François Truffaut
1959
100 minutes
This is the first of many Truffaut films about his favorite protagonist, Antoine Doinel, played by a child actor who would grow up to be the delightfully weird child actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. The same actor would end up portraying Doinel again in four further films later in his life. This one in particular is about his rather pathetic childhood, which slightly mirrors Truffaut's own childhood.
This film is considered one of the best French films ever made, which also solidly places it on a lot of people's lists as one of the best films ever made. Unfortunately, it has one of the worst titles for one of the best films ever made, since the title translates poorly into English. The idiom it translates literally means something along the lines of "raising hell", but that doesn't quite work either.
Look, this film is about a weird somewhat rowdy kid who grows into a weird kinda pathetic adult. It's not quite Dennis the Menace or anything like that. Imagine Dennis the Menace, except he has a bit of an obsession with Honoré de Balzac. This obsession not only gets him kicked out of school for plagiarizing Balzac in a very obvious manner for a school essay, but he also manages to nearly burn down his parents' home by building a little shrine in his bedroom to the writer which starts a fire when one of the candles in the shrine sets the curtains ablaze. Eventually the little weirdo gets sent off to juvie after a lot of sad misadventures and that's the end of the film.
When you were in middle school, one of your friends was dumb enough to get into lots of trouble but clever enough to get into trouble into interesting ways. He was a chemistry wiz, and he once gave you a cyanide pill he had stolen that you doubted was cyanide and which you thankfully didn't put in your mouth. In one of the college chemistry classes his eager Asian dragon-mom parent and his Army dad were making him take in middle school, he got his hands on a quantity of potassium permanganate and then went in the middle of the night and tossed it into the municipal swimming pool, which turned the water a delightful shade of purple. The authorities were not amused since the pool then needed to be drained and purified, and he was quickly identified as the culprit. This earned him a terrible reputation as a petty criminal, and it was a struggle to maintain your friendship with him without ruining your own reputation.
Your friend later switched to a different private school for gifted children, but after a few more petty crimes he ended up graduating from there into juvie and you never heard much more from him until you were both well into adulthood. At that point you had both led more colorful lives than many of your classmates, though his road was quite a bit rockier and much more directly crime-adjacent. The last you heard from him years ago, he was engaged to a much younger woman and trying to get you involved in one of his PUA training schemes, which you politely declined.
Time to choose something different: