François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents coups | The 400 blows (1960)

In the vanguard of the nouvelle vague cinema mentioned below in Godard's film À bout de souffle, Les Quatre Cents coups was the first of the films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel saga, which was followed by the twenty-minute short Antoine et Colette (1962), and then the feature length films Baisers volés (1968), Domicile conjugal (1970) and L'Amour en fuite (1979).

In large part autobiographical, Les Quatre Cents coups (in spite of its very weird English translation) is a reference to leading a wild life: Antoine is brought up in a rather run-down flat with dysfunctional parents (his mother is far from motherly and is having an affair), his school is run on painfully traditional lines where learning by rote is the order of the day, and the main person he relates to is Rémy, his schoolmate who lives in rather more fortunate circumstances, but has a rebellious nature that chimes with Antoine's.

Antoine plays truant, indulges in petty theft, has a healthy disrespect for authority, sleeps out in Paris one day, lies to his French teacher that his mother has died, visits the cinema as much as he can, tells the truth when he says he's learned a Balzac passage by heart but is disbelieved by his French teacher. And finally he steals a typewriter but is discovered in the act of returning it and is denounced by his father. His punishment: ending up, at thirteen years of age, in a military-style youth centre, from which he escapes, runs, runs, until he reaches the sea and...what next? To be continued.