Rush 4: Surprise Yourself

From The 400 Blows, I chose how Antoine got himself mixed up in a somewhat elaborate lie, starting with waking up late for school, and his friend convincing him to play hooky with him. The two explore the town, going to various places, including a carnival when Antoine rides a barrel ride. He then faces his teacher the next day and tells him he misses school because his mother died, an unnecessary exaggeration that gets him in even more trouble. I selected this sequence of scenes because it connects to the metal puzzle seen in My Effortless Brilliance, which relates to the metal puzzles I used to play with at my grandparents' house.

The connection between the lie in 400 and my experience with metal puzzles is a little difficult to make. However, the idea of elaborate lying is much more easy to relate to. Antoine lies about his mother being dead in order to not get punished for skipping school, an offense that probably wouldn't have gotten him in so much trouble if he had said something a bit less extreme. Antoine's life at home is obviously conflicted in itself. He sleeps in a hallway/closet and doesn't receive much love. He and his father get along nicely but they also don't spend a whole lot of time together. The relationship between Antoine and his mother seems very disturbed, so it wasn't surprising that he decided to "kill her off" in a sense. Antoine's lie and troubles at school very much reflects how he is treated at home; it makes sense that he acts out.

As a kid, I would spend time at my grandparents' house and they would set-up play-dates for my brother and I with kids from around the neighborhood. Since we didn't visit more than once or twice a year, the play-dates never turned into any sort of friendship. I used to make up pretty detailed stories about my life when I met new people that I knew I wouldn't see very frequently. Nothing was ever harmful or totally unbelievable, they just weren't entirely truthful. I don't remember all of them but I know there was a storyline of my mom being some sort of model (she was really pretty) and my dad was a world a traveler & explorer (he did travel a lot for his job). In addition to these tales, I also tended to blame a lot of things on my little brother. I wasn't as big as a trouble-maker as he was so it was easy to swindle everyone into thinking he did anything bad I may have done. Plus, I was older and wiser.

I suppose I could say I came from a broken home, with my parents divorcing when I was five. However, I don't know if I actually see it as that. Broken is such a negative word and although there were many rough points in my childhood, I never had it that bad. I know that the specific story I shared above was derived from the vision I had of my parents: my mom being this beautiful person who took care of me and my dad who I saw twice a month that occasionally brought us gifts from around the world. Like Antoine, I took my relationship with my parents and elaborated on it.

For an autobiographical film, I would probably choose to focus on the stories I would create about my life. I can see a scene showing my brother and I playing (possibly with the metal puzzles) with some children as I tell them about our fabulous lives. We would be in my grandparents' garden and I would probably incorporate dream-like sequences showing the "memories" I created. I see a contrast happening between reality and the elaborated, perhaps in a way that a child would see it in their mind (more fantastical than needed.) I could actually see much of the film incorporating these types of scenes, showing what I thought was my ideal world and the ways I would achieve it through the telling of my stories.