François Truffaut-Les Mistons (1957)

During the hot summer, 5 kids, "Les Mistons", spy on two lovers. They follow Gerard and Bernadette everywhere. Les Mistons send a suggestive postcard to Bernadette once Gerard is away. But a newspaper learn to all of them that Gerard just died by accident. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0050714/plotsummary)




Two years before LES 400 COUPS, french director François Truffaut shot LES MISTONS (1957), a short movie dealing with children and a young couple. Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont impersonate the lovers followed by the bunch of " mistons ". Both actors will become, with Jean-Claude Brialy who appears briefly as a character of the movie chosen by Gérard and Bernadette, THE actors of the french " Nouvelle Vague " (1958-1965).




François Truffaut's 1957 short "Les Mistons" (roughly translated to "The Brats") is an early testament to Truffaut's affinity with kids and his first exploration of impossible love. Five boys palling around one summer fall for a teen beauty, but as the narrator (one of the five) describes, "Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate her--and torment her." These adolescent boys are neither cute nor innocent, but Truffaut sympathizes with the frustration born of budding hormones and sexual mystery. (--Sean Axmaker - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




'Les Mistons' is a short made two years before Truffaut's first feature, when he was still best known as a polemical critic. It is a very sad tale about young lovers spied on by a group of brats, and has the casual tragic force of Renoir's 'A Day in the country' or Demy's later 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg'; and yet is most memorable for its sheer schoolboy-like joy in location shooting, trickery and allusion, affirming cinema's power over life's transience.