We can look at 'La petite voleuse' (1988) in several ways. She resists the temptation of playing her as a teenage martyr and makes her a cheeky Cinderella instead. The biggest credit, of course, is due to the amazing Charlotte Gainsbourg and her arresting performance in the part of Janine. The whole thing feels entirely natural and deeply touching at the same time. The 1950s rural and Parisian sets are designed with just the right mixture of dedication and détente to make you forget it's only make-belief. By showing us what she does, rather than narrating what happens to her, Claude Miller brings to life a story (written by none other than François Truffaut himself) that may easily have turned out corny at a lesser man's hands. She finds out the hard way there are limits even for a pretty girl and ends up in a nunnery that is half poorhouse, half prison.

As Bob Dylan famously put it: 'She'd come away from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs, with men in every walk of life which took her everywhere.' While Janine may have the genes of a flirt and a crook, it's the men she meets that take her from petty theft to grand larceny.

It's more like a ballad, set to music in a minor key. But her own life is unlike the song-and-dance pictures she likes so much. She steals from the church to go to the movies. Truffaut would probably have approved the result. But, don't neglect the other obvious qualities that Miller's movie contains: the quality of the screenplay, the subtlety of the making and a quite faithful reconstruction of the France after the Second World War. More simply, she nearly carries the whole movie on her shoulders. She epitomizes with a lot of conviction the role of this teenager searching for real love and a better life.

Her amazing performance is enough to justify the trip and the vision of the film. I think the movie is especially worth for Charlotte Gainsbourg, full of freshness. The whole may not reach the peak of 'les 400 coups' but it is after all a decent work although opinion is a little divided about it. So, it was Claude Miller who took over and put in pictures a story with recurrent topics in Truffaut's work such as childhood, education. Unfortunately, he died before he could make his film. Indeed, he was dreaming of a feminized version of his movie 'les 400 coups' (1959). Originally, 'the little thief' is a movie that François Truffaut was to shot.

The little thief