Arson, larceny, vandalism and elaborate attempts at suicide — if the latest of the province’s many memorable movies about adolescence is to be believed, no Quebecois boyhood is complete without hobbies like these.

That’s bad news for parents but good news for viewers of C’est pas moi, je le jure! (It’s Not Me, I Swear!). Philippe Falardeau’s fourth feature is a very worthy addition to the canon of Quebecois films about misspent youth — imagine a less showy C.R.A.Z.Y. or a (slightly) gentler Léolo. It could also be the most entertaining Canadian movie to hit Toronto screens this year, provided you’re able to see the humour in a film that starts with its 10-year-old hero trying to hang himself.

“Having the music of Patrick Watson there helps,” notes Falardeau of his film’s opening scene in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. “You take out the music and it becomes pure drama — I didn’t want that. I wanted to set a different tone right away.”

Thanks to such constant clashes of light and dark elements, C’est pas moi, je le jure! is able to convey the volatile nature of early adolescence with unusual accuracy. The kid with the death wish is Léon (Antoine L’Ecuyer), a rebellious 10-year-old growing up in the Montreal suburbs in the late ’60s. After his beloved mother abandons the family to go find herself in Greece, Léon’s antics only get worse and the viewer never knows whether the outcomes of his actions — which include the systematic destruction of a neighbour’s house — will be comic or tragic.

C’est pas moi, je le jure! is based on a pair of semi-autobiographical novels by Bruno Hébert, a writer whose family life must’ve been truly tumultuous, seeing as his sister Isabelle Hébert wrote Maman est chez le coiffeur, the past year’s other great Quebecois coming-of-age film (and a fellow entry on Canada’s Top Ten). Though Falardeau was conscious of the rich history of French-Canadian movies about childhood — so much so that he toned down similarities between Léolo and Hébert’s novels — he says C’est pas moi, je le jure! was influenced more by Francois Truffaut’s Small Change and Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog. He also tapped into feelings from his own boyhood, which he admits wasn’t quite so eventful.

“I wasn’t the hellraiser Léon is,” says Falardeau, who grew up in Gatineau before launching his film career in Montreal with 2000’s La Moitié gauche du frigo. “But he’s at this age when we all find out that we’re different. Most kids just want to look like the others and blend in but he doesn’t want to. He is what he is and he has all kinds of metaphysical questions about life — that’s something I could relate to. He also has this energy boiling up inside and he doesn’t know what to do with it. I don’t think boys are meant to be sitting in a classroom for five hours a day — we just have too much energy. I really felt that, too.”

The reason that Léon remains such an engaging character despite his outrageous acts is that he doesn’t have malicious intentions. Instead, his behaviour stems more from a universal need that children feel to exercise their will on the rest of the world.

“The film is very much about rites of passage,” says Falardeau. “It’s about getting outside the family circle, about lying for the first time and getting away with it, about falling in love. We all go through these things at a certain point. It’s about finding out how life works. But this kid is not afraid of dying so he has an advantage that many kids don’t.”

Léon may not be afraid, though, as Falardeau adds, “he doesn’t know exactly what dying is.” That doesn’t make him stupid or foolish — Falardeau’s film astutely illustrates that what Léon really lacks is the ability to articulate and therefore process the existential matters he’s just beginning to tackle.

“I think children at that age can understand and grasp all of the big questions in life but just can’t talk about them because they don’t have the wording,” says Falardeau. “I experienced that even working with the child actors. They can understand what the characters are going through so directing is not a question of saying, ‘Do this and do that.’ It’s a matter of asking them, ‘What do you think the character is feeling now?’ We discuss it and they can apply it.”

As a result, C’est pas moi, je le jure! has none of the condescension that can ruin movies about youngsters, even if Léon’s choice of hobbies means that Falardeau’s film is not exactly family-friendly fare.

“My premise is that the kid is as intelligent as we are,” says the director. “He doesn’t have as many references as we do — he didn’t read as many books or see as many films. But he is as intelligent as us so we have to treat him like that.”