Summary
Antoine walks down the street, opens the bottle of milk, and takes several big gulps, drinking until it’s empty, then pushing the bottle into a sewage grate. He climbs into an empty fountain, puts his hand in some rainwater that has gathered, and puts some on his face, before running away.
The next morning, he meets René and they walk to school. At school, the teacher asks Antoine if he got in big trouble at home. “Not at all. Everything was fine,” Antoine replies calmly. The teacher shrugs, sends Antoine on his way and turns to an adult nearby, saying, “The parents spoil these children.” Inside, a different teacher teaches English class, and one student cannot pronounce the English word father. The teacher sends the student back to his seat before calling on a different student, whose name is Abbou. He asks Abbou, in English, “Where is the girl?” The student answers, “The beach.” Suddenly someone knocks on the door, and the teacher goes to answer it. Antoine is being summoned to an office.
In an administrator’s office, Mrs. Doinel is complaining about Antoine, when the English teacher delivers him to her. She hugs him and asks if he’s alright, and where he spent the night. “I don’t care if he’s the last in his class, I just want him to behave,” she tells the administrator. “Maybe it’s something in his glands,” offers the English teacher.
The scene shifts and we see Mrs. Doinel walking home with Antoine. She holds his shoulder and kisses his head. At home, she bathes him and continues to be affectionate towards him. When he has dried off, she sends him to bed, even though he assures her he isn’t tired. After he climbs into bed she tells him, “I was your age once too, you know. You kids always forget that. I was stubborn too and didn’t want to confide in my parents. I preferred writing in my diary. No one’s ever read it. I’ll show it to you one day.” She then tells him a story about how when she was young, she ran away with a farm boy and got in trouble with her mother. “You should always obey your mother,” she tells Antoine, before asking what he meant in his letter when he said, “We’ll discuss all that’s happened.”
Antoine tells her that he doesn’t like school, that he misbehaves because he wants to quit and “earn a living.” His mother scolds him and assures him that she regrets having stopped going to school after high school. Leveling with him, she says, “I know they teach you a lot of useless stuff in school…But what about French? One always has letters to write.” She then strikes a deal with Antoine: if his next French essay is in the top 5 in his class, she will give him 1,000 francs, but he mustn’t tell his stepfather.
We see the boys running out of the school, cheered on by their physical education teacher. We see the young boy Abbou walking away from the group. Antoine and René also break off. A much smaller group now follows the physical education teacher down the street. As they round each corner, more and more boys peel off. The scene shifts and we see Antoine reading Balzac and smoking on a couch. We hear the lines of Balzac read aloud by an adult man in voiceover—is it an adult Antoine? Later, Antoine hangs up a portrait of Balzac in a small altar to the writer, a new fan.
In class the next day, the French teacher writes a prompt on the board: “Describe a serious event you witnessed that involved you personally.” Antoine sits in his seat, and is suddenly struck with an idea—“Eureka!”—which he begins to write about: “My Grandfather’s Death.” The scene shifts and we see Antoine lighting a candle and positioning it in the altar he made for Balzac. Later, he eats dinner with his parents, and his stepfather tells them that his boss is sleeping with his secretary, who is just doing it to get a better job. Suddenly, Mr. Doinel smells something burning and accuses Mrs. Doinel of leaving something on the stove.
Antoine runs into the next room realizing that his altar caught on fire. His stepfather tries to smother the flames with a pillow, yelling at his son all the while—“I’ve had it, you little idiot!” As Mrs. Doinel tries to put the fire out, Mr. Doinel asks Antoine why he lit a candle, and Antoine whimpers and tells him, “It was for Balzac.” Mrs. Doinel runs to her son’s defense, telling her husband that she and Antoine made a promise. Antoine’s stepfather doesn’t back down, however, and only scolds his son more vehemently, threatening to send him to a military academy. Struck suddenly with an idea about how to lighten the mood, Mrs. Doinel suggests they all go to a movie, and asks her son if he wrote a good essay. “Not bad,” replies Antoine. Mrs. Doinel calls to her husband, and tells him to trust them, assuring him, “You’ll be pleasantly surprised.” She holds her son’s head and convinces Mr. Doinel to take them to the movies.
We see the Doinels coming out of the movie theater, all linking arms happily. “I never had strawberry ice cream before!” Antoine says to his parents, his stepfather now smiling. They get in the car and drive through the streets of Paris. Antoine giggles happily as the family discusses the movie. While Mr. Doinel thinks it wasn’t funny, Mrs. Doinel thinks it had depth. As they arrive home, Mr. Doinel makes a lot of jokes and they all laugh as they go up the stairs. In the apartment, Mrs. Doinel instructs Antoine to bring the garbage down, before saying to Mr. Doinel, “I’ve won him over. I hope I won’t regret it.” When Antoine leaves, Mr. Doinel grabs her breasts and the couple flirts.
The next day in class, a student steals Mauricet’s goggles while he’s reciting, and passes them back to Antoine and René, who destroy the goggles and pass them around for other students to further vandalize. The last student tosses the goggles onto Mauricet’s desk just as he finishes his recitation. The teacher calls on Antoine, saying, “Your paper is first today, only because I decided to return them in order beginning with the worst. Your search for perfection led you straight to an F, my friend.” The teacher makes it evident that he thinks Antoine cheated, but Antoine calmly assures him that he didn’t cheat. Infuriated, the teacher reads Antoine’s paper aloud; it is directly copied from Balzac’s book, and is clearly plagiarized. He sends Antoine to the principle’s office with his paper. “ I don’t want to see you back here this term!” the teacher yells as he leaves.
Another student escorts Antoine to the principle’s office, but on the stairway, Antoine punches him and escapes. Back in the classroom, René comes to Antoine’s defense, saying, “I sit next to him. I would have seen it if he had copied.” When the teacher threatens him, René gives him attitude and is promptly kicked out of the class, dragged by the collar. In the hall, the teacher throws Rene’s bag onto the ground, when the student charged with escorting Antoine to the principle’s office comes back and informs the French teacher that Antoine ran away.
We see Antoine and René walking down the street. They share accounts of what happened, and Antoine leans up against a wall, sad that he cannot go home—his stepfather threatened to send him to the military academy if he misbehaved again. René thinks that the army wouldn’t be so bad, but Antoine would prefer to enter the navy. “I’ve never seen the ocean,” Antoine says. René invites Antoine to stay at his apartment, to which Antoine agrees. Keeping quiet, the two boys sneak into René’s apartment, and Antoine marvels at a fake horse that René’s father keeps in the house, a souvenir. Antoine marvels at the size of the apartment, and René assures him that his parents will not find him in this room, as they never come in there. “My mother drinks, and my father spends all day at the races,” René says. The boys then strategize how they will make money.
They go into the next room, also very large, and René opens a locked box with money in it. He takes a bill, when suddenly they hear someone coming into the apartment. The boys hide behind the curtains as a woman, René’s mother, enters and goes to take money from the locked box herself. When she leaves, the two boys sneak out of the house and run down the street triumphantly.
Analysis
With all of the adults in his life meeting his rebellious antics with misunderstanding and ill will, Antoine decides to run away. This more dramatic rebellious act—his desire to go off and “become a man” on his own—has the effect of encouraging his previously neglectful mother to pay more attention to him. She picks him up at school and meets him with kisses, hugs, and warm feeling. As she tells the school principal, she doesn’t mind that he doesn’t do well in his class, but only wishes that he would behave. For the first time in the film, instead of treating him gruffly or with disinterest, she chooses to approach his resistance with love. When they get home, she bathes him and puts him to bed affectionately. Her loving and attentive parenting has the effect of subduing the wayward Antoine for a time. Indeed, when met with love from his mother, he is willing to come home and behave, no longer interested in pursuing adulthood without a home.
Another way that Mrs. Doinel levels with her son is by seeking to speak with him as an equal, and trying to hear his point of view. She reminds him that she was once a child, and that she was willful, but that she learned to be more disciplined as she grew up. Mrs. Doinel’s candor empowers Antoine to speak his own mind, and he tells her that he doesn’t see the point of school and would rather be in the real world making money. Seeing a way to motivate her son more actively, she makes a deal with him that if he writes a paper that is one of the five best in his class, she will give him 1,000 francs. She is negotiating with her child on his terms, but for the first time a bridge seems to emerge between the adult world and the child world.
When his mother gives him the challenge to become a good French student, incentivizing it with the promise of 1000 francs, Antoine immediately becomes more ambitious for himself. Additionally, the family seems to be getting along much better. In no time after they strike the deal, Antoine is lounging on the couch with a cigarette and a Balzac novel, like a humorously precocious French intellectual. It is as though his mother’s negotiation worked, as though the promise of a financial reward for academic achievement leads Antoine to love composition and writing. We hear the words of Balzac read aloud in voiceover as Antoine pores over the page, intoxicated by the beauty and power of the language. He even makes a small altar for Balzac, his newfound idol. Even though it nearly burns the house down, it is still a representation of Antoine’s redemption, and the family goes out for a movie together, laughing gaily in the car, the picture of a happy family. It seems as though Antoine will finally find happiness and purpose in adolescence, and that he might even piece together his broken home life.
Antoine's ambitious paper is rather misguided, however, and it hardly pays off. His newfound devotion to Balzac proves too strong when he turns in a paper that is simply a transcription of his favorite passages from Balzac’s writing. Even though the paper is meant to be about the death of his grandfather, he borrows exact passages from Balzac’s writing, and his cantankerous and easily angered French teacher immediately spots the fraud. This revelation dismantles all of the good karma that Antoine seems to have been accruing. His French teacher reads aloud his paper in front of the class, tauntingly informing the clueless boy, “Your search for perfection led you straight to an F, my friend.” Antoine’s passion for Balzac is misplaced and his mother’s financial incentive only leads him more astray than if she had not intervened.
In this section of the film, Truffaut maintains a playful visual style and the photography reflects an experimental approach so common to the French New Wave. Indeed, The 400 Blows demonstrates many conventions of the New Wave movement, such as its playful photographic techniques and studies of less traditional or naturally sympathetic characters. Along with Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, Truffaut's 400 Blows is credited with bringing the New Wave to international attention. Truffaut’s approach to the visual makeup of his shots is particularly unique. The camera often takes unexpected angles which highlight thematic and narrative elements with greater vividness. For instance, in this section of the film, the boys go for a jog with a physical education instructor. As they go out running into the streets of Paris, the camera takes more of a birds’ eye view. From that angle, we watch them run down the street, almost the size of ants. First, one boy peels off from the group. Then, René and Antoine leave. Then more. Gradually, almost all of the boys leave the clump of runners, but the instructor, who is in the front, never looks back to see. By the end it is only him and about three other boys. The sight of this choreography from above gives the viewer a more omniscient and objective standpoint, and we are able to see the absurd sight gag of a group of runners that dwindles and dwindles, until almost no one is left but the clueless teacher.
