Customer Reviews

Two Short Films by François Truffaut (Les Mistons / Antoine et Colette)

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You may be a bit disappointed about the length of the DVD. Les Mistons is 17 minutes. Antoine and Collette is 30 minutes. But these two shorts are among Truffaut's best work. Note that Antoine and Collette is letterboxed despite not being noted on the packaging. Les Mistons was 1.33 to 1 when I saw it on film 20 years ago so I'm going to guess that is the correct ratio.

I am reviewing the dvd itself, not the 2 short films by Truffaut, which are great. You cannot watch the entire film of Antoine & Colette, because the picture freezes at 23 mins. into a 30 min. film. This is a manufacturing defect of which I informed Fox-Lorber well over a year ago. I must have purchased over ten copies from different sources at that time. All were the same on every dvd player I tried. Apparently Fox-Lorber doesn't care, because they keep re-issuing the dvd without fixing the problem. They have the same problem with their dvd release of Mrs. Dalloway. BE WARNED!!!

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).

It's quite strange to find in LES MISTONS a lot of themes Truffaut will treat in his next movies, for instance the tragic love affair (DEUX ANGLAISES ET LE CONTINENT, L'HISTOIRE D'ADELE H, etc...), the children (LES 400 COUPS, L'ARGENT DE POCHE).

ANTOINE ET COLETTE has been shot in 1962 for L'AMOUR A 20 ANS, a movie composed of four different films about the same theme. It's a movie absolutely necessary for those of you interested in the saga of Antoine Doinel, the cinematographic double of François Truffaut and young hero of THE 400 COUPS.

Since a dozen movies of François Truffaut are now available in the DVD standard zone 1, this DVD could be a valuable addition to your library.

Good image and sound transfer.

A DVD for the curious ones.

A boy bends down to smell the bicycle seat of a beautiful girl. A young woman laughs and giggles her way through a game of tennis with her lover. An elderly man sprays water at a young rascal. Forgettable yet utterly unforgettable moments are captured on film in Truffaut's enchanting short film LES MISTONS.

LES MISTONS is a beautifully conceived story that seizes the attention from start to finish. Truffaut brings together the artistic endeavour and human spontaneity that characterized the best of the French Nouvelle Vague in the '50s and '60s. It is a real pleasure to watch a simple tale told so engagingly, so cinematically, a tale in which the the smallness of everyday life intersects with the vastness of human existence and emotion.

Francois Truffaut's first three features are, for me, the most precious things in the universe, and if I am only allowed to take one thing to heaven it will be one of these. The rest of Truffaut's oeuvre, for some bizarre reason, is rather forgettable, ranging from the slight but entertaining ('Stolen Kisses') through the dense and stodgy ('The Green Room') to the plain embarrassing ('Such a Gorgeous Kid like me').

These two shorts go some way to providing an answer for this fall. '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.

'Antoine and Colette', the second film in the Antoine 'The 400 Blows' Doinel series, was originally an episode in a portmanteau film 'Love at Twenty' (also featuring Marcel Ophuls and Andrej Wajda). It is a slick piece of entertainment about the romantic difficulties of a now very together young man. All the trauma and life of the first film is neatly ironed out.

Criterion included "Antoine et Colette" as a part of their five film package from 2003,"Francois Truffaut's Adventures of Antoine Doinel" (The 400 Blows / Antoine & Collette / Stolen Kisses / Bed & Board / Love on the Run) but as I already own the others .... "Les Mistons" is included there also, as a hidden feature on the final disc.