This beautiful film explores the fortunes of Antoine, a schoolboy in late fifties Paris. He lives with his parents in an apartment and sleeps on a camp bed in the kitchen, every night he has to deal with the dustbin before getting into his bed. It soon transpires that all is not as it seems when his father complains about his behaviour and goes on to say about he gave him a home and his name. For this and a number of other reasons Antoine slips into truancy from school.
He would like to leave school and to learn a trade, but his mother sees the benefit of an education and offers Antoine 1000 francs if he does well in writing a composition, as she recognises the value of French more than that of Algebra or Science. Unfortunately Antoine’s zeal causes him to plagiarise Balzac which leads to him eventually being expelled from the school.
This film was one of the first of the new wave, one of those directly reacting against le cine de papa. It shows Paris as a depressed city finding its feet after the Second World War. Overall the film is a plea for freedom from the constraints of society that turn poor Antoine into truant from school and then into a criminal.
I love the brutal honesty of this film. It does not flinch from telling and exposing truths and reaching natural conclusions without sentimentality. As I’ve said before this was a pioneering film, a film that showed how life was then. It was about real people encountering real issues. It is also quite interesting to see the directors that were influenced by this and how it shaped film to this day.
One of my favorites! Yes, it was very brutal, but so very real.
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