If, as I'm sure I read somewhere, the word 'teenager' was coined in the mid 1950s then the boys and girls who epitomize joie de vivre in this minor masterpiece from 1949 are merely young people who are not yet in search of a label. It has been compared to the New Wavelet that would swirl round the ankles of older and better filmmakers in the late 1950s but primarily because Becker took his camera on to the streets of post-war Paris and focused it on young people who were rebelling in a modest way against the values of an older generation. But young people had always, at one stage in their development, rebelled against their parents and what they stood for and they'd taken a camera on to the streets of Manhattan two years earlier in The Naked City or, like the man said, there's nothing new under the sun.
To watch this film today - and in my case for the first time, thanks to my Norwegian benefactor - is to be struck by just how CLEAN as well as clean-cut these kids were; no tattoos, no scruffy sweat shirts and torn jeans, no rings through the nose, eyebrows or anywhere else and no tongue studs, definitely no H, Coke, Crack, Smack or Speed and YET with all these 'handicaps' they still HAD A BALL. Okay, not all of them were teenagers; Daniel Gelin, who held them all together was 28 and Brigitte Auber was 21, though Nicole Courcel weighed in at 19. With the exception of Gelin most non-French viewers may well assume that these people came out of nowhere, shot this movie and disappeared without trace but not so; Pierre Trabaud, for example, dubbed Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront and was still acting four decades after this movie when he featured in Round Midnight; Nicole Courcel had already appeared (uncredited) in Les Amoureux sont seuls au monde and would go on to Gibier de potence and La Marie du Port whilst Brigitte Auber, who had also been in Les Amoureux sont seuls du monde would go on to Duvivier's Under Paris Skies, which IMDb refuses to accept in French.
This is a Hymn to Youth and a wonderful contrast to stuff like City Across The River, released the same year or Rebel Without A Cause; in all three teenagers are 'troubled' but in Becker's movie they handle it with much more maturity and zest for life as they drive around Paris - in an amphibious vehicle that was probably a remnant of World War II and resembles something known as a 'duck' that is as much at home on the Seine as on the boulevards - in between sessions in jazz clubs. A real gem and a joy to watch.
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