A train belches steam and soot, cutting through the French countryside like a mechanical scar. Inside, two young boys, Caussat and Colin, transform their compartment into a microcosm of pure, childish anarchy. Balloons, toys, funny faces: it is a pocket-sized carnival, a final gasp of freedom before the boarding school gates close like those of a sepulchre. This opening sequence of "Zero for Conduct" is no mere prologue; it is Jean Vigo’s mission statement, an injection of surrealist vitality into the stagnant body of French poetic realism. Vigo, son of the militant anarchist Miguel Almereyda (an anagrammatic pseudonym for "y'a la merde"), who died under mysterious circumstances in a prison cell, is not directing a film: he is exorcising the demons of his own traumatic childhood, transfiguring oppression into a cinematic poem of 44 minutes, as brief as it is seismic.

Shot in 1933, in a Europe sliding inexorably into an authoritarian chasm, "Zero for Conduct" was immediately perceived for what it was: a grenade tossed at the foundations of the establishment. The French censors did not hesitate, branding it "anti-patriotic" and banning it until the Liberation in 1945. Its crime was not so much showing a school rebellion as it was understanding and celebrating its sacredness, the irrepressible right of the imagination to overthrow power. Vigo’s boarding school is not an educational institution but a grotesque allegory for the repressive state. The proctors are Rabelaisian caricatures, misshapen figures seen through the distorting lens of childhood memory: the supervisor "Pète-Sec" (dry fart), who steals the boys' sweets; the science teacher, who clumsily imitates Charlie Chaplin; and above them all, the headmaster, a bearded dwarf whose physical stature is inversely proportional to his tyranny, a resurrected Jarry prowling the corridors like an operetta despot.

Vigo disintegrates any pretense of realism. Authority is not just unjust; it is ridiculous. The adults are puppets devoid of psychological depth, Pirandellian masks condemned to repeat a script of obtuseness. The only glimmer of humanity among the faculty is the new supervisor, Huguet, a Chaplinesque dreamer who joins in the boys' games, does handstands, and leads them on an outing like a pied piper. He is the intellectual who sympathizes with the revolution, the unexpected ally, but his rebellion is individual and dreamlike, not collective and incendiary like the one about to explode. The film's true beating heart is the community of boys, a phalanx of hoplites in short trousers. Caussat, Colin, Bruel, and the delicate, almost androgynous Tabard, who refuses to apologize for an unjust accusation, form the nucleus of a revolutionary cell. Theirs is not a political rebellion in the ideological sense, but something more primordial: it is the reclaiming of the body, of play, of the dream, against a system that wants to domesticate them, to turn them into obedient, unimaginative citizens.

The narrative structure is fragmented, episodic, like a memory surfacing in flashes of genius. Vigo contaminates reality with the oneiric, anticipating the cinema of a Fellini or a Buñuel by decades. The skeleton drawn on the blackboard that comes to life, the procession of boys marching in slow motion, spectral figures in a pagan ritual: these are tears in the veil of verisimilitude, incursions into the territory of the subconscious, where the laws of physics and logic are suspended. And then, there is the apotheosis, the scene that alone would be enough to inscribe Vigo in the pantheon of masters: the pillow fight in the dormitory. This is no mere scuffle; it is a liturgy, a ceremony of liberation. Filmed in an ethereal slow motion, with feathers floating through the air like enchanted snow, the sequence transforms childish violence into a ballet of ecstatic anarchy. It is the cinematic equivalent of a Rimbaud poem, a "drunken boat" sailing free from the constraints of meter and grammar. In those few minutes, Vigo captures the very essence of freedom: an explosion of pure, joyous, and destructive energy that asks no permission and offers no justification.

The influence of this medium-length film is incalculable, a seed sown in the soil of future cinema. Without the ecstatic revolt of Caussat and his comrades, it is hard to imagine Antoine Doinel's final, desperate run to the sea in François Truffaut's The 400 Blows. But where Truffaut reinterprets Vigo through a filter of existential melancholy, focusing on the loneliness of the rebel, Lindsay Anderson, with his If...., embraces its more incendiary and political legacy. Vigo's pillow fight becomes, in Anderson's hands, a full-blown armed guerrilla war, where the boys don't just throw objects from the rooftops but open fire on the representatives of the adult world that has oppressed them. "Zero for Conduct" is the archetype, the "degree zero" of cinematic rebellion, the chrysalis from which far more aggressive butterflies would emerge.

But to reduce the film to a mere precursor would be a mistake. Its power resides precisely in its impure form, in its status as a unique cinematic object, somewhere between autobiographical documentary, dark fable, and surrealist pamphlet. Its short runtime is not a limitation, but a virtue. It is a lightning bolt of a poem, a visual haiku that condenses a universe of meaning into less than an hour. There is no time for conventional psychological introspection; the characters are symbols, forces arrayed in a cosmic battle between order and chaos, regulation and imagination.

The final scene, with the four leaders of the revolt marching triumphantly across the school rooftops during the official ceremony, bombing the courtyard with books and junk, is not just a victory. It is an ascension. The boys are not simply escaping; they are conquering a new plane of existence, a higher vantage from which to look down with contempt on the petty world of adults. In that moment, "Zero for Conduct" ceases to be the story of a group of French schoolboys in the 1930s and becomes a universal myth. It is the eternal story of youth that refuses to bow down, of the life force that shatters the chains of tradition, of the poetry that smashes the dull, grey prose of power to pieces. Jean Vigo, who died of tuberculosis at just 29, left us only a handful of works, but this film is his immortal testament: a battle cry that, nearly a century later, still resonates with a deafening and wonderfully subversive clarity.