It is always worth not watching 400 Blows for a while before taking it up again for the sole reason that the last shot works best if one isn’t quite prepared for it. I have learned over successive viewings that one can know beforehand in detail the precise form in which the film closes – that being little Antoine staring directly into the camera through an unfocused frame – and it will prove repeatedly to be a startling moment. The shot is a brilliant collusion between Léaud and Truffaut, perhaps accidental, in which Léaud runs along the beach from left to right in an arc with his eyes on something to the distant right of the camera. At the last moment, as the camera drifts to the left, Léaud turns his head slightly and looks directly into the camera.


It is more complex than it sounds (pardon this awful analogy), but like a decent wine there are recognizable steps encountered on each sip:


1. At first one feels unsettled that both he and Truffaut have violated a narrative contract in which Antoine has been third person. Truffaut has always had him wandering about in all sorts of typical third-person humdrum, perfecting what was practiced in Les Mistons. But here he looks at us as if we both recognize each other, a flicker of the first person, and then the film is “Fin.” 400 Blows is like being in a public bathroom, trying not to look around very much without making it too obvious that we are trying not to look. Here Antoine accidentally catches our eye and neither of us is quite sure how to respond. This is Truffaut, before Godard, at his most Godardian.


2. That sense of violation quickly gives way to a recognition of the thoughtfulness of this gesture. The look in Doinel’s eyes is one of youthful apprehension, an innocence just beginning to become aware of itself and therefore lost. This movement to the first person lends a memorable charity to the film as we are able to more completely empathize with the Doinel’s youthful ignorance.


3. Following closely on the heels of this empathy, the “finish” of the shot, comes from the well-known autobiographical nature of the film. At the very least we know that Truffaut mined his own past for the tenor of Doinel. So now here at the end, through the frozen image of Doinel sweeping his eye back towards Truffaut’s lens, we are privy to an eerie parallax akin to what happens with Errol Morris’ Interrotron – a unique intimacy based on the relationship between a lens, its subject, and an audience. The various points of experience in the film converge at the end, Truffaut's, Doinel's, and now ours.