The film responsible for the enormously influential and important French New Wave of filmmaking, Francois Truffaut uses the perils and triumphs of his own early life to inspire the story of The 400 Blows and the result is one of the most moving and dramatically satisfying movies ever made. The narrative concerns itself with a young boy growing up in Paris who immediately follows after a life of crime. Truffaut uses all of the trappings of the coming of age tale to reinvent the genre as well as cinema itself. The adults see the young boy at the center of the film as a troublemaker, which seems like a cliche of the genre, but the audience is allowed to share some of his most intimate moments, making the film deeply resonate with anyone who has ever been misunderstood. The closing shot is one of the most beautifully haunting ever committed to film. It shows the young boy trapped between land and sea unable to escape his life. Instead of this being incredibly depressing, Truffaut uses the narrative to show that it is the boy's first time ever seeing the beach, which emphasizes that he has so many things yet to do and that his whole life is ahead of him.