Movie: Small Change - L'argent de poche (Francois Truffaut, 1976)
I was not a fan of The White Ribbon, its endless portents of doom, and its austere portrayal of a rotten village with rotten children who will grow op to be nazi's. I don't like hopelessly bleak films, especially not when they present their bleak hopelessness as dogma that would be accepted by the rest of us if we just didn't look away. But, damn, oftentimes I found this film, whose approach is basically the polar opposite, almost equally offputting. This is one of the most aggressively positive films I've seen and as shamelessly patriotic as any gun-toting, flag-waving American Rambo wannabe.
Small Change is not without its pleasures. It is an almost plotless film meanderingly looking at the lives of pre-teens, and their families and teachers in the town of Thiers. Most of them live around each other, or even in the same apartment block, and pretty much all characters in the film know each other. The best parts of the film occur when they meet at various public spaces throughout the city (the school yard, the cinema, the bars on the streets), allowing us to observe how this community interacts with each other. We see who talks to who, how people behave around friends, acquaintances and people they know in passing just because their kids go to the same school, how small talk helps form and sustain friendships, and how the talk of the town becomes the talk of the town. Truffaut does film this beautifully, and it is a happy coincidence that I saw The Rules of the Game shortly before seeing this film. Truffaut was a great admirer of Jean Renoir, and you can really see (I think) the influence of 'La Colliniere" in the way he establishes the relationships and connections between the various townspeople, and in the way he follows and hops around various characters as they make their way across town.
Unlike Renoir, Truffaut absolutely loves his characters. Nothing wrong with that, but you often get the feeling that the film insists that we not only have to love these characters equally, but also that we have to love them in the same way that Truffaut does. This is a film in which good things happen to good people and oy vey if you even think that something bad could possibly happen to them, or if you believe that some discord could maybe improve the film. Every potential conflict is resolved as painlessly and swiftly as possible, nobody is really a bad student, nobody gets ever truly uncomfortable (or isn't shown to be when the occasion arrives), annoyed or angry, everybody is adjusted to the norms and values of the community and is happy to live in this quaint little town where everybody knows your name.
Well, there is one exception: little Julien Leclou, who lives on the outskirts of town in a shanty with his mother and grandmother and who always arrives in school with bruises on his face. He sleeps in class, steals from the other kids and is generally uninterested in socialising with the other kids and in becoming part of the town community. At the end of the film it is (not so shockingly) revealed that he has been beaten by his guardians and is transferred into another family. Julien's portrayal, in combination with the unfailingly positive attitude of the rest of the film, is really the main reason I was rather irked by Small Change. It makes it not merely a film about good things happening to good people, but a film about good things happening to good people, because they live in a good society and as good people follow the good rules of that society. People who fall outside of that society, who don't have access to it, do not get to live a good life. The film presents it as if every social space and institution in the town is ideally designed for people to to lead fulfilled lives. If you live in this town and are not happy it is your fault. After all, how can you possibly be unhappy in Thiers, France, where even a toddler falling from the third floor can survive without a scratch? At least the American Rambo wannabes are exciting.
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