The name of the movie "Four Hundred Blows" comes from a French proverb and has the meaning of "absurd and willful".
In the Chinese, it is similar to the semantic meaning represented by "miserable green youth". The film, in its name, records how a middle school student experienced the ignorant and bumpy years when he was twelve or thirteen years old.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="18" > bad growing environment</h1>
The protagonist of the film is an illegitimate child who was raised in foster care and returned to his mother at the age of eight. He knew he wasn't welcome because his mother used to yell at him. One scolded him for being a liar, and one wanted to drive him to the orphanage. This uncared family relationship catalyzed the self-awareness of the teenager's growth, making his precocious and susceptible heart full of loneliness and uneasiness.
The distance between his mother and him invisibly expanded into the distance between the world and him. His Mandarin teacher was even worse, seeing him as a hopeless rebel. If you do the wrong thing, you will be punished indiscriminately. In the eyes of teenagers, teachers are equal to schools, and schools are equal to useless and uninteresting places.
The stepfather didn't hate him, but he had less patience. When the brothers are good, when they are angry, they are reflexively angry, often unconsciously hurting the child's heart. Like a teenager skipping school, his stepfather went to school to investigate, but he didn't even ask a question, so he rewarded the teenager with two slaps in front of the whole class. These two slaps almost broke the love between father and son.
Another time, the teenager wanted to fight for the composition score, and suddenly wanted to place candles to worship the literary hero, and almost caused a fire. When the stepfather was angry, the child could not listen to a word of the truth, but only made cruel remarks to send him out of the house and throw him to the military school.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" Data-track="19" > who is at fault for the twisted personality? </h1>
After several setbacks, the teenager became withdrawn and self-exiled, and began to run away from home and even steal. So he was sent from the police station and the court to the penitentiary. After all, the teenager was a teenager, and when he was sent to the prison car, looking at the street scenes and crowds that had passed away in front of him, he shed tears. However, education in correctional institutions is not more tolerant than in schools.
The mother who came to visit him not only did not encourage him, but also blindly satirized, and even said that she did not want him, and let him fend for himself. Whose fault is it to get to this point?
The director slowly states the experience from the perspective of a very calm, unemotional bystander. Mother, stepfather, teacher, classmate, judge and teenager himself, each seems to be only a little wrong, but it is a huge torque to the teenager's personality and life, deflecting the direction of his future life.
Teacher Guowen is not an educated person, and his love is drowned in anger because he is angry about the challenge to his authority. The mother's ability to love is insufficient because she is unhappy. Unhappy, I thought that my son was a drag bottle and a debt collector who tied himself to death. The stepfather's love could not be sustained because there was no opportunity to listen carefully.
The teenager is like a mirror, and the true face and true state of the adult are all reflected in his heart.
Just like in the play, the mother is obviously out of affair, but she returns late on the grounds of overtime. At this time, the stepfather who cooked was still reciting the great principle of filial piety to his mother. The teenager couldn't help but laugh and chose to pretend to be garlic, without breaking the lie. The adult world's hearts are different and he knows it. In his mind, it was as if there were two forces competing:
One is the oppressive forces from the family, the school, and society;
One is his enthusiasm for not accepting defeat and desperately trying to find an exit.
It is these two forces that run through this film.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="20" > defeated by two forces in life</h1>
From the perspective of behavior, teenagers wander around, skipping school to go to playgrounds and playing marbles, and sexual things also seem to be "quite aware of one or two".
In addition to these same patterns as the ordinary "bad field boy", he has actually shown a special interest and ability in novels and movies. He remembered the passages he had read, said what he had learned from watching movies, and had a feeling for the world.
This is his talent, his own strength, but unfortunately he is unaware. Moreover, the world is determined to oppose him and make him do not go wrong. No one cared about him, and there wasn't a single thing he was happy to do.
The last two forces continued to fight, and in the end, the teenager lost.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="21" > fully portray the unsettling power of teenagers</h1>
The film doesn't end here, though, and then the director really starts to express his own position. In "Four Hundred Blows", the two forces of youth growth are focused.
We might as well think in reverse, if the director doesn't want to highlight personal opinions, he can end with an elevation shot after a psychological interview with a teenager or after his mother's visit, simply taking the audience's eyes to the blue sky outside the walls of the correctional home.
Or, for example, in the Taiwanese 1990s movie "The Juvenile Murder On Muling Street", the director ended with "the prison guard threw the tape sent by the visiting classmate into the trash can". Another of Cai Liang's "Long Live Love" ends with "People who can't get love can't cry for themselves".
The former means "the burial of youth". The latter means "the lonely heart of the wounded.".
The director is not, he is dedicated to portraying the uneasiness of teenagers. A shot that is essentially only a few seconds, but stretched up to four minutes long, the director's intention is self-evident.
The teenager sneaked out of the penitentiary and ran wildly to the sound of police whistles. He wanted to flee the world, to escape all the injustice that had been inflicted on him. The teenager kept running, alluding to his aimless, unsophisticated, somehow becoming such a soul. He wanted to see the sea, because it was a beautiful corner that represented freedom and did no harm to him.
Of course, he can't escape, he can't escape the price he must bear for wrong behavior, but how can the adults around him escape the responsibility of neglecting education? In the last scene, the teenager looks back helplessly, hesitantly, and in fear. This shot is like a hot whip in the face, completely fixing the audience's thoughts in this questioning. What's going on? Who can save him, and how?
Children learn about the world through adulthood. When an adult abandons his child, abandons his enthusiasm, and abandons his vision of life, then the child will one day give up the world and give back to this boring and ruthless world with indignation. Youth is a rope that climbs a rock wall. If you want to reach the top, it takes a lot of work. But to go down, just let him go.