Movie #39: Released in 1959, 99 minutes, directed by François Truffaut. New to me!

Letterboxd Score: 3.5 stars

On the one hand, Antoine is a little shit.*

On the other hand, he’s not in a great situation. School sucks, he’s not particularly good at it, and his home life doesn’t permit enough time to do assigned work, which makes a bad situation worse. His mom isn’t very loving, and he sleeps in a sleeping back instead of sheets. He’s best friend at school is a rich miscreant. His dad seems ok.

So he relieves his misery by stealing left-right-and-center. And blowing off school. But that only makes his situation worse. Things spiral a bit out of control and soon he’s off to a kind of juvenile detention.

Intellectually, I sympathize. Intellectually, I know he might turn out to be a good kid, if he got the right kind of support and it’s kind of a tragedy he doesn’t. Intellectually, I know Antoine is based on Truffaut to some extent, and look at him! Intellectually, I know sympathy should not be contingent only on him actually turning out to be a good kid.

And yet, I didn’t find I sympathized a ton with him and so it’s hard for me to connect with the movie. Maybe I’m getting old and conservative or something. But I feel what I feel and can’t reason myself into feeling otherwise.

The movie is funny. I especially like the scene where the line of kids following the gym instructor bit by bit evaporates from seemingly 40 to 2. And you can tell the style is something new. The ending scene is poetic. And Antoine is a new kind of lead. But still – I wasn’t that caught up in it.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

Probably because it birthed a movement, and because people who were to some degree little shits when growing up (and maybe grew out of it – or not!) see themselves reflected in it.

Next: North by Northwest

*This sounds like I’m writing him off, which is what all the adults do in the story. That makes me feel bad. If anything, maybe this movie succeeds most in making me examine the tension between my emotional and intellectual response to Antoine’s life.