Summary
The camera moves along the streets of Paris as the opening credits roll. We see the Eiffel Tower from a distance. The camera then moves under the Eiffel Tower and past it. The scene shifts and we see a schoolroom filled with boys taking a test. One boy pulls out a photograph of a woman in lingerie and passes it to a boy in front of him, who passes it around the room. Eventually the photograph gets to a boy named Doinel, who draws on the woman’s face. The schoolteacher sees Doinel pass it to another boy and orders him to bring the photograph to the front. The teacher examines the photo and orders the boy to stand in the corner. When the teacher announces that they have one more minute for the test, the boys groan. The test period comes to an end and the row leaders collect the tests. One boy refuses to turn in the test, and the teacher yells, “No special treatment!” The row leader collects the boy’s test, before dismissing the class. As Doinel goes to leave with his classmates, the teacher stops him, reminding him that “Recess is a reward, not a right!” Doinel goes back to the corner.
Outside, boys play at recess. Some boys fight one another, while others play games. Inside, we see Doinel writing on the wall and hear him narrate in voiceover, “Here poor Antoine Doinel was unfairly punished by Sourpuss for a pinup that fell from the sky. It will be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Outside, the school teacher separates two boys and punishes them with no recess for 3 days. As the boys file back into the classroom, a few of them go to the corner to check on Antoine, but he pushes them away. The teacher goes to investigate what Antoine has been up to, immediately angered to find that Antoine has written a poem on the wall in the corner. He orders Antoine to take his seat and write down a special extra assignment to do that night. He tells the students to conjugate the words, “I deface the classroom walls and abuse French verse.” As the students begin to work, the teacher orders Antoine to get something to wipe his poem off the wall. Antoine skulks out of the room.
We see a boy ripping out pages and pages of his notebook, and getting ink all over his hands from an exploded pen. The teacher writes out a poem on the board, as the boy continues to rip out more and more pages. Antoine comes back in to clean up his poem, but not before making his fellow students laugh by starting to touch the back of the teacher’s head. As the teacher writes on the board, his back to students, they begin to rough house. When he turns around, they immediately stop. As the teacher recites the poem, which has a romantic subject matter, and turns back towards the board, the boys whistle and become rowdy again. “Who’s the idiot who whistled?” the teacher yells, throwing his chalk at one student. “I’ve known idiots before, but at least they were polite!” the teacher yells. He then scolds Antoine for only making the wall dirtier.
The boys emerge from school. Antoine and a friend, whose name is René, call to another boy named Mauricet and ask him where he got his glasses, which look more like aviation goggles. “I bought them,” he tells them. As Mauricet leaves, Antoine scolds him as the “louse who squealed on me today!” The boys walk home, taking a break to sit on a park bench on the way. They complain about their teacher, who they refer to as Sourpuss. Antoine says, “I’m gonna smash his face in before I go to the army!” They say their goodbyes and Antoine runs home.
At home, we see Antoine throwing some coals on a stove, before pulling some cash out from a hiding place in the mantle. He goes into another room and brushes his hair. Then he goes and sets the table for dinner, laying out plates, glasses, and silverware. Grabbing a notebook, he begins to write, “I deface the classroom walls,” but he hears his mother arriving home and greets her. She greets him brusquely and asks if he bought flour like she asked him. When Antoine tells her that he lost the list she made him, his mother scolds him and tells him to get her slippers as she takes off her stockings. She then tells him to go get the flour immediately, before looking at herself in the mirror and touching her face. Outside a store, Antoine hears two women talking about a difficult birth. Antoine listens in, shocked about their frank discussion of caesareans and bloody births.
Later, we see Antoine climbing the steps to his apartment with his stepfather. He tells him about his fight with his mother, and his stepfather urges him, “You have to handle her gently.” His stepfather shows Antoine a fog light he bought for a race of some sort, before putting flour on his son’s nose playfully. Back at the apartment, Antoine’s stepfather makes a joke about the flour, but Antoine’s mother snatches the flour and doesn’t find the joke amusing. Antoine asks his stepfather for money, and his stepfather hands over 500 francs even though he thinks that Antoine’s mother should provide it. As Mr. Doinel sits at the table, he asks Antoine where he got his pen, and Antoine tells him that he traded for it. “You’ve been doing a lot of trading lately,” Mr. Doinel says.
Mrs. Doinel brings out a soup and they eat dinner. At the end of the meal, Antoine clears the table. Mr. Doinel tells his wife that a relative called to tell them they had another child. Mrs. Doinel is disgusted that they have had so many children in such a short amount of time. “Speaking of children, what should we do with this one for the summer?” Mr. Doinel asks. They consider summer camp, but don’t make a definite decision about it. The scene shifts, and we see Antoine and his stepfather unfurling a banner that reads “Lion’s Club.” Mr. Doinel invites his wife to join him on an outing on Sunday, but she tells him she’d rather rest at a girlfriend’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Doinel begin to argue and Antoine takes out the trash. The scene shifts. Early the next morning, Mrs. Doinel awakens Antoine to tell him that the alarm has gone off. He dresses hastily.
Analysis
The opening of the film establishes a strong sense of place. As the credits roll, the camera moves briskly through the streets of Paris in traveling shots. The shots of various buildings in the city are shot from below, as if from a moving car. In an analysis of the opening credits on Roger Ebert’s website, critic Jim Emerson suggests, “The camera seems a bit like the POV of a child riding in a car around Paris—attention always fixated on the Tower which dominates the skyline.” The Eiffel Tower, Paris’ most recognizable landmark, a symbol of Western industrial prosperity, can be seen in many of the opening shots, and the camera gets closer and closer to it as the credits continue, traveling underneath it by the end. While the choice to shoot the opening credits with views of the city doesn’t strike a contemporary viewer as particularly groundbreaking, at the time of the film’s release, Truffaut was breaking with convention and creating his own cinematic vocabulary.
From there, we are dropped into a spartan and oppressive academic landscape, a boys’ school where creativity and playfulness are nipped in the bud by humorless adults. We see the protagonist, Antoine, in a classroom of boys taking a test. As they pass around a pinup photograph of a woman, the angry teacher, whom they call “Sourpuss,” catches it just as Antoine is passing it. Antoine suffers the consequences. The division between the teacher and student is stark, and at times violent. The teacher belittles his students as stupid and disobedient, interpreting their free-spiritedness not with good humor and understanding, but with punishment and abuse. He disparages them all, saying, ”I’ve known idiots before, but at least they were polite…They kept their heads down and didn’t get caught.” In this, we can see the backwardness of the teacher’s logic; he suggests that he would respect the boys more if they were more repressed and better at hiding their disobedience. Rather than holding them to a higher standard and being patient with them, he scolds and diminishes them. Thus, the film positions the world of childhood and adolescence as in direct opposition to the joyless world of adulthood.
The distance between childhood and adulthood is depicted not only through the narrative itself, but also through the photography of the film and the choreography of the characters’ movements. As Antoine goes to clean up his verse scrawled on the wall, he pretends to touch the teacher’s head. As the teacher writes on the board, his back to his students, the boys erupt almost instantaneously into a raucous choreography, putting one another in headlocks and tousling one another’s hair. As Sourpuss turns around, the boys immediately assume obedient and studious positions once again. The camera is placed in the back of the room, and from this angle perfectly shows the power dynamic between teacher and student—bursts of transgression followed by immediate good behavior. Truffaut’s depiction of this dynamic is at once realistic and playful, and the viewers are aligned with the schoolboys, trying to find as much fun as they can in the gray schoolroom. Their well-practiced disobedience is pleasantly depicted, an inside joke the film lets us in on.
Antoine is the protagonist, and the viewer gets a special window into his experience and psychology. After he has been put in the corner in school, he begins to write a poem on the wall. We hear him recite the poem in voiceover; it is about the oppressive brute force of the teacher’s logic, the teacher’s insistence on “an eye for an eye” philosophy. Antoine speaks truth to power, and we hear him conceive of his act of dissent, as if we are inside his head. He seeks justice for the disproportion of his punishment, and rebels against a corrupt system. Later, Antoine is alone at home, and we watch him in a private moment. He goes into a small room in his house and looks at himself in the mirror. Mirrors surround Antoine, and we see his face from various perspectives, as he stares at multiple selves. This image, of numerous Antoines, suggests the fragmentation of adolescent identity, the ways that identity can feel multiple and difficult to pin down. Truffaut reflects this emotional experience of adolescence through the shot of Antoine in the mirror. After looking at himself for a minute, Antoine picks up his mother’s eyelash curler and experiments with using it for a moment, a curious and private moment to which only the viewer is privy.
The division between the adult and the child world is again reflected in Antoine’s relationship to his parents. Mrs. Doinel is busy, overworked, and seemingly frustrated with her role as a housewife. She scolds Antoine for his carelessness and shows him no affection. Mr. Doinel, while more playful and fun-loving than his wife, seems similarly disinterested in his son. Antoine enjoys when his stepfather makes jokes at his mother’s expense and engages in silly antics (like wiping flour on his son’s nose), but as Antoine clears the dishes, Mr. Doinel suggests that they send their son away to summer camp. Antoine has a much more affectionate relationship with his stepfather, but neither of his parents seem particularly interested in their roles as parents, and by and large, Antoine is left to look after himself. Thus, the division between the adult and adolescent worlds is deepened. Neither side can fully understand the other.
