I loved this movie, and it's very clear to me that Techine had hit his stride when he made it. You could see it as an homage to 400 Blows, but it's more 
than that. I think it's an update of Truffaut's film to a time that's got its own brutalities and in a medium with more flexibility because of relaxed social mores. J'embrasse pas considers what would have happened to Antoine Doinel if he'd been born in the late 70s and convincingly finds he'd have ended up a hustler in the Bois de Boulogne.Like Doinel, Pierre faces some hard obstacles. He leaves a less-than-ideal family for Paris, and I was cringing at his beatific smile and naive optimism as soon as he got there. He's used, robbed, beaten and raped in the course of the film, a series of events that hammers the adolescent.
But many of his problems are also self-inflicted. Like the kid Thomas in Le lieu du crime, Pierre fiercely rebels against any authority or external control. He’s sexually attracted to Mireille, though when she gives him money to try to hold him, he immediately leaves. He goes with Romain to Spain, but when he feels (imagined) pressure to join the Romain’s team, he bolts. His knee-jerk rejection of authority eventually leads him to cross the path of a particularly vicious pimp, and that encounter gets him severely beaten.
In each of these situations, Pierre is following his heart, though his heart isn’t always right. With Mireille, Pierre was only interested in sex and didn’t care about her or her situation. Romain (a precursor of Adrian in Les temoins) was more concerned about Pierre’s future than sex, a fact that Pierre’s visceral homophobia prevented the kid from seeing. Pierre’s obsession with Ingrid eventually leads to his getting beaten. In all these, Pierre doesn’t have a good perspective on himself or on others, and this lack of perspective is what leads him into making bad decisions and becoming disillusioned.
Pierre also lacks perspective about himself. He doesn’t have the education to play Hamlet, and the scene in the film where he fails at that reading is painfully honest; after his failure, Pierre drops his dream of being an actor, a dream so naïve that even the kid working at the hotel remarks on it. Pierre then focuses on money, but when Romain asks him what he’d do if he had it, Pierre can only say he’d be respected. He doesn't have a vision and doesn't know what he wants to do, but he's dogged. His are a much stronger version of the problems Doinel faces in 400 Blows.
As life in Paris takes its toll, Pierre seeks refuge and eventually lands in the army. He’d previously rejected military service because he rejected authority, but after his beating, perhaps he saw he wasn’t handling life as well as he’d thought. He had plenty of money as a prostitute, but it didn’t get him Ingrid, didn't get him respect, and didn't prevent his beating. He sought refuge, if an unhappy one. Unable to control his determination even in the army, he spends evenings berating himself in the mirror. Unlike the other army kid, Pierre doesn't reject love; he rejects failure to follow his own ideal.
And upon leaving the base, Pierre heads yet again to follow his dream, and J'embrasse pas makes its most explicit reference to 400 Blows. The responsible, societal thing to do would have been for Pierre to visit his aging parent nearby like his brother advised him, but he heads to the coast to see the sea that Ingrid had told him about. The final shot of Pierre in the ocean , and the scene has the same bittersweet tone as that in 400 Blows. Pierre hasn't changed, and the same world awaits him.
One of the things I especially notice in this film is how it doesn't leave gaps in psychology that I can't fill. Unlike in Le lieu du crime, for example, when Lili is suddenly in love with Martin, none of the shifts in Pierre's character are so sudden that I couldn't follow them. Perhaps Techine made Pierre easier to understand because Pierre is the sole focus of the film. Rather than trying to bring 2-4 characters along, J'embrasse pas brings along only one, and it therefore has the time to look at Pierre in some depth.
Techine doesn't neglect secondary characters. Mirielle has her motivations and conflicts, and so does Romain. Even Said has personality. One of the things I like in Techine is the character richness that his films have and his willingness to wander off on details that don't necessarily have to be in the film. I wonder if Hollywood would have kept Said as a character at all. And I don't see that the scene with Romain and Dimitri had to be there. Nor, for that matter, the all the scenes with the Brazilian transvestites. These, though, give a huge depth to the film that makes J'embrasse pas resonate even more.
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