Summary
We see René and Antoine running down a large set of stairs. They yell at a man passing by, then keep going. Later that evening, René sits eating a meal at the dinner table with his father. His father asks him if he’s seen his mother, and René tells him that she was home when he got back from school. His father says, “She makes sure she’s never home when I am. She must be up to something.” When his father goes to get something from the kitchen, René switches the clock and steals some food to bring to Antoine in the next room. Antoine is reading by a small light in the room where the horse mannequin is kept. René gets back to the table just as his father is returning from the kitchen. As his father sits down, the clock, which René has changed, starts to chime. René’s father leaves, thinking that it’s 9:30 already.
Left alone, René turns the clock back to the real time and takes more food to Antoine, before urging him to hurry up so they can make it to the movie theater. We see the boys watching the screen, and Antoine blows some bubble gum. On their way out of the theater, they snatch a photo of a woman off a nearby wall and head home. Back at René’s, they smoke and drink wine while playing backgammon. When they hear someone getting home, René gets anxious and wants to get rid of the smell of smoke. They shake the blankets to get rid of the smell, put away the backgammon board, and Antoine finds a hiding spot just as René’s father comes in. He wants to know why it smells so smokey, and tells René that he’s taking the cost of the cigars out of René’s allowance. He then takes a coat off of the horse mannequin, talking about the fact that the mannequin is a “work of art.”
The next day, we see the boys shooting spitballs from a window in René’s roof at unsuspecting passerby on the street. René picks up Antoine’s father’s Michelin guide (Antoine did steal it), and considers selling his father’s horse. “He’d kill me for sure,” René says, but Antoine urges him that they should do it, then “head for the beach, set up a boat business, and get everyone off our backs.” The scene shifts and we see René, Antoine, and a girl walking in a park. The boys flank the girl on either side and hold her hands. We then see a puppet show, which a number of children watch, yelling and cheering along with the story of Little Red Riding Hood. In the back row, Antoine and René argue about selling their parents’ belongings for money.
Antoine goes to his father’s office, and sneaks in when no one is around. He goes to his father’s desk and steals the typewriter from it. Outside, he and René run away from the office building and down into the subway. They emerge elsewhere, still carrying the typewriter, and run into a man who wants to buy it. They hand it over, then wait for the man to retrieve some money for it in a shop. When they hide nearby, they see him walking out of the shop and away with the typewriter without paying for it, and run out to confront him about it. He says he’ll hand over the typewriter if they give him some money for it, but they fight with him insisting they have no money. Antoine threatens to punch him, and the man still won’t hand it over, when suddenly the boys spot a policeman coming around the corner. The man hands over the typewriter, and the boys walk away.
As they walk, Antoine tells René that his father will know that it was him who stole his typewriter. “It was your idea!” says René and the boys argue. Antoine decides that he will put on a disguise (a hat) and return the typewriter in the night. When he goes back up to the office, a night guard is waiting for him. As Antoine puts the typewriter back on the desk, the guard grabs him and recognizes him as Doinel’s son. Trying to save his reputation as a guard, the guard grabs Antoine and calls Mr. Doinel, telling him to come to the office immediately. René waits for Antoine outside the office, when suddenly he sees Doinel dragging Antoine down the street by the collar insisting, “The games are over.” Doinel walks Antoine down the street, telling him, “If I had done this at your age, my father would have killed me!” He takes him to the police station and asks to speak to the chief.
Inside, the chief advises Doinel to be harder on his son, but Doinel tells him that “his mother and I aren’t like that.” The police chief and Doinel commiserate about how hard parenting is, and Doinel complains that Antoine doesn’t even listen when he is spoken to. Putting the hat on Antoine’s head, Doinel bemoans, “Who knows what goes on in that head of his!” The chief calls in a policeman to bring Antoine into another room for questioning, suggesting that Antoine is guilty of vagrancy and theft. Antoine goes in to the other room, and the chief asks Doinel if he’s decided what he wants to do. When Doinel worries that if he brings Antoine home, he will just run away again, the chief offers to put him in the Observation Center. “It’s well organized and he’ll learn a skill,” the chief says. While this seems promising at first, Doinel seems less sure when the chief informs him that sending Antoine there would mean forfeiting parental rights, and that Antoine would have to appear in a juvenile court. Eventually, Doinel agrees.
In the next room, a policeman questions Antoine about his theft of the typewriter, then has him sign a document. Another officer takes him downstairs, where he is put in a cell with another criminal, an adult man. The man asks Antoine what he did, and Antoine tells him that he ran away from home. The scene shifts to later on and we see two policemen playing a game and another reading a paper. In his cell, Antoine sleeps on the floor, but is awakened by the arrival of two women at his cell. The policemen put the women in the cell, then move Antoine to a much smaller one. We see the police station from Antoine’s perspective, through the wire of his cell. After some time passes, the policemen let the prisoners out of their cells, including Antoine, and lead them out to a bus. We see Antoine looking out the window of the back of the bus through bars as they drive past various sites in Paris. Antoine begins to cry.
Analysis
When René offers for Antoine to stay in an often-vacant room of his family’s apartment, Antoine readily accepts and the boys begin to forge a lifestyle of petty criminals. Both of them want nothing more than to live a free and easy life of leisure, turning a profit and becoming unfettered from the responsibilities of civil society. They turn into enfants terrible, a French term for particularly rebellious and capricious children. In their lifestyle as libertine adults, they smoke in bed and drink wine, in spite of the fact that they haven’t even gone through puberty yet. They walk together through the park with a girl between them. They shoot spitballs and make plans for how they will turn a large enough profit to allow them to ignore the rules of pleasant society. The contrast between their adult actions, which turn them into tramps, and their relative youth is a comic and charming contrast.
We are reminded just how young René and Antoine are when they attend a puppet show. We see brief bits of the puppet show itself, a hand puppet rendering of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Truffaut chooses not to put much of the show itself on camera, however, focusing on the wide-eyed and expectant faces of the children in the audience. This shot mirrors the shots of the classroom from the beginning, in which the camera is directed at the students from the front of the room, from the teacher’s perspective. By positioning the camera more directly at the young people, Truffaut creates an intimacy between the viewer and the children. In effect, the viewer is invited to look at the children as if in a mirror, to empathize with their innocent wonder, their excitement, guffaws, and fear at watching the puppet show. The shot is a beautiful and comic one all at once. The shots of the children’s faces are long and the viewer looks into their eyes, feels their belief in the puppets, their belief in fiction.
The extended shots of the children watching the puppet show make way for one of the more comical contrasts of the film. After the camera shows the innocent and astonished faces of the children watching the puppet show, we see René and Antoine sitting in the back, hardly enjoying the show, just strategizing how they will be able to pawn some belongings and earn some extra money. While the other children their age are more appropriately imaginative, able to engage with the fun of a puppet show, the two boys are like old gangsters, plotting their next move. Indeed, they find a suitable con soon enough, choosing to break into Antoine’s stepfather’s office and steal his typewriter to sell. The way that Truffaut shoots the two boys aligns the viewer with them, depicting their freedom and their sense of adventure, even if they might be misguidedly poorly behaved.
When Doinel comes to realize that it was Antoine who stole his typewriter, he decides that he must take a more dramatic action than simply scolding him and bringing him home. Rather than confront the emotions and turmoil that might be creating Antoine’s disobedience, Doinel decides to turn the rascal over to the police, turning him in as a delinquent, and hoping that the authorities will be able to straighten him out one way or another. Yet again, in this sequence, we see the huge divide between the young and the old. While Antoine may like to imagine that he is an adult, and while he does not share a wide-eyed sense of the fantastical with his peers, he is still only a child. Doinel and the police chief speak about Antoine in the third person in the chief’s office, as Antoine sits nearby, lost in thoughts, imaginings and schemes.
Indeed, Antoine is not really a villain or a delinquent at all, but simply a child with a dream of freedom and an unformed sense of consequence. When he is handed over to a police officer and locked up in a small cell, the adult criminal with whom he is sharing the cell asks him what he did. Antoine does not think to tell the man about his crimes, but answers simply, “I ran away from home.” In his mind, Antoine has an independent streak, and loftier dreams than can be held by his neglectful home life and oppressive school environment. This has landed him in a small cell, unable to wriggle out or escape his situation. The camera assumes his position once again; when he is put in the smaller cell in the police station, the room is shot through the wire of the cell, as if from his point of view. Then later, he is loaded onto a truck that drives through the city. This moment echoes the very first shots of the film, in which the camera seems to be in the perspective of a child looking out the window of a car, driving through a Parisian afternoon. Antoine can still see the beauty of the city, only now it is through the bars of the truck. Rather than freedom, the drive represents his confinement, and this makes him cry.
