School as Imprisonment (Allegory)
The film opens in a classroom filled with misbehaving children. At the front of the classroom is a tyrannical teacher who tries to control them. When we first meet Antoine, he is caught passing around a pinup and is forced to go and sit in the corner. While his classmates play at recess, he scrawls a poem about his imprisonment on the wall, comparing his teacher to a kind of corrupt dictator. Additionally, etched into the side of the school is the French motto: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The adults in the film prevent the boys from experiencing freedom, equality, or fraternity, and the classroom resembles a prison more than a school. This allegory for the schoolhouse as a kind of captivity is driven home by the fact that Antoine is, eventually, literally imprisoned, and sent away to an "observation center," essentially a juvenile detention center. The film positions all state-run institutions as being analogous to imprisonment, places to escape rather than explore.
The Tilt-a-Whirl (Symbol)
One day, instead of going to school, Antoine and one of his friends go to an amusement park. There, Antoine gets into a tilt-a-whirl machine that spins him, raising him from the ground and forcing him to remain in close contact with the walls. The centrifugal motion of the machine is symbolic of Antoine’s life and his behavior. Antoine is caught in a vicious circle, where he imitates the behavior of those around him and repeats his mistakes. While he wants nothing more than to be free, the structures of his life are such that he is always being forced into situations beyond his control, and no one will stop to try and better understand his point of view. Just as the tilt-a-whirl pins Antoine to the walls in such a way that he cannot escape the force of gravity, responsibility and the oppressive gravitational forces of the adult world pin him down emotionally and psychologically.
The Sea (Symbol)
At one point, Antoine confides in his best friend, René, that he has never been to the sea. Instead, he has spent his whole life in a family that didn't want him, in a crowded city, in a small apartment. René, who is wealthier, has seen the ocean many times. For Antoine, seeing the sea would mean tasting freedom for the first time, finally being able to break free from the confinement of school and city life. The sea, in its openness and expansiveness, symbolizes the freedom that Antoine is always after. Even his mother, who otherwise takes very little interest in her son, asks the judge if Antoine can be sent to a facility near the ocean. Thus, it is significant that when he runs away from the observation center, Antoine eventually arrives at the sea. As he looks out at the horizon line, he tastes freedom for the first time.
Mirrors (Motif)
Mirrors recur several times in the film. In the beginning, when Antoine first arrives home, he is alone, and goes to his mother's vanity table, looking at himself in the mirror. With three mirrors propped up next to each other Antoine's face is multiplied, and he stares at himself, eventually experimenting with his mother's eyelash curler. In this moment, the mirrors portray the way Antoine is confused about his identity, feeling as though he has multiple selves. Just as there are several reflections of his face, so too does he feel like his identity is fragmented, and he is incongruous with the world. Later, his mother, who doesn't seem to care very much for Antoine, looks in the mirror for a while, which shows her vanity and disregard for her role as a mother. Additionally, the next morning, Antoine goes to the mirror in the bathroom and wipes away some steam to look at his reflection. We hear an older voice recite in voiceover the first lines of the poem that Antoine wrote on the wall. Here, Antoine confronts himself as a misfit, looks into his own eyes and feels the way that he doesn't fit in with the oppressive structures at school.
The Burning Balzac Shrine (Symbol)
When Mrs. Doinel strikes a deal with Antoine to motivate him to write a good paper, he throws himself into the work of Balzac, and becomes obsessed with the author's prose. He feels so tied to Balzac's work that he even makes a small shrine to him in a box. He misguidedly lights a candle, puts it in the shrine, covers it with a cloth, and goes to eat dinner. The family dinner is interrupted by a small fire—the candle has set the shrine on fire. This event, and the image of the burning shrine, symbolizes the ways that Antoine's passions and desires cannot be contained, they are too much to be held within a small space. Just as the candle could not be confined to a box without overwhelming it with a fire, Antoine cannot be too confined without acting out. This event also shows the fact that Antoine is careless, and not very commonsensical.
