Zero for Conduct Reviews

Since I kept some really interesting things about this flick, I was really eager to check it out. First of all, Jean Vigo is one of these mythic movie directors who managed to deliver only one masterpiece (‘L’atalante’) before dying very young. Vigo did also manage to direct a few shorts and this one is probably the most famous one. Well, to beginning with, I just loved this title. I mean, even though this movie was made 60 years before I myself went to junior high-school in France, I completely could identify myself with these kids who felt completely misunderstood by the school and by the establishment in general. In their case, it was actually much worse though since, at least, I didn’t have to sleep there. This movie also displayed the unrest and melancholy that you can experience at this age, when you start to realize that your games are becoming childish and that you discover that the grown-ups around you are not so great after all. So, the approach was definitely quite realistic and I’m pretty sure that this movie must have been a major inspiration for François Truffaut when he made ‘Les quatre cents coups’ 25 years later. However, in spite of Vigo’s realistic approach, there was also a few seriously surrealist moments, the kind of wild combination you would see only back then when they were still experimenting on how to make a movie and these few surrealist bits made the whole thing even more unique and even quite poetic. The only critic I might have was that the whole thing was pretty random and none of the characters was really developed but, since it was a rather short movie, it was understandable. Anyway, to conclude, I really loved the damned thing and I think it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.