The story of the fence and a run-away - 400 Blows

(Rebel without a cause?)

We always associate France with all kinds of adjectives of beauty. Paris is a romantic city and its country is the capital of art. French women are desirable and French is elegant as silk ...

But the veil comes from its unconventionality.

From the revolutionary Saint Joan of Arc to the French Revolution, all the way down to the legendary George Sand, then to the contemporary music bad boy Serge Gainsbourg and the enfant terrible of the fashion world Jean-Paul Gaultier, this country seems to be the synonym of rebellion to me.
If we follow the logic of the Hong Kong officials, then we must ask whether they had put "Rebellion" as a subject of their curriculum.

François Truffaut himself is also a rebellious drop-out like Antoine Doinel in 400 Blows. He is what the society called "uneducated". Yet ironically he pioneered the French New Wave and produced this movie that makes the "educated" like you and me pretend like we know something about education and art as we watch it.

People say education is for upward and outward social mobility. Then can it propel inward mobility? And why do we need "mobility"? Why can't we stay as we are?

Antoine Doinel is, actually, and like most of us on Earth, also looking for "mobility", though in a slightly different form. He ran away from a dysfuntioned family, he ran away from school, he ran away from the custody, until the end of the scene where he kept running in the changing scenery and stop in front of a seemingly limitless sea, looking lost and confused. Yes, where am I running towards?

He ran away because he wanted to get rid of the fences, as they are everywhere. In the police office where he stayed for a night after he was caught stealing the typewriter, in the car which he was sent under guard to the the observation center, and then, of course, in the observation center. But it is his own family and the school (the teacher to be more precisely) that being the biggest fences he wanted to escape from. So at the end, he escaped from fences of the football ground of the observation center and ran towards an unknown future.

Antoine Doinel is for sure a impuissant vandal of the fences. While education is all about how well we can paint those wire of fences, destroying it will only make us a criminal drop-out of a normal system. The fence will recover itself, waiting to contain even more running wild kids, and fight with those who try to run away.

I had escaped! He looked directly into the camera as if asking, who are you? The fence painter or the vandal? Or is he also clueless, asking if there's another way out?

Or, is it just that I'm thinking too much? It's just simply a story of a childhood that you and I had been though more or less, nothing more, nothing less.