Paper # 2: Seeing the City Differently

Alvaro Munoz
ENG 125 – Cities and Cinema
Professor Broadhed
November 5, 2018
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When audiences around the world watch a film set in Paris, they usually have a particular set

of expectations. They expect to see a romantic, picturesque city full of old-world charm, where there

is no unpleasantness. The reality is that Paris is not a fantasy, it is a real city. And like a real city it

has many different faces. It can be an incredibly elegant and glamorous city, or it can be an

unpleasant, dirty, and crowded place, just depending which part of Paris one finds themselves at.

And while neither Elevator to the Gallows (1958)1 nor The 400 Blows (1958)2 portray Paris as a

romantic city, each film shows a very different side of the city. In Elevator the Gallows, director

Louis Malle depicts a city that, despite the prevalence of crime, is still quite elegant and graceful,

while in The 400 Blows, François Truffaut chose to show Paris from the perspective of an ordinary

working-class family, downplaying the aspects that foreigners typically associate with that city.

Having been released barely a year apart, and in the midst of La Nouvelle Vague, it is not

surprising that both Elevator and The 400 Blows have plenty of similarities. Not only do they share a

city, but also a cinematographer, Henri Decaë.3 And the fact that they depict the same time period

certainly does not help to differentiate them. But each filmmaker clearly has their own vision of

what Paris is like, each one addresses different themes, and each one is trying to say something

different about the city through their film.

The association of Paris with romance is by no means a new one, it has been around for a

while. This deeply romantic image of the City of Light has been perpetrated by literature, song, and

of course, cinema, for decades now. And because of this, visitors seem to arrive expecting to see “a

quaint, affluent and friendly European city with smartly dressed men and women smelling of Chanel

1
Malle, Louis, dir. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. 1958; France: Nouvelles Éditions de Films
(NEF), 1958.
2
Truffaut, François, dir. Les quatre cents coups. 1959; France: Les Films du Carrosse, Sédif
Productions, 1959.
3 Brody, Richard. "Louis Malle's "Elevator to the Gallows," and Its Historic Miles Davis
Soundtrack." The New Yorker. June 19, 2017
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No. 5,”4 but anyone who has ever set foot in Paris knows that outside the elegant Champs-Élysées

and the Rue de Marbeauf, there is a different Paris, one with scruffy streets and rather average-

looking buildings. But “the ‘City of Love’ seems a far cry from the dark, urban underside of film

noir” (62).5 And that is the Paris the both Malle and Truffaut depict in their films; the grittier Paris,

not the idealized and romanticized version that is virtually unrecognizable, or at least fairly

meaningless to its residents.2 That is not to say that the films are completely bereft of love stories,

after all, a large part of the plot of Elevator to Gallows revolves around the affair between Julien

Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) and Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau), and the consequences of it. But a

lot of the inherent romanticism of the city is stripped away by the glass and concrete of modern (by

mid-20th Century standards) Paris, and by the crimes perpetrated during the film.

One the primary ways in which Malle portrays Paris in such an elegant manner in Elevator

to the Gallows is through the way he dresses his characters. The way people dress can say volumes

about a particular place. From the very beginning of the film we encounter exceptionally well-

dressed characters in a modern—for the time period—office building. Wealthy arms dealer Simon

Carala (Jean Wall), whom we see donning a double-breasted suit cut from a Prince of Wales fabric,

is a perfect example of this. The details of the clothes he wears exude elegance and French cachet—

"a certain aristocratic air so powerful that when a man wearing a French tailored suit walks by, he

continually evokes the question: Who is he?”6 Everything from his well-cut suit—most likely

bespoke—to the cap-toe Oxfords we get a glimpse of, to the crisp linen pocket square that peeks out

of his breast pocket, is very fitting of a man of his status.

4 Speed, Barbara. "Is ‘Paris Syndrome’ Actually a Real Thing?" CityMetric. January 7, 2016.
https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/paris-syndrome-actually-real-thing-1705.
5
Mennel, Barbara C. Cities and Cinema. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008.

6 Nicholson, Sonya G. "My Tailor Lives in Paris and French Cachet" The Parisian Gentleman.
February 21, 2014. https://parisiangentleman.co.uk/2014/02/21/my-tailor-lives-in-paris-and
french-cachet/.
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Likewise, Tavernier, one of Carala’s employees and the film’s protagonist, evokes that very

same concept of French cachet, which is so characteristic of Paris, and certainly very common

amongst the protagonists of Noir films. We can see him wearing a gray flannel suit, with a

characteristically French shoulder and ‘cigarette’ sleeve, and the drape of the garment suggests that,

if not bespoke, the suit at least comes from a reputable house. The trench coat and the leather gloves

that can be seen later on further illustrate his status as a fairly successful businessman and exemplify

traditional French elegance.

In contrast, the way in which Truffaut dressed his characters in The 400 Blows fits in

perfectly with the way he depicts Paris. The clothes the children wear in the film, including Antoine

(Jean-Pierre Léaud), the film’s protagonist, seem like an afterthought. Their jackets look big on

them, they appear to be wearing muted colors, and the kids continuously look disheveled. This

makes sense given the setting of the film. After all, the kids do not live in glamorous place, nor do

they attend a glamorous school. But the way they dress also makes sense in the context of the film.

As Truffaut said himself in an interview for The New Yorker, “In fact, The 400 Blows [is] a rather

pessimistic film. […] One central idea was to depict early adolescence as a difficult time of passage

and not to fall into the usual nostalgia about ‘the good old days,’ the salad days of youth.”7 So it

makes sense that the children are not particularly interested in the clothes they wear or the way they

present themselves, they have other things to worry about.

The way the characters dress is one thing, but where they live and interact is another. As

previously stated, each film shows a different side of Paris. In Elevator to the Gallows, the office

building where Tavernier works, and spends most of the film trapped in, is located on the rue de

Courcelles, and is a shiny example of Paris’s elegant modernity in the late 1950’s that Malle clearly

wanted to show off. And even as Florence wanders the streets at night à-la-flâneur while searching

7
Brody, Richard. "Truffaut's Last Interview." The New Yorker. June 20, 2017.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/truffauts-last-interview.
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for Tavernier, there is still an certain air of Parisian glamour present in the film.

In contrast, Truffaut deliberately chose to shoot a lot of his film in the Parisian district of

Montmartre, where he grew up.5 Given the almost autobiographical nature of The 400 Blows, his

choice could not be more appropriate, as the cinematography charmingly captures what a childhood

in that neighborhood must have been like. Throughout the first minutes of the film, the audience

gets to see the daily occurrences in the life of a child born into a working-class family in 20th

century France. The apartment where Antoine resides, in particular, allows the viewer to get a

detailed look at what life is like for your average Parisian. It is, “in the time-honored tradition of

Paris living spaces, painfully cramped.”8 He lives there with his self-absorbed blond mother who

“likes tight sweaters and is distracted by poverty, her bothersome son, and by an affair with a man at

work.”9 His stepfather is also in the picture, and although he is friendly to him, the man does not

appear to be deeply attached to Antoine.

Antoine’s daily life is, of course, the main focus of the film, at least for the first half of it.

“He’s bored with school, and his teachers are on to him. Whenever he lies — which he does no

more or less often than any other boy trying to squeeze a bit more fun out of life than his elders

think is good for him — he’s caught.”6 And it is this mundane routine—so uninteresting, so

quotidian, yet so endearingly relatable—that robs the Paris around him of its romanticism and

reduces it to merely another city that, were it not for Montmartre’s iconic charm, would be almost

unrecognizable from most other European cities at the time.

The fact that Antoine, very much like most children at the time, is constantly reprimanded is

not that surprising. Even if a child today acted in a similar way as he does throughout the film, the

8 Rafferty, Terrence. "A Trouble Maker Who Led A Revolution." The New York Times. September
23, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/movies/23raff.html.
9
Ebert, Roger. "The 400 Blows Movie Review & Film Summary (1959) | Roger Ebert."
RogerEbert.com. August 08, 1999. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the
400-blows-1959.
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response from the figures of authority would probably be very different. However, at the time, the

French were concerned with the influence that American media (such as movies or music), among

other things, was having on their youth. A clear example of this fear is clearly showed by Malle in

Elevator to the Gallows by the way he depicts Louis (Georges Poujouly), the James Dean-esque

character that steals Tavernier’s car and attempts to adapt his persona by putting on his gloves and

trench coat—without exuding the same French elegance, however.

Everything about him, from his pompadour haircut, to his leather jacket, to his cuffed-up

jeans, screams ‘rebellious American teenager.’ And rebellious he is—after stealing Tavernier’s car

and riding away with Véronique (Yori Bertin), his girlfriend, he attempts to race a beautiful

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, only to get in a fender-bender with the German tourists that were driving it,

eventually leading to murder.10

Some members of the audience might want to embody the suave masculinity and Parisian

elegance exuded by Tavernier (who very nicely follows the archetype of the noir male lead) in

Elevator, but it would be hard to find anyone who might aspire to have a life like Antoine, despite

the fact that perhaps many of the people watching The 400 Blows when it first came out might have

had a childhood not unlike that shown in the film. This is, again, because of the way in which each

filmmaker chose to portray Paris. Malle’s noir-ish—dark, yet elegant—Paris drastically contrasts

with Truffaut’s realistic—albeit a tad nostalgic—working-class Paris.

Neither of those depictions is incompatible with the other. Each of those simply shows a

different side of the same city. No city is ever just this or just that, and Paris is certainly no

exception to that. It can be incredibly elegant, hopelessly romantic, or dangerously dark. It can the

City of Love, the City of Light, or the setting for the perfect crime. It just depends which way one is

looking.

10 Ebert, Roger. "Elevator to the Gallows Movie Review (2005) | Roger Ebert." RogerEbert.com.
September 15, 2005. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/elevator-to-the-gallows-2005.