Cum din primul său scurtmetraj - Une visite (1955) - se pare că s-au pierdut toate exemplarele şi cum era mai degrabă o formă destul de rudimentară de relaţionare cu cinema-ul, rămâne Les Mistons (1957) să fie considerat opera prima şi, mai ales, începutul unei frumoase şi faimoase aventuri cinematografice care avea să se încheie peste 26 de ani cu Vivement dimanche! De altfel, autorul însuşi (Truffaut, dacă nu v-aţi prins deja), spunea, într-un interviu pentru The New Yorker, că Les Mistons e primul său film adevărat, primul film care contează.
Les Mistons conţine în fibra sa interioară ecouri ale realismului liric de tip Vigo sau Renoir, stil de care Truffaut se va rupe în scurt timp. Nu a fost genul de ruptură sinonimă cu negarea, ci mai degrabă o racordare conceptuală a unei arte încă fragede la tehnici prea puţin sau deloc explorate la acea vreme.
«My first real film, in 1957, was „Les Mistons”- „The Mischief Makers”
in English. It had the advantage of telling a story, which was not
common practice for short films in those days! It also gave me the
opportunity to start working with actors. But „Les Mistons” also had
commentary interspersed with its dialogue, so that made making it much
simpler. The film met with quite a bit of luck. It was awarded a prize
at a festival in Brussels, I believe. „Les Mistons” is based on a story
by Maurice Pons; it’s not my original script. I saw it as the first of a
series of sketches. It was easier at the time, and would be even now,
to find money for three or four different short films than to find
enough financial support for a feature film. So I planned to do a series
of sketches with the common thread of childhood. I had five or six
stories from which I could choose. I started with „Les Mistons” because
it was the easiest to shoot.
When it was finished, I wasn’t completely satisfied because the film
was a little too literary. Let me explain: „Les Mistons” is the story of
five children who spy on young lovers. And I noticed, in directing
these children, that they had no interest in the girl, who was played by
Gérard Blain’s wife, Bernadette Lafont; the boys weren’t jealous of
Blain himself, either. So I had them do contrived things to make them
appear jealous, and later this annoyed me. I told myself that I’d film
with children again, but next time I would have them be truer to life
and use as little fiction as possible.» (din interviul menţionat anterior)
- imagine via Adrian Munteanu -
«It was really and truly while filming „Les Mistons” that I came to realize that the choice of story for a film is more important than one thinks and that you cannot simply jump into things. I realized, for example, that there was no connection between the lives of those five children and the pair of lovers. Every time I had to shoot things that were truly connected with the subject, like the pestering pranks played on the pair by the five children, I was ill at ease. Whereas every time I did things with the children that were almost documentary, I was happy and everything went well. We were making a kind of investigation into truth, if you will, using the children, because they have a terrific feeling for realism, and because that interested me. It was thanks to the mistakes of „Les Mistons” that I came to realize, for „The 400 Blows” [1959], that this time I had to stick close to childhood and, above all, very close to what is documentary, working with the minimum of fiction.»