Summary
During their summer holidays in the French town of Nîmes, a group of mischievous
schoolboys make fun at the expense of two lovers, Gérard and Bernadette.
But what starts out as harmless tomfoolery ends in tragedy...
Review
François Truffaut’s first commercial film Les Mistons marks a definitive
turning point in French cinema history. By the mid to late 1950s, the French cinema
industry had become regimented and standardised, stuck in a rut with its conformity, lack
of diversity and over-reliance on star names. Les Mistons heralded a much
needed return to the age of the free-thinking independent film directors of the past,
when film-making had been an art, not just a shallow commercial exercise.
The critics on the review magazine Les Cahiers du cinèma (who included Truffaut,
Godard, Rohmer, amongst others) had been calling for revolution. Now they had it.
This was the beginning of the New Wave. In Les Mistons, a group of
unruly schoolboys tear down a poster of Jean Delannoy’s film Chiens perdus sans collier
. In the years that followed, this scene would come to symbolise what Truffaut
and his New Wave allies (Godard, Rohmer, and others) would do to contemporary French cinema.
Tear down the past and start afresh.
With financial backing from the wealthy father of his wife Madeleine Morgenstern, 25 year
old François Truffaut, then a notorious film critic, was determined to make
a film which demonstrated his view of what modern cinema should be about. An obsessive
cinephile since his childhood, Truffaut new instinctively what would make good cinema
and had a vision which focused on human relationships using believable characterisation
and natural dialogue. With its strikingly neo-realist documentary style, Les
Mistons shows clear references to the work of Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir, two directors
whom Truffaut venerated.
The film contrasts the tenderness of a young couple who are very much in love with the
unthinking malice of a group of young teenage boys (the "brats" or "mistons" of the film's
title). Unable to make any sense of their attraction for the sensual young Bernadette,
the boys decide to make her suffer and resort to increasingly cruel methods of spoiling
her love affair with Gérard. It is a stunningly realistic portrait of male
adolescence, in which Truffaut presumably draws on his own troubled experiences.
Yet it is also, through its evocative location photography and simple narration, hauntingly
poetic.
The film features Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont (at the time husband and wife),
two actors who would become strongly associated with the French New Wave.
Shortly after Les Mistons, both actors would become recognised for their roles
in Le Beau Serge, the first film to be made by Truffaut’s friend and collaborator,
Claude Chabrol.
When Les Mistons was shown to a public audience for the first time in 1958, it
was praised by the critics, who were persuaded that a new brand of cinema had indeed arrived.
However, it also fuelled the growing schism between Truffaut and the traditionalists,
especially Jean Delannoy. Most importantly, it gave Truffaut the confidence he needed
to persevere with his first full length film, Les
400 coups, which he made the following year.
© James Travers 2002
See also:
The life of François Truffaut
Les 400 coups
Tirez sur le pianiste
Jules et Jim
Farenheit 451
Baisers volés
Le Dernier métro
Buy films by François Truffaut
More about the French New Wave
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