Francois Truffaut's
Small Change
New 35mm print
Opening November 25 2009 at IFC Center in
New York
“Francois Truffaut’s series of
sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children
turns out to be that rarity – a poetic comedy
that’s really funny.”
– Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
“Children – so long, so
sentimentally, so horrendously, and so profitably exploited by
movies as inadequate, miniature imitations of adults –
are rediscovered, their lost language intact, in Francois
Truffaut’s Small Change, the lilting, marvelously funny and wise
recreation of childhood that will be shown twice tonight to
open the 14th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall.
Small Change is
an original, a major work in minor keys. It’s a labor of
love that ignores precedent with splendid verve and a film with
so many associations to other Truffaut films that watching it
is like meeting a previously unknown relative, someone both
familiar and utterly new and surprising... has the air of a
child’s Saturday afternoon when no special activities
have been planned. It ambles through the lives of these
children, observing them in school, at home, going to the
movies, making do on a Sunday morning when parents sleep late,
trying to pawn some textbooks, making painful and hilarious
discoveries that, by the time we reach the end, have
encompassed most of the ordinary expressions of childhood in
ways not possible in the conventional fiction film.”
- Vincent Canby, New York Times, 1976
“Small Change, filmed in the French provincial town of Thiers with
scores of non-professional children, deals primarily with a
dozen or so children in the closing weeks of the school year
and the beginning of the summer vacation. But it also shows
children who are young enough to enjoy a first baby bottle, as
well as some old enough to appreciate a first amorous kiss.
There are adults in the film, too, one of them –
according to Truffaut – expresses one of the
picture’s principal themes: “By a kind of strange
balance, those who have had a difficult youth are often better
armed to confront adult life than those who have been
protected. It is a kind of law of compensation.”
- James F. Clarity, New York Times, 1976
“Magical... one of the year’s
most intensely, warmly, human films. In that it joins so much
of Truffaut’s earlier work: What other contemporary
filmmaker is so firmly in touch with the personal rhythms of
life?”
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times, 1976
“At its best Truffaut’s work
retains a piercing candor, a directness and material immediacy
that only the cinema, in the hands of its masters, can
communicate. Time hasn’t dulled Truffaut’s
achievement, but it has highlighted it differently. He was a
thornier, more complex filmmaker than we thought, and perhaps a
greater one.”
- Dave Kehr, New York Times, 1999
"Do kids in French villages really run
to school in packs?"
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