Synopsis Of The Four Hundred Coups (Les Quatre Cents Coups)

Direction: Francois truffaut

Production: Francois truffaut

Script: Francois Truffaut and Marcel Moussy

Music: Jean Constantin

Photography: Henri Decaë

Distribution: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble, Patrick Auffay and Georges Flamant.

Country: France

Year:1959

Gender: Drama

Duration: 95 minutes

Producer: Les Films du Carrosse

Belonging to the new French wave, The Four Hundred Blows (1959) is considered one of the first films within this genre, it was directed, produced and written by Francois Truffaut, a great representative of the so-called Nouvelle vague, an intellectual movement with which the cinema joins the social revolution of the early years sixty.

With the participation of Jean-Pierre Léaud (Antoine Doniel) who represents a young Parisian who lives difficult situations with his mother, role played by Claire Maurier (Gilberte Doniel), a woman who faced being a single mother and later apparently found love with Julien (Albert Remy), who became the stepfather of his son, with whom, he never managed to have a good relationship, so Antoine gets into a series of problems and goes from being a naughty young man to a conventional criminal, behavior that will take him to a juvenile correctional facility to the joy of his parents, later he will escape from the reformatory to fulfill the greatest of all his dreams

The new French wave sought to make cinema more artistic and intellectual, using cinematographic language to perfection, Truffaut makes this story almost a self-portrait, since, the life that this Parisian boy is actually an approach to what was the childhood and youth of the French director constantly remarking one of the main characteristics of the new wave: conflict between couples, represented by Antoine's parents, who argue and fight constantly.

Another of the characteristics of this intellectual movement, as we had already commented previously, is that of the social revolution that began in the late 1950s, which is captured in this film, through the setting, we can see a Paris where the economic devastation is remarkable and the scale of poverty in which many of its inhabitants live population.