The French New Wave, one of the most influential movements in film history, first arrived on the scene as a foundational shift in French society. A new generation of young people coming of age after World War II began to shake the established order, reshaping values, morals, roles, and relationships between women and men. Their progressive thinking revolutionized the cinematic landscape, guided by young directors whose philosophy and aesthetic celebrated personal style and authenticity. New images of female characters represented a palpable break with the past. Off screen, women were enjoying more freedom while still caught between the conflicting messages of a society grappling with rapid evolution. These new women, these nouvelles femmes, suddenly saw their complexities reflected on screen: the roles and the actresses who inhabited them were, in a word, modern.

If many New Wave films still depicted women through the lens of male fantasies, they also brought about freer, more independent images of women with individuality and some amount of agency. In Truffaut’s 1957 short Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers), Bernadette Lafont encapsulated the duality of embodying a pinup in the eyes of the young boys (the young “rascals” or “brats” of the title) spying on her (as well as Truffaut’s camera), and, at the same time, a free and free-spirited woman as she rides through town on her bicycle.

The film was adapted from Maurice Pons’s novel of the same name and foreshadows Truffaut’s alter-ego troublemaker Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre cents coups. In the south of France, a group of adolescent boys follows Lafont’s character around, transfixed by her power, fascinated by her body and her relationship with a young French soldier (Gérard Blain) on leave from his military service. Like Bardot min Et Dieu créa la femme, Lafont in Les Mistons reflects the tension of an emerging feminine agency, translated by the bicycle, in the context of a cinematic and societal tradition of objectifying women through the narrator’s gaze, the director’s lens. The film opens with a long tracking shot of Lafont riding her bicycle toward the camera before it pans over to reveal the young boys gazing at her from afar as a literary voice-over narrates the story: “Jouve’s sister was unbearably beautiful. We couldn’t take it. She always rode with her skirt flying, and without a slip. Bernadette led us to discover many of our darkly hidden dreams. She awoke in us the springs of luminous sensuality.”

FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: ACTING AS ESCAPE AND REBELLION

Capturing the spirit of the French New Wave, the image of Jeanne Moreau running across the Valmy Bridge in Jules et Jim has become emblematic of the movement and of the actress. Dressed as a man, Catherine (Moreau) gives herself a head start against Jules and Jim and wins the race. They all laugh about it, the men having accepted her taking the lead in their harmonious trio. But Moreau, along with most women of her generation, did not have that head start; women struggled just to enter the race. In life as in cinema, customs and hierarchies were well established, and there was no room for women who did not fit the predefined roles. Such was Moreau’s case as an actress in the cinéma de papa era before she carved out her own place within the New Wave.

On screen, she came into her own through encounters with directors who revealed her uniqueness. Off screen, she was a free woman before the women’s liberation movement, and a romantic yet transgressive actress in a shifting cinematic context. Disregarding conventions, she intertwined reality and film, always remaining true to herself in both.