At only 47 minutes, Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (dedicated to Charles Trenet (who else?)) is Jean Eustache's second short. Like Les Mauvaises Fréquentations before, it slowly leads towards the masterpiece which is La Maman et la putain, only more so. The Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud in Eustache's landmark film also stars in this, and is also a penniless drifter cruising the cafés in search of a woman, any woman.
The setting is Narbonne, where Eustache spent his youth. The young Daniel here has equally macho friends who view women as sexual objects, and of importance here is the need to dress respectably. The jobless Daniel has no money to buy new clothes, steals books from booksellers, but dreams of forsaking the same coat that a friend gave him several years before, dreams of buying a duffel coat!
His luck is in when, this being before Christmas, a photographer offers him a job wearing a Father Christmas costume and taking photos of him in the streets of Narbonne with his arm round children and other people. Daniel sees this as an opportunity to buy a duffel coat by the new year, and also get off with girls who allow him to touch them through their winter clothes. His attempts to seduce them though dates backfires, although he manages to buy a duffel coat with this money, as well as working for a lottery in which he can fiddle money.
The final scene is of Daniel and his drunken friends staggering down a street singing about visiting a brothel.
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