Small Change

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Do kids in French villages really run to school in packs?”