Les Mistons (1957)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film 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.

Film Synopsis

In the historic town of Nîmes, an attractive young woman named Bernadette finds she has some unwelcome admirers in a gang of schoolboys who insist on following her about during the long summer holidays.  With her skirts flying in the wind as she cycles past, these pre-teen boys find themselves inexplicably drawn to Bernadette.  Their fascination and admiration for the woman they have come to idolise become tainted with revulsion when they see her in the company of an athletic young gymnastics teacher, Gérard.  The boys cannot resist spying on the young couple when they meet and go about the town in search of quiet spots where they can enjoy each other's company in private.

The boys are not old enough to understand their feelings for the young woman, so they resort to making her life a misery.  Wherever the two lovers go - a tennis court, the town's famous amphitheatre, the cinema - the troublesome brats are not far away, watching their every move with a mixture of curiosity, loathing and an odd thrill of covert naughtiness.   In the end, Bernadette and Gérard get engaged and decide to marry once the latter has returned from a mountaineering course.  With their detested rival away, the boys send Bernadette an obscene postcard - just before she learns the terrible fate that has befallen her fiancé...