Small Change (1976)
Directed by François Truffaut
The lives of a motherless young man, who's just starting to find interest in women, and his physically abused, poverty stricken friend, are mixed with more or less innocent childhood experiences and challenges most their age experience.
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What critics compared Small Change to
But what it really reminded me of was “Little Fugitive,” the great 1953 independent movie, about a boy let loose in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, that influenced the French New Wave, or François Truffaut’s “Small Change,” in which childhood is comprehended, without sticky sentimentality, as an enraptured time of life.
There’s a dash of Truffaut’s “400 Blows” and “Small Change” in the movie’s recipe, along with the “Our Gang” vibe.
A glimpsed poster for Truffaut’s 1976 comedy Small Change suggests an inspiration for the picture’s skit-like structure.
But combined with the Small Change poster positioned conspicuously in one of the several New York flats that Frances crashes in throughout the film, it seems like Baumbach isn't only fetishizing various nouveau vagues of French cinema.
But Anderson handles it with a sensitivity and an unembarrassed openness that evoke the style of François Truffaut, in classics such as The 400 Blows and Small Change.
The film certainly owes a debt to the crafty kid imps of The 400 Blows and Small Change (by one of Anderson's avowed heroes, François Truffaut) but on the evidence of his artful and electric action direction, Anderson might work wonders with a throwback thriller in the vein of his hero's hero: Alfred Hitchcock.
He appears on-screen, often alone and silent, for nearly every minute of the movie, and his watchful, expressive face recalls the juvenile protagonists of Truffaut films like The 400 Blows or Small Change .
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It didn't, and the result is a combination of the startling sands-of-time realism of Michael Apted's Up series of documentaries and the piercing emotion of Francois Truffant's "Small Change."