Best Ever
Drama Movie?

The final shot of The 400 Blows is one of the most famous in cinema: a boy runs toward the ocean, reaches the water’s edge, turns to face the camera, and the image freezes. His expression is unreadable — relief? fear? emptiness? — and Truffaut holds on it long enough for you to project everything you’ve ever felt about childhood onto that face. It’s an ending that refuses to end, a question mark disguised as a period.

The boy is Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud with a naturalism so complete it doesn’t register as acting. Antoine is twelve, maybe thirteen. His mother resents him. His stepfather tolerates him. His teachers see him as a problem to be managed. He lies, he steals, he skips school, he starts a small fire — not because he’s bad, but because no one has given him a reason to be good. Truffaut, drawing heavily on his own childhood, refuses to judge him. The film simply watches, and in watching, understands.

This was 1959, and French cinema was calcified. The “Tradition of Quality” meant literary adaptations, studio shooting, scripts that telegraphed every emotion. Truffaut had been a critic, famously savage, and The 400 Blows was his manifesto in action: location shooting, natural light, a handheld camera that followed Antoine through the streets of Paris like a friend keeping pace. The New Wave started here, with a kid running from reform school.

The classroom scenes are devastating in their precision. Watch the teacher’s face as he catches Antoine with a pinup calendar — the performative outrage, the pleasure in punishment. Watch Antoine’s face as he’s blamed for something he didn’t do, the resignation of someone who knows fairness is not on the menu. Truffaut shoots these scenes like documentaries, observing the small cruelties that accumulate into a childhood.

The relationship between Antoine and his friend René provides the film’s only warmth. They smoke cigarettes stolen from René’s parents. They go to the movies, watching the screen with the rapt attention of believers. They forge absence notes with increasingly elaborate lies. It’s a friendship built on shared exclusion, two kids who’ve figured out that the adult world is not on their side.

Antoine’s mother is a masterpiece of ambivalent characterization. She’s neglectful, yes, and vain, and conducting an affair she barely bothers to hide. But there are moments — a hand on Antoine’s shoulder, a shared joke at the dinner table — where you glimpse the mother she might have been in different circumstances. Truffaut doesn’t let her off the hook, but he doesn’t reduce her to villainy either. She’s a person, trapped in her own disappointments.

The Rotor scene — Antoine spinning in an amusement park centrifuge, pinned to the wall by force, grinning with pure joy — is often cited as the film’s emotional key. For once, Antoine isn’t running from anything. He’s just experiencing sensation, letting physics press him into the present moment. It’s the only time in the film he seems fully happy, and Truffaut shoots it like a memory you’d want to keep forever.

The reform school sequence, based on Truffaut’s own experience, is clinical in its horror. Not violent, not melodramatic — just the systematic process by which institutions process children, the interviews and the forms and the dormitories. When Antoine finally escapes, running through fields toward the sea, you understand he’s not running to anything. He’s just running.

That freeze frame. That face. Sixty-five years later, we’re still trying to read it.

François Truffaut: The Best Ever is the moment before freedom becomes just another trap. Is The 400 Blows the Best Ever Coming-of-Age Movie? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• For essential context, get the Criterion Blu-ray—it includes Truffaut’s short film ‘Les Mistons’.
• The Adventures of Antoine Doinel box set collects all five films in the series.