On Loca­tion: The Nor­mandy beach from The 400 Blows

After being banned from the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val as a crit­ic in 1958, François Truf­faut mis­chie­vous­ly returned the fol­low­ing year to have his own debut fea­ture nom­i­nat­ed for the festival’s top prize. The film that earned him such a stark turn­around in career was The 400 Blows, a beau­ti­ful but dev­as­tat­ing piece of cin­e­ma that still defies the con­ven­tions of the com­ing-of-age dra­ma to tell a more deeply per­son­al and affect­ing narrative.

Being a film that would change the face of French cin­e­ma in the decades that fol­lowed, the imagery of The 400 Blows is burned into the cin­e­mat­ic hive-mind, from view­ers and crit­ics to film stu­dents and cineast­es. Due to a pen­chant for loca­tion film­ing on Truffaut’s part, these imagers are filled with real places. With the film famous­ly boast­ing one of cinema’s strongest final scenes, the loca­tion of its famous final track to freeze-frame makes for a deeply mov­ing cin­e­mat­ic pilgrimage.

Truffaut’s debut fol­lows a young cipher of him­self, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a char­ac­ter he would return to again and again as the years went by. Strug­gling to fit in at school and being a social tear­away, he dis­likes author­i­ty of any sort, stum­bling around Paris try­ing to dis­cov­er some mean­ing to his exis­tence. With a volatile fam­i­ly life at home and lit­tle com­fort else­where, except in the nov­els of Hon­oré de Balzac, Doinel soon turns to pet­ty crime before final­ly end­ing up in trou­ble with the law. Essen­tial­ly a bio­graph­i­cal piece, The 400 Blows is a med­i­ta­tion on the ear­ly life of the direc­tor and his own trou­bled past, lit­tered with run-ins with authority.

If Truffaut’s film charts any­thing, it is a sense of flee­ing; from a crum­bling fam­i­ly life to the bul­ly­ing of teach­ers and even­tu­al­ly more offi­cial author­i­ty fig­ures. Because of this flight, Truf­faut makes exten­sive use of real places, one that marks loca­tion film­ing as a key ele­ment of the New Wave he spear­head­ed. Paris nev­er looked bet­ter, from its open­ing mon­tage of des­per­ate glimpses towards the Eif­fel Tow­er to Montmartre’s grub­by streets in stark reflec­tion to the gleam­ing white of Sacré-Cœur. But if a loca­tion real­ly gets to the heart of the film then it is the final scene’s use of Normandy’s coun­try­side and beaches.

In the nar­ra­tive, Doinel has just escaped a young offend­ers insti­tute and is on the run again. We keep to his pace, run­ning through the win­tery coun­try roads that even­tu­al­ly lead to the coast­line. In per­haps what is the most famous con­clu­sion to any French film, we fol­low him along a des­o­late beach, cold­ly alone and not dar­ing to look back. He con­tin­ues on until there is nowhere left to turn, except back towards us. In his attempt to escape from the world, he lit­er­al­ly runs out of land. He turns to the view­er, as if to say ​“Where now?”, and Truf­faut freezes the frame and zooms. The only move­ment left for Doinel is beyond him, with­in our per­cep­tion of his life rather than his own.

The beach is ques­tion is in Villers-sur-Mer, a pic­turesque Nor­mandy town just to the south of the more lav­ish Deauville where Parisians typ­i­cal­ly hol­i­day in the warmer months. After hours of research using Google Earth, attempt­ing to dig­i­tal­ly fol­low in Doinel’s foot­steps, I marked the exact spot on the beach using a par­tic­u­lar­ly evoca­tive man­sion on the hill­side (with a dis­tinc­tive tur­ret) and the slop­ing cor­ner of land descend­ing into the sea from the rocky hill­side above as ref­er­ence points. It was only to be con­firmed, how­ev­er, by a visit.

Trav­el­ling to Nor­mandy on an incred­i­bly gusty day, I walked from the town along the coast­line in search of Doinel’s run­ning route. With the hill­side crum­bling into the sea, a vari­ety of defences have been erect­ed since Truf­faut filmed, seg­ment­ing the beach in the hope of pre­serv­ing the remain­ing land. Much of the hill­side has fall­en since Doinel ran here and the steps he uses are no longer present. Walk­ing fur­ther past the rocks, the ear­ly evening sea even­tu­al­ly retreat­ed to reveal enough of the sandy beach below to recre­ate the shot. It was impos­si­ble to resist run­ning along the beach myself, before wan­der­ing to the water to take a final Polaroid of the tide as it sank into the Chan­nel and beyond.

See­ing the loca­tion height­ened the feel­ing of melan­choly from Truffaut’s scene. The blus­tery, emp­ty realm was unfor­giv­ing and tricky to manœu­vre around, just like Doinel’s fam­i­ly life and social sit­u­a­tion. Con­trast­ing this land­scape with the bright lights of Paris was a mas­ter­stroke on the director’s part, bring­ing to the fore the des­per­a­tion of the char­ac­ter. ​“After this, I can’t live with my par­ents any­more. I’ve got to dis­ap­pear,” Doinel sug­gests in the film after lying about the death of his moth­er. Truf­faut could not have cho­sen a bet­ter place to mark such a dis­ap­pear­ance, as the waves extend far towards the hori­zon before even­tu­al­ly tip­ping into the sky.

With thanks to Polaroid Orig­i­nals.