ALTERNATIVE ENTERTAINMENT: FROM THE BY-LANES OF OUR YOUTH

by Vandana Kumar April 10 2025, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 9 mins, 34 secs

A nostalgic reflection on François Truffaut’s Les Mistons, by Vandana Kumar, tracing cinematic memories, the innocence of youth, and a South of France summer that echoes in hearts and frames across generations.

Set in the sun-drenched town of Nîmes in the South of France, Les Mistons captures the essence of Provençal summers with its Roman ruins, winding lanes, and Mediterranean light. This iconic short film by François Truffaut offers a poetic exploration of childhood and adolescence, filmed against the backdrop of Nîmes’ historic architecture—including the famed Roman Amphitheatre. A gem of French New Wave cinema, Les Mistons immortalises not just a coming-of-age story, but the evocative landscapes of southern France that continue to inspire filmmakers and cinephiles alike.

The best way to appreciate an auteur and that distinctive stamp on his œuvre is often to go back to his beginnings. The early phase of many directors shows us characteristics of their filmmaking that were taking shape and would later become so definitive.

Les Mistons (English Title – The Mischief Makers) is a short film directed by François Truffaut in 1957. The French title means "brats" and is the director’s second film. It has all that can be considered a precursor to the much-acclaimed director of the French New Wave’s 1959 classic, The 400 Blows.

The lightness of being Truffaut is an expression I have always used for the director’s cinema. It is actually a seeming lightness that is quite difficult to achieve. The tender look at adolescence and childhood is not easy to get right, and yet Truffaut makes it look so effortless.

Many filmmakers have made children the protagonists but ended up making something a little too maudlin, or portraying children unrealistically—as innocent people of God who can do no wrong.

There is something about films where children are the main focus that fascinates me. Truffaut’s œuvre frequently positions children at the centre of his narrative. The approach toward handling children without condescension or being patronising is a rare thing. Annette Insdorf said of Truffaut’s films that they “constitute a vision of childhood unequalled in the history of the cinema for sensitivity, humour, poignancy and respect for children themselves. With neither sentimentality nor condescension…” I have felt the same while viewing the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Louis Malle, too.

The story unfolds in the town of Nîmes during one hot summer. A group of boys are fascinated by a young, beautiful woman (Bernadette Lafont) and collectively pursue her by spying on her. The short story is simply about their following her around in this small town—in gardens, public spaces, when she is out for a swim, at a picnic spot, and just about anywhere. That should have been enough to draw the young beauty’s attention toward them. Happy in the company of her boyfriend and the flushes of a tender romance at that age, she is blissfully unaware of them. When all that young bravado and daring with which the boys followed the beauty boomeranged, they decided to torture the couple as sweet revenge. This, however, has an unexpected tragic consequence, and the accident brings their summer adventure to a grinding halt.

The 26 minutes take us through the entire gamut of emotions the young boys go through—fascination for a young woman, jealousy, and then a hard knock at the end. The summer obsession can never be realized, and the episode gets etched indelibly in memory.

This film is considered significant in Truffaut’s œuvre. His first film, Une visite (A Visit, 1954), was dismissed by not just critics but by Truffaut himself as a mere training exercise. He has often said that his first film vrai, or real film, was in fact Les Mistons—real not just in terms of cinematic merit but also in the way the production happened. It ensured that Truffaut would be able to successfully produce films for years to come. Behind every successful man is a woman sort of literally became a reality for his career to take off. The Venice Film Festival in 1956 got him acquainted with Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, who happened to be the managing director of one of France’s largest film distribution companies. Truffaut told Madeleine about wanting to adapt the short story Les Mistons (The Brats) by Maurice Pons into a short film. She approached her father for the funding, and the rest, as they say, is history—Truffaut’s company Les Films du Carrosse came into being, and then there was no looking back.

The film is not just about boys fixated on a beautiful young girl. It’s about the transience of childhood, like any phase of life. It is about going back to one’s childhood through episodes that stand out in our memories. “School days are carefree” is the common refrain—this film is something straight out of that. Truffaut makes you live out one summer of that phase of life through these children.

The age of mischief, the age of wonder and fascination with the opposite sex, and the angst when society does not understand you, is something that Truffaut has brought out so beautifully time and again through his stories.

Who can forget Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows or Stolen Kisses? The difference in Les Mistons is that the memory is not owned by one single person. Les Mistons reflects memories—of what this group of boys did in their youth and during one summer in particular. The memory is a collective noun, as in “The Brats.” It is not one person going through the entire gamut of adolescent emotions and first attraction to the opposite sex but the entire group of boys.

Some feminist studies hint at the objectification of women. Far from objectification, to me, on the contrary, it seems an ode to feminine charm and the beauty of that age.

The children’s desire and curiosity are natural to the age. The grace with which Truffaut touches childhood and fascination for the opposite sex can be the subject of an entire article. In the hands of another director, the film could well have become largely titillating. Not even the scene of the brats as voyeurs who watch the heroine bathe gives one any such feeling.

Les Mistons took me back to a slice of my childhood—to my days in Kolkata, residing in a society flat on Rowland Road. Our girl gang was in the age group of 7 to 12 and we had our respective crushes residing in the same block. The only thing was that they were around 21–25 years old—either studying in colleges, doing management at IIM, or young trainees in some companies. I don’t recall the exact year, but there happened to be a union strike in our building—the ‘Darwan’ (security guard) and Liftman association, to be specific. A volunteer group was formed from amongst the residents to do these two duties in their spare hours with an impressive timetable. Needless to say, my girl gang would not be considered for something as adult as security guard duty. We weren’t even eyeing that. We got the lift operation duties. On the pretext of school homework, we asked for late evening timings. We so desperately wanted to be on duty when those young men got home. We wanted to ask them which floor (as if to say we stalkers did not know) and open and shut the lift doors for our heartthrobs. We acted nonchalant as we discharged our duties—precocious brats who pretended to be deeply interested in the union strike as we sacrificed our hide-and-seek and badminton-playing hours. Our objects of affection, too, à la Bernadette, seemed totally unaware of our existence in those lift rides. I have no idea how long the strike lasted, but for us, it felt like too short a strike.

The film explores the city in these 26 minutes that Truffaut gives us—wherever Bernadette’s easy bicycle rides take her and wherever the brats go following her. Sometimes her skirt bellows in the wind. The sun falls on the lanes and by-lanes of the city. The camera sweeps the poetry of a small town with its rivers and ponds and the evening summer breezes that make the trees sway. The scenes feel like a delicate stroke of a paintbrush in so many places. A tender kiss of reverence in slow motion, that one of the boys plants on Bernadette’s bicycle seat, is one such moment.

The interesting thing in this short film is also that these brats are not all the time simply staring at their object of affection. They are often wondering about who the boyfriend is. They think of how they can harm the couple by writing all kinds of things about them all over their small town. Sometimes they act cool. In a particular scene, they try making a point that they can well continue playing their cops-and-robbers games and show the audience that they are not impacted by Bernadette. Ignoring a crush or object of desire is something most of us would relate to from our childhood, as a way to get his/her attention.

The summer dreams of infatuation that the brats carry in their eyes come to a grinding halt with a tragic event—that of Bernadette’s fiancé’s sudden death in a mountain-climbing accident.

Truffaut lets the film primarily linger on the boys and their obsession for most of the short film. The tragic incident is not dwelled on. Life, as he shows us, is one happy dream until it is time to wake up. The waking up to harsh realities in life is never gradual but sudden, Truffaut seems to say through the screen time devoted to the tragedy—barely a minute. The film ends with a scene, a few months later, when the boys get a glimpse of the darkly dressed Bernadette strolling down a road and then going forever out of sight.

The boyfriend ‘Gérard’ (played by Gérard Blain), the object of collective jealousy of the brats, was the then-husband of the lead actress Bernadette Lafont. Gérard faded into oblivion, but Bernadette became a darling of the New Wave directors and was seen in Claude Chabrol’s films regularly.

The film ends, but some images endure—that of a summer au sud de la France (South of France) and the youthful boys getting tormented by Lafont’s billowing skirt. Some of the scenes were shot at the Roman Amphitheatre.

Les Mistons is said to be the first film that truly satisfied Truffaut. One can clearly see why. Summer should have been a slow and long winding road, but it never is. I conclude with lines from a poem of mine:

“This summer stretches

Like a rubber band

On my thinning hair

Before the day slips

And falls into twilight

Hold on to it

…What a life to live

Stories to recall

With the long days of one’s summer

Cut short.”