SOURCE: "The Metaphorical Window in Truffaut's Small Change," in The French Review, Vol. 63, No. 3, February, 1990, pp. 452-63.

In the following excerpt, Cormier discusses the merits of Truffaut's film Small Change as a vehicle for the study of French.

Et je me couche, fier d'avoir vécu et souffert dans d'autres que moi-même …—Baudelaire, Les Fenêtres, 1869.

With L'Argent de Poche (Small Change), which saw its premiere in March 1976, François Truffaut has given us a charming, bittersweet, funny and sad film about childhood. The story, it may be recalled, leisurely follows the interlocking "careers" of about a dozen youngsters in the village of Thiers (20-odd miles east of Clermont-Ferrand) during the last month of the school year. Not unlike the mood in his quasi-autobiographical La Nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973), the narrative is bathed in typical Truffautian authenticity: optimistic human images of a new mother feeding...