Pastiches in the noble sense of the word, Truffaut's B movies, semiserious and intelligent, are constructed on an unusual reportthe delicious contrast between the finesse and the brutality/ brusqueness. Finesse of conception, of treatment, of methods; brutality and brusqueness of the primary literary sourcestestifying of Truffaut's decadent attraction towards the brutal and the sordid (Truffaut himself had a rather naughty adolescence, and his physiognomy shows a certain human stuff, there are Lombrosian traces that somehow are at odds or seem to contradict his reputation of a gentle, emasculate human being and his high and refined intellectuality; he obviously wanted to look like the angelic leadsLéaud ;he did not).<br /><br />From this juxtaposing of finesse and brutality issue a nonchalance and a delicious contrast. The respective pictures are not _epigone flicks, they are not pastiches in this pejorative sense, they are not derivativebut ingenious, ironic, and contradictory. They are also highly cultured productsthe same vacuum pomp found at Godard as well (with an entire different function in Truffaut's cinema, etc.). This artificiality might seem at first disconcerting; yet it is of a Hitchcockian efficiency, and strictly functional. This artificiality bears valuesseveral values, either human, personal or artistic. It can not be dismissed as a defect. It is part of the charm.