Small Change is in many ways exactly what you'd expect from Truffaut after seeing his entire oeuvre. It focuses on the childhood experience, on sexual discovery and other coming-of-age aspects, and it does so with lingering cinematography and awkward editing. But it broaches some difficult topics that seem to me a fascinating departure from Truffaut's typical fare as well. While watching the film, I presumed "childhood" to be its theme (although my teachers loved telling me that a single word can never be a theme). But actually childhood is more the idea--the mood, the atmosphere--than it is the theme. It is the setting in which events take place, events that happen haphazardly without a plot to lead them along. And that is one of the film's strengths: it reproduces the feeling of being a child, strung along by random events with no control over or prediction of tomorrow. It is episodic and unrelenting, without a beginning or end in sight. You are just stuck in the middle as life happens around you.Unfortunately, that is also the film's weakness. The lack of a plot made a lot of the movie painfully tedious. Not knowing what will happen next turns even the shortest of movies into ones that are too long. There are some memorable moments (an infant by an open window ledge on the 9th floor) and other moments that stir up memories of ourselves and the stubborn refusals, incorrect assumptions, and rebellious behavior of our own childhood. But we cannot relate to all the moments, so some just pass us by and feel like wasted footage. Although Truffaut gets the mood right, he didn't get the movie as a whole right, at least for me. I don't go into a movie hoping for a yearbook so I can relive my past. I go for the possibilities of the future. I go for concepts that stimulate my brain or events that force a visceral reaction out of me, be it tension or heartbreak or joy. This movie did not do that. It may be the perfect film for some people, but it is not for me.
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074152/