The marksmen they select is an ex-policeman Vogel knows about, Jansen, who is trying to cure himself of his acute alcoholism.

During this act we learn that the job is to steal all the jewels from an upscale jewelry store at the Place Vendome in Paris.

Meanwhile Mattei, under pressure for having let Vogel escape from the train, is trying to talk to his various underworld informants concerning the whereabouts of Vogel.  His most important contact is a nightclub owner Santi, who is known to have underworld connections, and over whom Mattei can threaten in connection with some past nefarious, but unpunished, activities.

3.  The Heist
The jewelry heist itself is a masterly sequence of about 25 minutes, mostly without dialogue, and comparable to other famous heist sequences, such as those in Rififi (1955) and Topkapi (1964).  Here Corey, Vogel, and Jansen carry out what apparently has been a meticulously planned operation to break into the posh jewelry store and circumvent the elaborate electronic security system that is used to protect the jewelry.  This is where the expert rifle marksman is needed: to fire a bullet that will deactivate the system.
                                       
They pull it off, just barely, and make off with the jewels.  But now they have to find a fence, because the original one they had secured has backed out.

4.  The Outcome
Mattei, of course, has been working all along to thwart Vogel, and he learns through Santi that Vogel was involved in the jewel heist.  So with Santi’s help, Mattei sets himself up as the fence that Corey and Vogel can use to pass on their jewelry.  There is a final confrontation, and you can guess that it doesn’t work out very well for Corey, Vogel, and Jansen.  The national police commissioner had admonished Mattei that all men are corrupt sooner or later.  But it was the individual virtues of the robbery team – Corey's trust and both Vogel's and Jansen's self-sacrificing loyalty – that ultimately did them in.

There are haunting, lingering images in this story that seem to have a metaphoric character – for example, Vogel crashing through windows, Corey’s enigmatic gaze, Mattei’s reflective visage, and the red rose that is passed to Corey by a cocktail waitress and which Vogel clings to later.  They seem to have some kind of vague significance beyond our understanding.

Overall, the story is relatively straightforward, and it is less complicated and littered with double-crosses than some of Melville’s other films.  What makes it all work is the charisma of the main characters, including Bourvil, who evinces a relatively compassionate humanity that is often missing in other Melville films.

But there is something else about Le Cercle Rouge’s charm that must be mentioned.  It has a kind of existential epic quality that characterizes American Western film and that has often fascinated European filmmakers. This was something that Sergio Leone intuitively understood and captured in his "spaghetti Westerns", notably For a Few Dollars More (1965) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Leone’s most famous films came just before Le Cercle Rouge, and Melville was certainly aware of them [4].  Indeed actor Gian Maria Volontè had been a star of For a Few Dollar More. As Melville, himself remarked,

“The Cercle rouge script is an original in the sense that it was written by me and by me alone, but it won’t take you long to realize it’s a transposed western, with the action taking place in Paris instead of the West, in the present day rather than after the Civil War, and with cars instead of horses. So I start off with the traditional—almost obligatory—conventional situation: the man just released from jail. And this man corresponds pretty much to the cowboy who, once the opening credits are over, pushes open the doors of a saloon.” [5]

We’re not just talking about a “horse opera”.  Melville and Leone (and, to some extent, Hitchcock, too) each understood that one can convey the dream-like nature of conscious existence by exploiting the expressionistic possibilities of deep social metaphors, such as the Western and the noirish underworld. They were not academically-oriented intellectuals, but they had an intuitive understanding of how to visually evoke and explore some aspects of life’s mysteries.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “Jean-Pierre Melville”, The Film Sufi.
2. World Film Directors, Vol. II., John Wakeman (ed.), Wilson, co., NY 1988, quoted in “Conversations About Great Films: Le Cercle Rouge”, Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), Buffalo Film Seminars, XVIII:8, The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (3 March  2009).
3. I am referring to the uncut two-hour-and-twenty-minute version of the film.  Shorter versions of the film were released initially.
4. Chris Fujiwara, “Le cercle rouge: What Is the Red Circle?”, The Criterion Collection, (12 April 2011).
5. Jean-Pierre Melville, “Melville on “Le cercle rouge”, The Criterion Collection, (excerpted from Rui Nogueira, Melville on Melville, 1971) (12 April 2011).

“The 400 Blows” - Francois Truffaut (1959)

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959), written and directed by Francois Truffaut, stands as a landmark film in several respects – in particular because it marked, along with Le Beau Serge (1958) and Breathless (À Bout de Souffle, 1960), the beginning of the French New Wave movement in filmmaking. The New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) emerged from a coterie of writers and critics around Andre Bazin and included Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard,  Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, and Eric Rohmer. Their motivation was primarily that of rebellion from the conventional cinematic fare of the day, and they sought to explore more spontaneous and less theatrical forms of film expression, which makes these films difficult to typecast. Nevertheless, there is something about The 400 Blows that separates it from those  contemporary works in terms of its authenticity, originality, and enduring relevance to our current existence.

This was the first feature film of writer-director Francois Truffaut, and the story of the film closely parallels Truffaut’s own troubled experiences growing up in Paris.  The events depicted here cover the everyday adventures of Antoine Doinel, a 12- or 13-year-old boy who struggles to make his way in a rather unsympathetic environment. The film’s title, incidentally, is derived from French phrase "faire les quatre cents coups", which means something like “making trouble” or “raising hell” and refers to the kinds of shenanigans and horseplay that teenagers the world over get themselves into.  As we watch the film progress, we see that Antoine is progressively branded as more and more of a juvenile delinquent, and yet we find him to be essentially innocent and a more of a victim than a perpetrator.  Almost everyone (at least among men, I think) can identify with Antoine’s experiences and understand things from his perspective. 

The story of the film is quite episodic, but it transpires almost in progressive round-robin fashion across three social environments of varying degrees of intimacy and control.

1. The Institutional Environment (IEnv).  This is the adult social world, and for Antoine, it is initially his public school, although it later devolves into the correction system and reform school. There are rigid rules administered by adults that must be followed, or penalties will arise.  For essentially minor offences Antoine finds himself ostracized and eventually cast out of his school and into a harsher regime.  The interactions Antoine has with people in this realm are cold and formal, with no empathy or sympathy extended.
2. The Home Environment (HEnv).  This is a more intimate environment, but is also run by adults.  Here rules are set, but more personal and nurture-motivated interactions are expected to prevail.  The interactions with his parents are more personal, but they are burdened with hypocrisy and selfishness on the parent side.
3. The Friends Environment (FEnv).  This is the only honest and personally straightforward  space for Antoine.  Although there are some classmate rivalries, Antoine’s best friend, Rene, is the only person who is willing to share things equally with Antoine.

Note that by identifying these three spheres of activity, I do not mean to suggest that the film embodies a global, gods-eye architectural view of existence.  It is very much an existentialistic story seen from Antoine’s point of view, but within these three perspectival contexts.

Throughout the story, Antoine is amazingly straightforward with everyone, and indeed he rather manfully accepts his misfortunes without complaint.  But we sense the unspoken: that he seeks escape from a suffocating world of hypocrisy.  He, like all young teenagers, wants to have the chance, at least sometimes, to have fun.

As the film story progresses, it moves, via slow disclosure among the three realms, through four general stages of increasing alienation for Antoine.

1.  Troubles at School
In the opening sequence at school (IEnv), Antoine and his mates (in an all-boy classroom) are shown to be bored with the stultifying pedantry of their dogmatic teacher.  Antoine is unlucky to be the one caught with a naughty picture that is being surreptitiously passed around during the lecture. At home in his family’s cramped apartment (HEnv), Antoine’s strict mother reveals herself to be rather vain and impatient with her son. There is also tension between his father and mother, whose suspected marital infidelity seems to be almost an open secret.  With Antoine’s friend (FEnv), Rene, however, life is more congenial.  The next day the two friends decide to play hooky from school, and they have fun at a movie and an amusement park.  On the street, though, Antoine happens to see his mother in the distance kissing a strange man; and she also notices Antoine, which turns out to have short-term benefits for Antoine.  Anyway, Antoine now needs to come up with an excuse to give to the teacher as to why he missed class that day. 

2.  Home Improvement
Unwisely following Rene’s advice that big lies are better than small ones, Antoine reports at school that his absence was caused by his mother’s death.  The lie is quickly exposed, and Antoine is harshly slapped in front of the whole class by his father.  Antoine’s standings in the IEnv and the HEnv have reached new lows.  Disconsolate, Antoine decides that his only option now is to run away from home, and Rene lets him into his uncle’s abandoned print shop to sleep there. But the next day, Antoine’s mother shows up at school to fetch Antoine home again. She is probably concerned that Antoine will snitch about her likely observed infidelity on the street, and she now treats her boy with motherly kindness.  She offers him a big prize if his upcoming school essay gets a good grade.

With idealistic fervor, Antoine is so inspired from reading one of Balzac’s works that he commits some lines to memory, and he sets up a little shrine with a candle in the apartment to honor the great writer.  When the burning candle causes a fire in the apartment, though, Antoine is surprised to see his mother kindly intervene to stop his father from punishing the boy.  Then, somewhat out of the character we have seen so far, she gaily urges them all to go out and enjoy a movie.  So the HEnv situation  seems to be much better now.

3.  On his Own
Later in school, though, everything collapses. Antoine’s memorized phraseology from Balzac leads to a plagiarism charge and expulsion from the school until January (the events in this film appear to be taking place in the Christmas season, so January would be about a month away). When Rene loyally sticks up for him, he is also expelled, for impudence. Antoine now stoically accepts that his parents will utterly reject him, and he decides to run away again and stay with Rene, whose parents are well off but neglectful of what their child is doing.  Antoine has now chosen the FEnv to the exclusion of the IEnv and the Henv (how many boys have not contemplated such a choice at some point?).

Back on the street the boys are having a raucous good time again – going to movies, smoking cigars, taking in a puppet show, playing backgammon, and naughtily shooting their peashooters at passers by from an upstairs window.  But they soon realize that if they are going be on their own, they will need money, and they decide to steal a typewriter from Antoine’s father’s office and pawn it.  This scheme disastrously falls apart, and Antoine is arrested and turned over to his father.

4.  Out of Options
Fed up with his son, Antoine’s father has the boy charged with a crime and jailed.  The cold institutional environment has now gone from school to twenty-four hour confinement.  Shipped like a common criminal to a juvenile delinquency center, Antoine is interviewed by a psychologist intent on scientifically collecting data about the new inmate.  In response to the frosty impersonal questions, Antoine’s answers are open and guileless.  Asked why his parents complain that he lies, Antoine says,

“At times. . . . If I told the truth they wouldn’t believe me.” 

Asked why he doesn’t love his mother, Antoine informs them that he knew he was an illegitimate child and that his mother had wanted to abort him: 

“At first I was placed with a foster mother. When the money ran out, I went to Grandma’s.  Then she got old and couldn’t keep me, so I went to live with my folks, but I was already 8.  I realized Mom didn’t like me much.”   

On visiting day his mother and Rene separately show up, but only his mother is allowed in.  And she is only there to issue her final rejection. “Don’t play the martyr”, she says, “your father says he doesn’t care what happens to you.” Now the FEnv and HEnv are closed off to him, and only the constrictive IEnv remains. Unbowed, Antoine slips away from the center during a soccer game and runs.  In a memorable eighty-second tracking shot, we see him running desperately, finally arriving at the seashore, where he can go no further.

There are several key elements to the film that enhance the emotional effects so important to the film.  The piano music score of Jean Constantin is lyrical and wistful, evoking a sense of inner loneliness.  The acting performances are excellent, particularly that of Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine.  Of memorable note is Leaud’s naturalistic responses to the psychologist’s interrogation near the end of the film. Leaud would go on to become a favorite actor of Truffaut and Godard, but his debut performance here, so authentically embodying innocent earnestness without self-pity, was his best, in my opinion.  Albert Remy and Claire Maurier who played Antoine’s parents also do well to portray parents with initially good intentions but who are too preoccupied with their own selfish concerns.

The cinematography of Henri Decaë is also noteworthy.  Decaë is one of my favorites, and his work with Chabrol and Jean-Pierre Melville I highly recommend.  Here he managed effective compositions in the difficult cinemascope (2.35:1 ratio) framing and executed numerous moving-camera shots (including that long tracking shot at the end) with great effect.

The 400 Blows, much better than other well-known youth films of the time, such as The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), captures the innate existential longing that young people have for something more engaging than the dim and compromised world that is set before them. Antoine is branded as a troublemaker, but we can so readily identify with him that we should all be equally so branded.  He is not malicious, but like all boys, he wants to have some fun sometimes, too.  The story seems commonplace, but Truffaut tells it so well that it captures the essence of this inarticulate feeling that there must be something more to life.  Truffaut made many fine films in his career, but he never surpassed this one, his first feature.

★★★★