Les enfants terribles

First, I have to admit that I nearly didn't write this comment at all. I read a rave review of Les Enfants Terribles by an earlier user and agreed with (almost) every word of it. What more was there to add? Then I searched my soul for a day or so, and had to admit that this film REALLY does not work for me - brilliantly directed, skilfully acted, moodily photographed and lyrically scored though it may be.

For all its many splendours, this Melville film of a Cocteau novel suffers from a malady I can only describe as "creative schizophrenia." It is recognisably a work by two highly individual artists, each of whom creates his own distinctive and magical world. No film by Melville could ever be mistaken for anybody else's. The same is true of Cocteau.

How do these two worlds mix together? To put it bluntly, not at all. This is most apparent in the (mis)casting of the androgynous and incestuous brother-sister duo. With his porcelain cheekbones and languid sensuality, Edouard Dhermitte is a classic Cocteau actor. (He was, in fact, Cocteau's lover at the time.) With her politicised Left Bank angst and 'butch' vitality, Nicole Stephane is a classic Melville heroine. (She had starred in his much finer 1947 film Le Silence de la Mer.) These two actors scarcely seem to belong on the same planet, let alone in the same family.

Still more disheartening is the utter lack of allure of Renee Cosima, a pudgy young ingenue who is cast as the brother's two ambisexual love objects - the sadistic schoolboy Dargelos and the lovelorn model Agathe. Lacking even the tiniest flicker of charisma, whether as a man or as a woman, Cosima makes it difficult for us to empathise with the hero's erotic longings, or to care much about the hothouse melodrama that breaks loose as a result.

Try as I might to warm to this film, I cannot help imagining it with a different cast. As the brother and sister, Helmut Berger and Dominique Sanda from The Garden of the Finzi Continis. As the androgynous sexual pirate Agathe/Dargelos, maybe Katharine Hepburn from Sylvia Scarlett or Indrid Thulin from The Magician or (why not?) the immortal Anne Carlisle from Liquid Sky. Most important of all - and I know this smacks of heresy - I would much rather Cocteau had directed it himself. One great auteur should be enough for any film.

David Melville

Based on a novel by Jean Cocteau who also wrote the screenplay and provided the narrative voiceover, Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terribles is a psychological duel between a brother and sister that takes them from poverty to wealth, all while playing a dangerous game that they can't stop playing. Expanding his cast of characters from three to four, essentially, Melville also expands the visual scope to tell the story of two terrible children who can't help but hurt each other.

Paul (Edouard Dermit) gets hit with a snowball in the chest at school, leading to his collapse. His weak chest simply could not take the hit, no matter how light, and he's taken home to be nursed by his older sister Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane) who also nurses their invalid mother. Witnessed by Gerard (Jacques Bernard), a school friend of Paul's, we see the contentious relationship between the two siblings. She doesn't believe that he's sick. He doesn't care that she doesn't. She still takes care of him because to the two of them it is all just a game that they must play, and that defines the entirety of the film. Whether we're told explicitly or not, the two never stop playing their game with loose rules other than an embrace of danger and egging each other on.

When their mother dies, the two are left alone (presumably with some money from their mother which allows them to survive, along with the good doctor deciding to pay for their maid), and they grow inward. Gerard often stops by to see the status of his friends, and the room they share becomes increasingly chaotic and messy, despite both siblings insisting that they would have clean rooms on their own. The three take a vacation to the seaside (banked by Gerard's rich father) where they extend their game into petty theft. One must steal something of no practical use from a small shop while Gerard's father purchases a hat. When Gerard steals a brush, far too useful an object, he must go back and steal a watering can (also a useful object, but far larger).

It seems as though their games are taking a toll on them both, and Elisabeth decides that she must get out and get a job, despite Paul's protestations. She takes the job of a model in a clothing store and quickly becomes friends with Agathe (Renee Cosima) and brings her home to live in their mother's room (that neither of the two siblings ever took up their mother's room is never mentioned, but it feeds the subtext). It's obvious that there are emotions running around everywhere under the surface. Gerard hanging around only really makes sense if he finds an attraction to Elisabeth. Paul ruthlessly insults Agathe, but she sticks around because she obviously has feelings for him. Elisabeth lords over it all, playing her game, even as it becomes obvious that people are feeling real pain over what's going on.

Elisabeth, through her work, meets a rich American Jew Michael (Melvyn Martin) and the two quickly marry, though he dies in a car accident between their wedding and their honeymoon. The death leaves Elisabeth with a huge house that she invites her brother and two friends to occupy with her, and with no need for money or any other actions for basic survival, the quartet fester and stew in that house. They all have separate rooms, but they end up sleeping in Elisabeth's together. When Paul can't take it anymore, he moves all of his things, recreating the room they shared at their mother's home, in the great hall of the house, attracting many visits from his fellow denizens of the house and also going only as far as he can in striking out independently from Elisabeth. He's dependent on her both financially and emotionally. Despite the ill-natured morass that she creates, he cannot get away.

And that's when Elisabeth takes the game too far. She never seems to think so, despite her final actions, but it all just feels like extensions of an insular, destructive game of a malignant child. The subdued emotions of her tenants come to the surface. Agathe admits to Elisabeth that she loves Paul. Paul writes a letter of love to Agathe but, in his poor emotional state, addresses the letter to himself instead of to Agathe. Elisabeth finds the letter, reads it, and destroys it, playing both sides against each other by telling Agathe that Paul has no feelings towards her but Gerard does while telling Paul that Agathe loves Gerard. She also confronts Gerard, telling him that Agathe loves him, but it's obvious that Gerard only falls into the proposed relationship to keep Elisabeth happy.

Poison is introduced, Elisabeth quotes Lady Macbeth, and the whole thing comes to its end with death in a very French manner.

Les Enfants Terribles is the story of a woman with no morals, perhaps a nihilist, who sees everyone around her as her playthings. She twists and manipulates everyone to suit her own interests which never seem to be more than filling time. It's a portrait of decadence and maliciousness in the form of children (really, all four main actors easily look like they're in their twenties even though Paul and Gerard are supposed to be about sixteen). Stephane is the standout of the cast, in a marked contrast to her nearly silent role in La Silence de la Mer, constantly talking and scheming with her eyes.

As a psychological drama, I find Les Enfants Terribles to be involving, twisting, and terrifying. Perhaps older generations are always scared of the next generations turning out as monsters.

Before he made the Bob Le Flambeur, the "Grandfather of the New Wave" made this film in collaboration with Cocteau. The cinematography in this film is pretty good, and Melville does a good job at replicating the feel of a Cocteau film. This is perhaps Melville's most "Un-Melville" film. There's no hardened men or bank robbers to be had here. The portrait of a sister/brother relationship is well-done and believable, and easily holds your attention the entire film.

The imagery is great, particularly towards the ending and the shot of the dead mother. It's almost dream-like! With this film, and Bob, it's easy to see why Melville was such and inspiration to future New Wave directors such as Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, etc. Highly recommended, especially to Cocteau/Melville fans!

I recently saw this movie, titled The Strange Ones in English, with English subtitles on TCM. I know a little French, and it seemed the English translations may not have captured all the nuances, but I'm not sure.

Before writing my review I wanted to see what more experienced or better informed people were saying, and I gather that most of the favorable reviewers liked the daring themes presented in stark black and white format with highly dramatic acting and artistic camera work. No doubt about it, this movie features all of those, and I did watch the whole thing because of those elements.

As with many French films I've seen over the years, this film presents an amoral view of life, i.e., there is no right or wrong, in fact in this movie there is no real consideration of right or wrong in the script or the story at all.

Minutes before my sister learned that her fiancée had been killed in a car accident, she asked me "what is existentialism?" I had a sense for the concept but I struggled to make it concrete. That awful phone call ended the conversation about literature, but I never forgot that moment. Now I know the answer, and The Strange Ones could well serve as a teaching tool in literature or philosophy classes; a person actively watching and thinking about this movie will "get" what existentialism is (in cinema anyway).

This film brilliantly presents strange people, maybe "weird people" better says it, going through unusual events in an unusual context. In existentialism nothing really has overarching meaning, so whatever happens, happens, and the results yield not so much tragedy as very dark farce.

Another KVIFF viewing of Jean-Pierre Melville's tribute section, after LE SAMOURAI (1967, a 9/10). This one is Melville's earlier work, a collaboration with Jean Cocteau, an adaption of Cocteau's internationally famed eponymous novel, which at first glance would seem to be deviated from Melville's comfort zone, the film has a more explicit portrayal of humanity in its darkest corner, and the fodder has a comprehensive penchant to theatricality and character study.

A quite conspicuous clash comes from the cast, to wit Edouard Dermithe, the leading protagonist as Peter, who would not be Melville's first choice but thanks to Cocteau's relentless insistence (Edouard is said to be his lover at that time), notwithstanding his dandy contour is unable to deliver any conceivable conviction which his role should have embodied, no matter how many close-ups swooping upon his statuesque face, it is certainly beyond the rescue even Melville had exerted himself to the utmost. Nicole Stéphane and Renée Cosima, on the other hand, are the messiahs of the cast, several emotion-eruption takes are right to the point.

At least Melville still manifests his capacity is other department of the films, the cinematography from DP Henri Decaë infuses very seclude intimacy during the siblings' scenes when a whiff of incestuous ambiguity permeates the whole frame. When the setting moves to the grand apartment in the latter part in the film, the spiderweb of deconstructing an immoral subterfuge foiled with riveting and labyrinthine shots culminates the film with a quite amazing coda, which by no means should be even scarcely credited for Mr. Dermithe.

So the win-win combo seems not to fire up to one's expectation, and it is a quite qualified candidate needs a remake, then who is the proper person at the helm? I dare to suggest Jacques Audiard if one must be French.