Summary
Antoine goes to the mirror. As he wipes the mist off it, we hear a strange menacing voice say, “I deface the classroom walls.” Antoine stares at himself in the mirror, and is interrupted by his parents talking about the holes in their clothes. His stepfather scolds Antoine for being late for school and Antoine runs off. We see him running down the street, where he meets René, who is also late. Antoine is worried about the fact that they will have to sneak into class, René tells him, “Sourpuss said he wouldn’t let you back in.” René asks Antoine if he has any money and leads him down the street. They go into a dark hallway, where they hide their bags behind a door. They go to the movies.
The scene shifts and we see them playing arcade games, them going on a ride at a carnival. René watches from above as Antoine rides a Tilt-a-Whirl. Antoine is pressed up against the wall and manages to get himself upside down as the ride goes faster and faster. Eventually, the ride ends and Antoine falls to the floor, stumbling around disoriented. As he emerges from the ride, Antoine finds René and they continue on their way. On the street, Antoine sees his mother kissing another man, and runs away, frightened. His mother turns to the man, telling him that she’s sure that her son saw them. Antoine and René walk away and go back to fetch their bags. Another boy from school spies on them.
Antoine tells René, “I’m going back to school tomorrow, but I’ll need a note.” René tells Antoine that he has an old note that he never used, which he pulls out and urges Antoine to copy by forging his mother’s signature. The boys say their goodbyes. The scene shifts to Antoine forging a note at home. He hears a creak of a door and quickly puts his notes away as his stepfather comes in. Mr. Doinel tells Antoine that his mother told him she’d be home late and that they will be eating alone. Antoine goes and lights the stove to make eggs as his stepfather asks him about school. Antoine lies about their lesson, telling his stepfather that he wasn’t called on. “You have to take initiative in life,” his stepfather advises him, before asking Antoine if he has gotten his mother anything for her birthday.
Antoine is silent, which his stepfather interprets as being about how hard Mrs. Doinel has been on her son recently. He urges Antoine to be forgiving, and tries to explain to Antoine why his mother’s life is difficult. “Women are always taken advantage of at the office, and they don’t know what to do about it,” he says.
Later, Mr. Doinel asks Antoine where his Michelin guide went, and when Antoine tells him he doesn’t know, yells at him for lying. Antoine maintains that it wasn’t him, so Mr. Doinel agrees to ask Antoine’s mother. Antoine goes to bed, but cannot sleep, lying awake in the dark. Suddenly, his stepfather walks in to fetch something and Antoine pretends to be asleep. Then his mother enters, making herself quiet on the way. She goes into the next room and she and Mr. Doinel immediately begin fighting. Mr. Doinel suspects that she is having an affair, which she denies, and they begin arguing about Antoine, each of them accusing the other of being a bad parent. His mother screams at his stepfather that they ought to send Antoine to an orphanage, as the scene fades.
The next day, Antoine runs down the street, meeting up with René. At home, Mrs. Doinel tells her husband that they should eat out for the rest of the month, to which he snarls, “For that I need a clean shirt!” As they argue about money, the doorbell rings. It’s a classmate of Antoine’s, who asks Mr. Doinel if Antoine is feeling better. “He missed school yesterday,” the boy says, which surprises Mr. Doinel, who dismisses the boy. When Mr. Doinel notes that his wife doesn’t seem surprised, she simply says, “Nothing the boy does surprises me,” before walking away. Outside on the street, Antoine and René strategize how they will make adequate excuses for having been absent the previous day. They run down the street to school. Nearby, we see the boy who told on them to Mr. Doinel skipping down the street.
As Antoine arrives at school, his teacher immediately pulls him aside and confronts him about his absence, asking to see the note from his parents. “I don’t have a note,” Antoine tells him, which makes the teacher even angrier. Antoine lies that his mother died. The teacher is shocked and apologizes to Antoine. “You should’ve told me. You should always confide in your teachers,” he tells Antoine, before sending him to get in line. In the group of students, René asks Antoine what excuse he gave, but Antoine deflects. In the classroom, a student recites and translates poetry aloud. When the student fails, the teacher gives him an F, before calling on Antoine. Antoine stands for a moment, but the teacher decides to make another student do the translation.
Suddenly the teacher stands, noticing someone at the door of the classroom. He goes to speak to the visitor in the hallway. Antoine covers his mouth nervously, when the teacher beckons him out into the hall. His mother and stepfather are both there, and as Antoine walks to the door, his stepfather slaps him twice in the face. Humiliated, he goes back to his seat, as the teacher tells his parents that he ought to be punished accordingly at home for his lie.
We see Antoine and René walking home from school. “I can’t live with my parents now after what’s happened. I have to disappear,” Antoine laments. When René suggests that worse has happened and they will forgive him, Antoine insists that he wants to disappear for his own reasons, that “it’s for the best.” René tells Antoine to meet him in an hour at Place Pigalle, and Antoine agrees as the boys go their separate ways. Later the boys meet up at René’s uncle’s old printing plant, a place that René says Antoine can stay. René sets his friend up with some makeshift pillows and mattresses.
At home, Mr. and Mrs. Doinel read a note from Antoine. It states his intentions to live away from them, reading, “I’ll prove I can become a man.” Each of them blame the other for the boy’s disappearance. Mr. Doinel tells his wife that she’s been hard on Antoine, to which she replies, “He gets on my nerves.” We see Antoine trying to sleep in the printing plant, when suddenly he hears workers and begins to sneak out. On the street, he passes a woman whose dog has escaped from her apartment. She asks Antoine for help, running after her dog. A man, hiding in the shadows nearby, asks Antoine if he knows the woman with the runaway dog, but Antoine assures him they’ve never met. The man whistles for the dog, shoo-ing Antoine away. “She asked me first,” Antoine tells him, but the man pushes Antoine away.
Antoine walks down the street, past a restaurant that is decorated for Christmas. As it gets later and later, Antoine continues to roam the streets. He steals a bottle of milk from a milk delivery man and runs away.
Analysis
Mirrors are again significant in this section of the film. When Antoine wakes up on the morning he chooses to skip school with René, he goes to the mirror in his bathroom and looks at his reflection. The camera seems to close in on his image with a particular intimacy, and we hear a line of the poem that he wrote on the wall of the classroom. The only difference is that now, instead of Antoine’s innocent voice, the line is spoken in an unusual and spooky adult voice: “I deface the classroom walls.” It is an uncanny moment in the film, and it suggests that in this moment, Antoine feels guilt for his act, and sees himself as a kind of villain, so changed is the voice in his head. Late for school, ashamed of himself, and disconcerted by his parents' treatment of him, Antoine looks in the mirror and sees a monster. This shot vividly reflects the shame, fear and anxiety that is projected by the adult world onto the adolescent’s self-image, and the effect it has on adolescent identity.
However heavy the subject matter of the film may be, there is often a contrastingly lighthearted soundtrack that underscores Antoine’s undertakings, particularly when accompanied by his best friend, René. After they decide to skip school, energetic flute music plays as we see them running down the street and getting into various shenanigans. The brightness of tone in this montage reflects the freedom that the young boys feel. Liberated from the oppressive forces of school and responsibility, they are free to go to the movies and waste time at a carnival. Unfettered from their responsibilities, Antoine and René are granted a lightness of spirit and a childlike innocence that they are deprived of in their normal lives.
The push and pull between freedom and confinement that Antoine feels is depicted visually in the way that Truffaut shoots Antoine’s ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl. As the ride begins to spin, we see the world from Antoine’s perspective. He looks up at the people watching the ride from above, including René. As the ride accelerates, the faces become indistinguishable and inscrutable, and Antoine finds himself in an alternate reality, in thrall to physics and adrenaline. The Tilt-a-Whirl has the effect of making the riders weightless, as their feet no longer touch the ground. We see Antoine turn his body almost entirely upside down on the ride, reveling in the feeling of an apparent lack of gravity. At the same time, however, the weightlessness is achieved by his body being pressed up against the wall of the Tilt-A-Whirl, unable to move from his position as the world spins by. The ride is a metaphor for his position in life; while he can create the illusion of freedom for himself, he is still being pressed up against a wall, still being overpowered by the forces of gravity.
A large part of what is pushing Antoine down and ripping away his childlike innocence is his relationship to the adult world. His teacher unforgivingly punishes him for deeds that are not his fault, his stepfather is inconsistent in his affections, and his mother seems incapable of even the slightest maternal warmth. Additionally, on his day playing hooky, Antoine learns that his mother is having an affair when he spots her kissing a man on the street. This signals to Antoine that not only are the individual adults in his life seemingly incapable of exhibiting love or understanding with him, but apparently they are incapable of experiencing it with one another as well. Antoine is surprised to witness his mother’s infidelity, but it is not entirely shocking either, as it only confirms his suspicion that adults cannot be trusted.
In the absence of trust, Antoine decides to lie and apply his own standards to the world around him. The next day, when his teacher questions why he was absent, Antoine lies that his mother has died. In Antoine’s mind, this is perhaps not such a lie, as his mother has effectually died in his consciousness. She cannot be trusted or relied upon, and Antoine’s lie reflects this emotional truth. The emotional truth, however, is of course not the relevant one, and when the teacher and Antoine’s parents discover that he has made up such a horrible lie, he is duly punished. Because the viewer is aligned with Antoine’s perspective and experience, we can see that he has virtually no resources through which to process his loss of innocence, alienation, and his feelings of frustration with the unfair expectations placed on him. In lieu of a support system, he seeks out independence for himself, running away from home and vowing to become a man by himself.
