La Première nuit (1958)
Directed by Georges Franju

Film Review

Immediately before he made his feature debut with La Tête contre les murs (1958) (in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Mocky), Georges Franju turned in this strangely beguiling short, which seems to anticipate two of the early works of his New Wave-era contemporaries, Louis Malle's Zazie dans le métro (1960) and François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959).  In common with these better known films, La Première nuit revolves around a stray child who goes on a magical mystery tour of the capital, his imagination transforming a banal setting into the most wonderful of fantasy worlds.  In this respect, it recalls an earlier short film, Pierre Blondy's Champions juniors (1951), which was set in a car factory but tells a similar tale, albeit with less of Franju's haunting lyricism.

La Première nuit neatly divides into two halves.  The first half is set in a world that any Parisian commuter will instantly recognise - the frenzied hubbub of the Métro during the evening rush-hour.  The hero - a cute little boy - is desperately looking for the girl he is smitten with but his efforts prove to be futile.  The girl hardly seems to be aware of his existence, and the crowds are so thick that he has no chance of reaching her.  Then the style changes abruptly after the boy has laid his head down on an escalator and now finds himself in the same setting, but seen from a completely different perspective, that of his fanciful imagination.

Driverless trains are seen gliding through eerily deserted tunnels, and all around there is a crushing sense of solitariness - as if the boy has just woken up to the fact that he is the last person alive.  In its way, the film is as haunting and unsettling as Franju's later horror fantasy offering, Les Yeux sans visages (1960), and it has more than a smattering of that film's other-worldly poetry.  Even though Franju was no great fan of the French New Wave (much of his work looks like a flagrant rejection of La Nouvelle Vague), it seems more than likely that Truffaut took some inspiration from this film for his debut feature.

Film Synopsis

One evening, a ten year old boy follows a little girl home from school and loses himself in the Paris Métro.  The crowds gradually disperse and eventually the boy finds himself alone in the seemingly endless subterranean tunnels.  Tired, he lies down on a dormant escalator and falls asleep.  He wanders alone through the now deserted underground labyrinth, where the face of the girl he has lost his heart to continues to haunt him.  When he wakes up it is already morning, so he heads back home through the awakening streets of the capital...