Small Change
This summer, circumstanced forced a major shift in approaching the process of cleaning out the home in Georgia my parents have known since 1988. My father passed in 2013, and my mother is now in Assisted Living, and as an only child, the responsibility of getting the house in order, going through the furniture and clutter, has been left to me. (With help from my in-laws, wife and friends.) Doing so, I’ve come across many pictures of our time in Ohio, and I’m seeing people I haven’t seen since we moved, and memories are flooding back. So much of my life, and my development, has taken place in Georgia that Ohio almost feels like a prelude to my life rather than my life itself. But in truth, it is as important to me as anything that has happened in Georgia, because it was a time where lifelong friendships were formed, and bonds were created, and feelings started to come to mind.
Francois Truffaut was probably the best filmmaker at being able to tap into that memory of being a child, and almost more than he did in “The 400 Blows,” and his other films about Antoine Doinel, “Small Change” illustrates that beautifully. Antoine and the other kids in “400 Blows” are teenagers, a bit closer to adulthood; the children of “Small Change” are younger, not quite sure who they are or what they are supposed to be doing outside of the moment. The film that Truffaut made was inspired by anecdotes about childhood since he made “Blows,” along with autobiographical details of his own. The screenplay he and Suzanne Schiffman ended up writing has some arcs it follows, but also includes vignettes and moments we don’t really return to. That’s basically how our memory of childhood works, right? Thinking back, we understand that there was an arc to our life, but sometimes it’s asides and unrelated moments that stand out just as strongly. “Small Change” feels like a companion piece to “400 Blows,” but something gentler, more in keeping with the time of life the children in this film are at.
Two kids are at the center of “Small Change”- Patrick Desmouceaux (Georges Desmouceaux), who’s motherless, and a bit of a clown, and Julien Leclou (Philippe Goldmann), a young boy new to Patrick’s class, whose family lives in poverty. They become friendly, but it’s not really about their friendship. For much of the film, Patrick and Julien are on their own little adventures and struggles throughout this summer in Thiers, France. For Patrick, he is just beginning to notice women and girls in that way that every boy remembers, and every man might be embarrassed about later in life if they saw the object of their affection again. For Julien, childhood is about survival. He lives in a shack on the outskirts of town with his mother and grandmother whom physically abuse him, and don’t have enough money to give him new clothes, forcing him to wear ratty pants and the same sweater every day. He doesn’t undress in public for fear of the bruises being seen. He feels like a younger Antoine Doinel, as we see him stealing, sneaking into movies and other things, but we empathize just in the little things Truffaut does to give us an idea of his living situation. We do not see abuse, but hear his mother’s harsh words towards him, and we see him having to sleep through school after not getting enough sleep out of fear in the night. His fate is unseen when the truth is revealed; we hope he is alright.
The lives of parents and teachers are shown in “Small Change,” but the film is primarily about the children. On the outskirts of adult life, two sequences stand out. In the first, a single mother returns home with her young boy, Gregory. When she loses her wallet, she goes hunting for it, leaving Gregory in the apartment alone with a kitten, and an open window. How the scene transpires is a masterclass of tension and release from Truffaut, and finding a comedic outcome out of a potentially tragic situation. In the second, a girl is punished by her parents by being left alone. In an act of defiance, she takes her father’s megaphone, and shouts that she is hungry for all the apartment complex to hear. In a different film, this would result in a fate similar to Julien’s at the end of this film, but in “Small Change,” what happens is a heartwarming and hilarious resolution that is also wildly inventive. Those are vignettes, though, that illuminate ideas of parental anxieties and youthful optimism the film explores rather than the emotional heart of the film. That is ultimately left to Patrick, and seeing how his exploration of the minefield of puberty and young love progresses from a double date to the movies where he seems more enamored with the images on the screen than the girls he’s next to the final scene where he has his first kiss (a memory of Truffaut’s, beautifully set up). “Small Change” is actually about big changes (a translation of the title outside the US is actually “Pocket Change”), and ones that Truffaut remembers vividly, and will help us remember our own.
