SMALL CHANGE Movie Review
L'Agent de Poche
Truffaut followed his dark The Story of Adele H. with this deceptively sunny look at the world of children—some who thrive and some who barely survive. Small Change was lambasted in many quarters for what was considered sentimentality, yet Truffaut's treatment of children—a subject he began with in The 400 Blows and returned to regularly—was based on his belief in their original innocence. The kids in Small Change, like Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows and Victor, the boy raised by wolves in The Wild Child, are reacting to their environment in the most sensible way possible. These films are about kids as survivors—physically and emotionally. The corruption of some of them is on the horizon, but that wasn't Truffaut's interest. When we discover that one of the quiet “loners” of Small Change is being nightmarishly abused in the shack to which he must return every night, Truffaut is less interested in this kid passing abuse on to others than he is in marveling at his capacity for getting himself to school every day in the face of his private holocaust. A child falls from a high apartment window only to get up and giggle, while his mother passes out. “There's no time in life in which people are more resilient than in childhood,” notes an observer. Truffaut's own childhood is an example, but Small Change is not meant to be a balanced portrait of good and “bad” kids, nor does it need to kill any off to show us that they don't always make it. It's simply a portrait of small, vulnerable human beings doing their best to cope with unfathomable rules and injustice—a liberating, unapologetic celebration of the human capacity for survival.
NEXT STOP … The 400 Blows, The Wild Child, Forbidden Games, Night of the Hunter
1976 (PG) 104m/C FR Geory Desmouceaux, Philippe Goldman, Jean-Francois Stevenin, Chantal Mercier, Claudio Deluca, Frank Deluca, Richard Golfier, Laurent Devlaeminck, Francis Devlaeminck, Sylvie Grezel, Pascale Bruchon, Nicole Felix; D: Francois Truffaut; W: Francois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman; C: Pierre William Glenn; M: Maurice Jaubert. VHS, LV MGM, FCT, WAR