Les Mauvaises fréquentations (1963)
Directed by Jean Eustache

Film Review

Les Mauvaises fréquentations, also known by the title Du côté de Robinson, was the first film to be completed by Jean Eustache, one of the peripheral figures of the French New Wave.  It was purely by chance that Eustache came into contact with some of the leading figures of the Nouvelle Vague.  His wife was a secretary on the Cahiers du cinéma, and it was through her that he came to meet Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Paul Vecchialli.   It was Vecchialli who encouraged Eustache to make a short film, even supplying him with the funds to do so.  That first film, La Soirée, was never completed, but the experience of making it encouraged its director to persist in his new art.

Filmed with a cool clinical detachment that makes it resemble more a documentary than a slice-of-life drama, using real locations in Paris and improvised dialogue, Les Mauvaises fréquentations bears a close resemblance to the early films of both Godard and Rohmer.  In this way it prefigures Eustache's one truly great film, La Maman et la putain, which is considered by some to be one of the landmark films of the French New Wave (although by the time it was seen the term was somewhat anachronistic).  

The film's antipathetic main characters (an amusing skirt-chasing duo performed with astonishing naturalism by Aristide and Daniel Bart) colourfully evoke the rebellious youth mentality of the time.  They look like a pair of overgrown Antoine Doinels, cocking a snook at societal rules and treating women as nothing more than objects of male gratification.  The fact that we end up liking these two ruffians implies that there is, possibly, something of the naughty rule-breaker in us all. 

Les Mauvaises fréquentations is a modest little film that strongly evokes the dubious morals and gently oppressive melancholia of its era, with just a vague hint of the upheavals that were to come (the sexual revolution and outburst of youth rebellion that came towards the end of the decade).  In this it aligns closely with the French New Wave, although Eustache exhibits far less self-conscious artistry than his more experienced auteur contemporaries.  Along with its obvious naivety, there is a deeply ingrained authenticity to this film, something that we struggle to find in, say, the early work of Jean-Luc Godard.

Eustache followed up this amiable taster with Le  Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966) and several other shorts, before proving his worth with the two defining films of his oeuvre - La Maman et la putain (1973), which won him a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and Mes petites amoureuses (1974).

Film Synopsis

One Sunday evening, two men in their twenties roam the streets of the Clichy district of Paris, hoping to pick up a pair of girls they can spend the night with.  They come across a promising young woman and, not yet knowing she is a single mother with two children, agree to accompany her to a dance hall where she has a girlfriend waiting for her.  Failing to meet her friend, the woman shares a drink with the two men before heading off with them to a popular night spot.  Here, she goes off to dance with a stranger, leaving her two new friends more bored than ever.  Out of spite, the latter steal the woman's purse and help themselves to her money.  Later, they begin to have second thoughts...