L'Αrgеnt dе Ροсһе

This is an enjoyable miscellany of scenes revolving around a school, its students and their teachers and parents. It's militantly episodic, and the absence of plot elements is such a deliberate choice, I found it easy to relax and watch the loosely strung-together anecdotes without prior expectations-- spend some time in one small French town and see that world from a kid's perspective. Of course it harks back to Les Quatre Cents Coups, and of course the collection of young characters includes a misfit with delinquent tendencies-- but it doesn't really play like a colorized remake. On the other hand, the absence of a plot puts some pressure on the director to extract "meaning" from the scene where the troubled character's life reaches a crisis-- a teacher assembles his students to talk with them about it, and his dialogue does get drawn out and preachy. The blatant injection of a summation with a "message" is the one flaw, for me at least, in the anecdotal flow-- it isn't too implausible and doesn't last that long, so dock a half star from the usual 7 or 8 for a Truffaut film, and enjoy!