Jean-Pierre Léaud dazzles at the heart of an autobiographical opus that invites new waves of adulation with each viewing
François Truffaut’s sublime autobiographical debut is now rereleased, a portrait of the artist as an unhappy child. He deserved every prize going simply for those heartstopping images of the children’s faces as they watch a Punch and Judy show. This is its first release in the
UK since 2009, but maybe 62 years is now enough perspective to see fully how the grim scenes of home life and school life, which would have been accepted as contemporary realism in 1959 and for years afterwards, now look like historical documents. The title itself, from faire les quatre cent coups, means to hand out punishment, raise hell, sow wild oats – but this is an ironic upending. Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, is receiving the blows. They rain down on him. Cruelty and humiliation and desperation – and defiance – are this kid’s destiny.
Jean-Pierre Léaud played the 12-year-old lead in this and the five successive Doinel films, a role which was to define his entire life. Like Truffaut, Doinel is a truant, a delinquent, a kid from an unhappy home and a thief: he steals money, a bottle of milk, a typewriter and, most importantly of all, a piece of writing. For a class assignment, he plagiarises, or at any rate paraphrases, a passage from Balzac’s Quest of the Absolute from 1834, about the death of the alchemist Balthazar Claes, repurposing it for the supposed death of his own grandfather. Doinel even has a candlelit shrine to Balzac in the cramped family apartment, which almost burns the place down.