‘The 400 Blows’: a film that made Benicio del Toro fall in love with cinema
After the rise of Letterboxd and the Criterion closet tour, we now have sneaky insights into the personal film taste and private collection of all our favourite film stars, with surprising revelations such as Michael Cera’s love for Kiarostami and Mikey Madison’s love for Isabelle Huppert. And for Benicio del Toro, who is the man of the moment after his surprising collaboration with Wes Anderson, the actor revealed his own very thoughtful and expansive taste in cinema that no doubt informs the huge variety of surprising auteurs he has worked with.
François Truffaut is a massive influence for many, with his involvement in the French New Wave movement inspiring decades of future filmmakers through the disorienting editing and loose narrative style. From the whimsical love triangle at the heart of Jules and Jim to the manic chaos of Shoot the Piano Player, the director was one of the key players within this movement for blowing apart the structure of cinema and injecting new life into the medium.
However, del Toro highlighted his love for The 400 Blows by saying, “I love the music, love the story, love the ending… just, you know, as he runs and he sees the ocean for the first time. Beautiful to me. That was the one that when I saw it, I went like ‘wow I want to see more’”. It is brutal yet innocent in the way it follows the experiences of one child who feels uncared for and unwanted, but despite this, tries to have fun and create adventure in the everyday.
Alongside the likes of Truffaut, del Toro also praised another classic from his childhood, perhaps speaking to those early experiences that are tainted by nostalgia, yet we cannot fully understand. The actor professed his love for The Creature of the Black Lagoon, saying, “When I was a kid, I loved all those monster movies. Growing up in Puerto Rico as a kid, The Creature from the Black Lagoon was a monster that could live in the humidity and the heat, and was that monster that could be rapping on my window. It’s a beautiful story, in a way, you root for the monster. He just falls in love and they’re invading his lagoon, so you root for the monster and the monster becomes the victim”.
Sometimes the films we watch as children are the ones that create our most visceral memories, remaining in our subconscious for the rest of our lives and having an effect on us that we can’t quite comprehend.
And finally, he described Lucia as another one of his personal favourites. Directed by Humberto Solás, the film three episodes in the lives of three Cuban women, with del Toro saying, “It’s a great story of three different moments in history and Cuban history seen through the eyes of three women and the last story of Adele Legrá, I think she gives one of those performances that is like Brando-esque. It’s just a movie that I think is still important today”.
Alongside the political undercurrents of the film and Cuba’s struggle for socialism, it interweaves the personal with the political to create a compelling portrait that spans across three different generations of women.
