L’Argent de Poche [Small Change] **** (1976, Georges Desmouceaux, Philippe Goldmann, Nicole Félix) – Classic Movie Review 3018

Director François Truffaut’s 1976 hymn to the joys of youth is a series of charming anecdotes about a group of provincial French schoolboys, their teachers and parents in the town of Thiers in the summer of 1976. Georges (Geory) Desmouceaux plays Patrick, a motherless lad just discovering the opposite sex, who befriends Julien (Philippe Goldmann), a new student who lives in poverty with his mother and has a terrible secret.

Truffaut, director of the hard-edged Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), is in a surprisingly benign mood here and has no difficulty making the light-as-air material work. L’Argent de Poche is certainly sentimental but it is also always charming and amusing and the sentimentality and nostalgic glow are never cloying.

It is the kind of film that when a toddler child falls out of a window he lands safely and unhurt, and that makes you relieved and delighted, glad you’re watching the movie. However, there are a few sharper incidents to bring a bit of edge. One kid relates his first dirty joke, while another gets into the realms of fantasy when a girl uses a loudspeaker to beg for food when she’s been denied it as a punishment.

There’s a fine ensemble, but no-star cast: Nicole Félix, Claudio Deluca, Franck Deluca, Richard Golfier, Laurent Devlaeminck, Bruno Staab, Sébastien Marc, Sylvie Grézel, Jean-François Stévenin, Chantal Mercier, Tania Torrens, René Barnerias, Katy Carayon, Jean-Marie Carayon and Pascale Bruchon.

One English language title is a direct translation, Pocket Money, but the English language title of Small Change was the idea of Steven Spielberg, Truffaut’s director on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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Classic Movie Review 3018