Small Change ends up strangely formal and opaque, and not a little patronising. Patrick's segment of the film is reasonably successful simply because it is the most developed and allows Truffaut to rework a familiar theme with some deftness. Overall, the incidents seem at once too arbitrary and too trite…. If The 400 Blows and Les Mistons were disquieting precisely because they took their protagonists as allies, and through them allowed the audience to question social assumptions, here the story of the child martyr Julien Leclou is used simply to confirm the complacent view of 'middle France' presented elsewhere in the film. In fact, it is arguably not so much childish resilience that is being celebrated but a certain milieu as seen through a childhood documented from birth to puberty…. What sets Small Change apart from Truffaut's other films about children is not simply that the director has become, as he has admitted, more 'resigned' in his treatment of his adult characters, but that he has become more distant from the children. And distance tends to lend not so much an enchantment as a self-consciousness that expresses itself in a sentimental and nostalgic view of childhood. Hence the moments of saccharin cuteness that puncture the rather fragile charm the film periodically musters. (pp. 163-64)