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A child's gaze for François Truffaut's camera, one brimming with callow infatuation yet aware of its toll—the narrator recounting "the springs of luminous sensuality" experienced by a batch of boys might be the aged Leo Colston in Hartley's The Go-Between. Summer in Nîmes, al fresco jaunts. Everyone's dream girl is the "unbearably beautiful" local gamine (Bernadette Lafont) who rides through the woods, skirts billowing, a zoom on her parked bicycle segues into a ceremonial slow-mo close-up of one of the kids sniffing the seat. Awe turns to resentment when the unwitting muse starts dating the gym teacher (Gérard Blain), the jeering of "childhood instinct" following the grown-ups at tennis courts and into movie theaters. (Jean-Claude Brialy is briefly seen on the screen-within-the-screen.) The loves (youthfulness, geegaws, movement) and hates (the poster for a Jean Delannoy picture is ripped right out of the wall) of the author of "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Franéais" are already amply visible. Cahiers foolery galore, from a reenactment of L'Arroseur Arosé to the Cocteau reverse motion that revives the brat "killed" during a cops and robbers game. Vigo's jeunes diables set to a skittering Sennett tempo, a rhythm suggesting a missing frame or two, accelerating toward the darkening of innocent desire. "A virginal heartbeat has its own logic." Autumn comes at the close, the carefree belle is now somber before uncomprehending eyes, rather anticipating another future Truffaut heroine (La Mariée était en noir). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |