A Classic of the French New Wave, And The Child Actor Who Made It Unforgettable
Jean-Pierre Léaud in "The 400 Blows"
I first saw François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” decades ago, but not until last week did I watch the interview that catapulted 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud to stardom. As Antoine Doinel, the film’s scrappy, unloved hero, Léaud convincingly moves from lying to truancy and theft, and ultimately—thanks to his monstrously neglectful, selfish parents—incarceration in a state reformatory.
In his initial audition, Léaud is both tough and charming, a captivating talker with a big personality. He answers Truffaut’s questions directly, then adds a tantalizing bit of information that leads the director to inquire further.
Truffaut: Do you think you look 12 1/2?
Léaud: I think so….And you said you needed a guy who’s mischievous.*
Truffaut: And you’re mischievous?
Léaud: Yes. I’m not much of a thinker.
Léaud’s face is adult-like but only intermittently serious, since he punctuates his answers with a brief, incandescent smile. The effect is enchanting, like glimpsing the sun through scuttling clouds. Though Léaud is clearly ambitious and determined to get the job, he’s also having fun. When Truffaut comments that his boarding school must be displeased by his absence, Léaud replies, “It doesn’t matter as long as I’m happy.” Truffaut, disarmed, says, “I see. That’s all that matters.”
Not surprisingly, Léaud booked the part and went on to a successful acting career that continues to this day. What wasn’t clear then—except to Truffaut, apparently—was the uncanny physical resemblance between the two. As Léaud grew older—and continued to portray Antoine Doinel in three subsequent movies—he became not just Truffaut’s alter ego but his doppelgänger, a slender young man with dark, wavy hair and the face of a poet.
The success of “The 400 Blows” made Truffaut a New Wave sensation and Léaud a 14-year-old movie star. The teenager became an adult overnight and permanently, particularly after he was expelled from school and ejected from the home where his parents, an actress and a screenwriter, had boarded him. Léaud’s life might have turned out like Doinel’s if not for Truffaut, who got him an apartment—and employed him as an assistant until he was able to support himself as actor.
Unlike Doinel—and Truffaut** himself, whose grim boyhood is recounted in “The 400 Blows”—Léaud at 14 gained the emotional and financial support of a caring adult. After the director’s tragic death at 52, the actor said Truffaut was the first person he had admired. “He realized that children understood things better than adults did. He was purely intuitive. We operated in a sort of complicity.”
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“The 400 Blows”, along with other French New Wave films, is available on Max.
*The the subtitles translate guailleur as mischievous, but a more apt translation is cheeky.
**Truffaut’s youth also ended at 14, when he left school and worked at menial jobs before being sent to a reformatory for stealing. He later enlisted in the army, but was dishonorably discharged for desertion. If not for the film critic André Bazin and his wife, who informally adopted him, things might have been even worse.