Small Change

Truffaut made Small Change between The Story of Adèle H. and The Man Who Loved Women, and it is the film in which he returned most directly to the territory of The 400 Blows — childhood, school, the negligence of adults — without any of that film's despair. He cast almost entirely from open auditions in the town of Thiers, and wrote scenes around what the children turned out to be able to do.

There is no plot. A term passes at a provincial school: a boy called Julien arrives filthy and silent and nobody asks why; a toddler follows a cat along a ledge; two small brothers make their own meal while their father sleeps; a girl refuses to come down to lunch and shouts about it through a megaphone; a boy takes a girl to the cinema. The camera is at the children's height and holds on faces for a beat longer than the joke requires. Only at the end does a teacher, played by Jean-François Stévenin, say aloud what the film has been observing.

Some critics found it sentimental, and it is warmer than almost anything else Truffaut made. But it is also precise about the specific powerlessness of being ten — the inability to explain, the assumption of adults that nothing is happening — and it holds up far better than its reputation as the gentle Truffaut suggests.