[January 1958] Paris, Thursday Dear old Robert [Lachenay], … I am screening Les Mistons, absolutely finished, Tuesday evening about 6.00, on the Champs-Elysées. I hope you’ll be able to come with whoever you like, the auditorium is very large and I’d like to fill it so as to have a better atmosphere. Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, Doniol, Bazin, etc. like the film enormously, and I’ve also come to like it again, nearly all of it. The music is terrific, you’ll see. A few days later, the film will be shown out of competition at Tours to two thousand people. I’m obviously very excited since the time is coming when I’ll know what the immediate future holds for me: more sketches, a feature film or who can say?

François Truffaut, Letters, Faber and Faber, London 1989

Filmed in the South, freely adapted from a short story taken from the Maurice Pons collection Virginales, and produced by Truffaut’s own production company (Les Films du Carrosse), which would go on to make most of his works, in little over a quarter of an hour Les Mistons fully reveals the talent of the filmmaker … Henri-Pierre Roché, the elderly author of Jules et Jim will write to his young friend “Drink from it like from a spring”. So too Maurice Pons, whose story the upandcoming director adapted according to his own tastes, will end up convincing himself that the “betrayal” carried out in the transition from page to screen was precisely what was needed. It is as though Cocteau’s enfants terribles had met and clashed with the sensuality emanating from the Renoirs, father and son. Truffaut is already present in the “subjective objectivity” with which the film depicts the difficult age these brats, as if waist deep in a ford, are passing through, and in the disapproval of that French cinema that manipulates childhood (the target is Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans collier), as well as in the sense of death that pervades the ending.

Ugo Casiraghi, Vivement Truffaut!, edited by Lorenzo Pellizzari, Lindau, Turin 2011