Small Change at BAM

Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) is deservedly lauded as one of the great cinematic portrayals of childhood --- in particular, childhood as a prison (with adults as the guards) that crushes idiosyncrasy and imagination. Seventeen years later, Truffaut offered a riposte to his earlier views, in the form of Small Change (also known as Pocket Money), which we caught last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Quite possibly the most charming movie ever made, it's also an extremely persuasive argument about the joys of creating beings who didn't ask to be born, assuming of course that the kids could then be raised in a small village in 1970s France, where the teacher's wife is best friends with the woman who takes tickets at the local theater, who relies on a ten-year-old boy to take care of her three-year-old son. In this world, a young girl shouts that she's hungry and an entire courtyard of neighbors conspire to deliver her a basket of roast chicken, bread, and fruit. Here, too, a baby falls out of a window and lands laughing.

Truffaut revels in the myriad delights of youth, including the first flush of sexual feeling, but he never completely abandons the realist impulse of The 400 Blows. After all, life is often quite difficult, no matter where you're raised. His somber counterpoint narrative about a mistreated boy allows for the climactic speech about the perils and promises of childhood to ring with genuine feeling.

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