Os Pivetes

in 1954, Francois Truffaut the young critic wrote a polemical essay in 'Cahiers de Cinema' called 'A Certain Tendency in French Cinema', which denounced contemporary mainstream cinema in France, with its inert notions of quality and prestige, and called for a cinema that would be responsive to experiment and outside (i.e. American) influence, which would be true to life in contemporary France, and which would facilitate the personal visions of the director, rather than borrowing the personal vision of a great writer, debasing it in the process.

Three years later, and what was Francois Truffaut the young film-maker putting in place of the dread 'Cinema de papa'? Well, like it, he adapted a novel; and like it, he concentrated on its love story. Like it, a dubious romantic strain smothers any attempts to portray 'real life', never mind the processes that go into making that real life - his heroine has no personality or will of her own, and is associated with vague ideas of freedom, and traditional essences of the natural.

Hey, I'm not the first to notice the disparity between Truffaut the revolutionary critic, and Truffaut the conservative film-maker. Originality for its own sake can often lead to the unwatchable. Where Truffaut decisively breaks with the cinema de papa is the freshness of his style, his exuberant love of film, and his schoolboy-like excitement at the sheer good fortune of being able to make a film, no matter how it turns out. These qualities retain their ability to enchant today, qualities which still make Truffaut's first three features THE most precious things in the whole of cinema for me, and which makes the subsequent slide into mediocrity and disillusionment so painful.

The opening credits are bewitching, not because Truffaut films a beautiful, happy young woman in the sunny open air on a bicycle in the countryside, but because he manages to find a way of filming that beauty and youth and happiness and sunniness and openness that allows the viewer to share and experience it, that liberates a formal set-up with the potential to be weighed down with technical artifice, and approximate something like life, even if it is only a hope or dream of life.

Truffaut's early films are so vital and moving because he achieves a poignant paradox: he shoots narratives about sadness, mistakes, failure, entrapment, despair, uncertainty, with the freest style, so that the pulse of the filming - unstable, improvisatory, immediate - is the pulse of life and emotion in all their bewildering varieties, an expression of feelings characters can't always express.

'Les Mistons' is a very sad story, looking forward to 'Shoot the Pianist' and 'Jules et Jim', with its doomed lovers, its pained nostalgia, its untracable crossing from one threshold to another, from youth to maturity, from love to indifference, from life to death. A motif - of the spontaneous lovers 'imprisoned' behind the 'bars' of trees etc. in the very nature that is supposed to be unrestrained, will be developed in 'Jules et Jim', while more 'studied' compositions, such as the sequence in the ancient arena, the complex framing and shifting, elusive notions of time (including a middle-aged narrator telling a story from his past we'd assumed was set in the present day) would likewise become more prominent in Truffaut. His ability to psychologically penetrate an undifferentiated group of boys, as in 'Les 400 Coups', is remarkable.

But, as with those films, we are as likely to remember the gleeful cinematic facility, the offhand tributes to favourite masters (Lumiere, Cocteau, Vigo, Rossellini, and, especially, the Renoir of 'A Day in the Country'), or the gorgeous, melancholy score. Truffaut affirms cinema's power to capture life, but also its ultimate power to transcend it, to reverse its inevitable, brutal move towards decay, as in the lovely 'Orphee' allusion here that raises a boy playing dead to life. It's interesting that Truffaut, with his reputation for misogyny, in this early film questions the very processes of voyeurism, of defining and interpreting the female through gazing, that he would be later accused of indulging in.

While some on IMDb scored this short film higher, I find it really hard to give it a score one way or the other since Les Mistons is only 17 minutes long. It's sort of an experimental film due to its length and it's about as long as the average 3 Stooges short (this is NOT meant as a criticism--just a statement about the length of the film). What I saw, I really liked. It's a real shame that Trufaut never expanded this movie or created more episodes on "The Brats" ("Mistons" in French)--I could see several vignettes like this going to create a nice film.

I assume if the viewer has no idea who Truffaut is or had no idea it was one of his films wouldn't think too much about it. It's a slight little film. Enjoyable, but not a "must see".

Francois Truffaut's pre-400 Blows toss-away is an understatedly entertaining little 18- minute film that takes a group of horny little boys and makes them a collective protagonist pursuing an older woman to play pranks on her, frustrated because they know that they could never have her for so many clear reasons. They antagonize her lovers and watch her simply be beautiful.

This tongue-in-cheek little whatever shows Truffaut and short story writer Maurice Pons's characters hustling all the woods, the streets, on bridges, and even inside a rural arena, and the kids have an exceedingly realistic affection to them, as this is in fact what boys their age would do with no technology or attention span. They play-fire guns at each other and devise their practical jokes against the lovers.

The object of affection is unbelievably attractive, and naturally so, and really that is all we truly know about her, as it's all any of these kids know about her. This short has the muted lack of direct involvement that Truffaut tends to have, and despite that there isn't enough time to get to know these kids or or their crush, it's enhanced to have the inscrutable, almost objectified feature in her character.

I first saw this film while taking a class in European Cinema when I was in film school. It's a charming story about a group of young boys in a small French city, their ages ranging from nine to fourteen- just about the time that boys begin to notice girls, particularly the older ones. The film follows the boys for their summer while they, in turn, follow around a pretty young lady whom they all have crushes on. It isn't until the end of the film, when her boyfriend returns home that they see her as something less than a goddess, but still something more than human. The film has a number of memorable scenes, but the most memorable one is when the boys follow her as she rides her bicycle to a nearby lake. She parks the bicycle near some trees, and goes down to the lake for a swim. Instead of the expected action, which would be to hide in the bushes and watch as she swims, the boys do something much more enterprising and considerably more satisfying- they line up, and one by one, bow their faces to the bicycle's seat and take a long, luxuriant SMELL of the seat that the girl (In a skirt) was just sitting on! Classic Turffaut, definitely worth watching if you can find it.

Truffaut's first steps in filmmaking were towards adolescence and their response to the world. "Les Mistons" is not an enjoyable film probably because the young director captures beautifully the feeling of innocence and cruelty. It is a reminiscent film, keeping the viewers interested not just because it reminds them of their youth but also because of the rhythm: it's constructed like faded memories, and the passing of time comes in the end as a surprise. The opening shot, with a boy in his bicycle, is one of the most beautiful scenes ever filmed, as we instantly capture the essence of this truly unforgettable film. In French.