Primo, Prima

Two adult cousins go well beyond the kissing stage in this lighthearted French comedy, a popular choice for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, thanks in large part to its casually forthright attitude toward the joys of physical affection. The two lovers, each already married, are blithely unconcerned with the opinions of others, taking an altogether healthy pleasure in scandalizing their extended (bourgeois) family by retiring to the bedroom for hours on end during holiday reunions, and so forth. A surplus of natural charm, combined with a refreshing (and typically French) lack of romantic melodrama, make it an easy film to enjoy, and an unsurprising candidate for the inevitable glossy Hollywood remake, fourteen years later.

"Cousin Cousine" had a huge popular success in the United States (as probably everywhere else) when it was released in the 1970s. It is nothing more than a love story about a middle-aged man and woman who are estranged from their respective spouses. They openly profess and privately consummate their love, everybody be damned. The movie's value lies in its anarchic and refreshingly droll (drôle?) spirit. The lovers are the lovely Christine Barrault and her cousin by marriage, Victor Lanoux. They win our sympathy because they are such a delightful contrast to the sham and self-pity of their respective mates, Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier. Marchand is an especially hilarious cranky type. Jean-Charles Tacchella directed this bubbly and, yes, "gallic" comedy with wit and sensitivity, and you can't help enjoying it immensely. So all this makes adultery OK? Well, we at least are supposed to think that. The movie was remade in 1989 as "Cousins" with Isabella Rossellini and Ted Danson in the two leading roles.

"Cousin, Cousine" is certainly the most cheerful film where two marriages are being broken, maybe because it chose to deal with the exception rather than the norm, when the right romance comes after wedding vows, or maybe because writer Daniele Thompson foresaw that we would secretly cheer for those who refused to commit to dead-end relationships for commitment's sake or because they fear the avenging public eye. It's not the secrecy of the affair that provides the film's unique zest but its lack thereof.

And so Marthe (Marie-Christine Barrault) and Ludovic (Victor Lanoux) are both in their thirties (Ludovic closer to the forty mark) and meet at the point of their lives where a meaning is sought and heart commands to be filled with something that transcends family diktats, how ironic that it all starts in a family banquet. And never has infidelity been portrayed in such a light way, light as a something truly relieved from the burden of guilt and the necessity of concealing, although it is prevalent in the first weeks of the relationship, it is less as a hindrance than a way to preserve something occasional sunshine in rather cloudy lives.

And it's the tour de force of director Jean-Charles Tacchela to tackle the relationship in such a way that we never feel inclined to condemn the sight of a man having an affair, indulging in a pastry binge-eating, humming a classical piece of music or going swimming, not skin-dipping like in usual romances, but in the local swimming pool as to already taint their relationship with social visibility. Even their children don't disapprove their relationships, the opening wedding sequence having already established them as fully aware of the adults' little misbehaviors (after all, everyone's part of the same hypocrisy).

And while the leading couple floats on a cloud of tenderness, most of the laughs are provided by Marthe's cheating husband Pascal (Guy Marchand) and Ludovic's neurotic sleep-cure addict girlfriend Karine (Marie-France Pisier). Pascal is a delusional macho lover who, after a long sequence where he dumped his mistresses one by one, he comes home triumphantly waiting for Marthe to applaud his redemption, she doesn't even dignify it with a smile. As a more complex character, it's the pert, hippie-like and neurotic Karine who steals the show with such gusto that she could have been a full Woody Allen character, Pisier is so hilarious she'd make you forget how beautiful she is in a young Adjani way. Now, there are moments where subtlety deserts the story but not so long that it is distracting... and just when you think the film borders into darker territories, you realize it's only setting you up for a big laugh. "Cousin, Cousine" tactfully spares us the whole drama and one scene involving a suicide attempt had the kind of predictable outcomes that can only be considered comical genius.

Now, would the liaison have been more acceptable had the two been happy or their partners not be unfaithful in the first place? In the first case, it wouldn't have made much sense, in the second the director finds a little pirouette by making them meet before they understand what Pascal and Karine were up too. The romance wasn't premeditated and we believe it because their lines of dialogues flow so naturally with the casual frivolity we carefully insert in our many flirtations with strangers, for the kicks, especially in these screen-less times where nothing could be recorded (some kids were still sneaky enough to take play paparazzi on you). Lanoux plays Ludovic with the quiet charisma of the man who doesn't weigh everything he says and embraces his contradiction, he criticizes family reunions but admits he enjoys them, he doesn't value his job and says he needs to change one every three years, his volatile life speaks less about himself than his total honesty about it.

And there's something so graceful in Barrault's performance, in the way she literally gives herself to Ludovic, that makes for a compelling performance full of little touches such as a smile or a maternal desire to clip his toenails, Barrault would be nominated for Best Actress the same year than "Rocky". And in a way, the couple reminded me of that quote from about Rocky and Adrian: "she's got gaps, I've got gaps, together, we fill gaps". What gaps could they possibly have? Well, the film is not interested in delving into them, what it does however is present them as two members of an ordinary family gathering for the usual occasions: wedding banquets, funerals, Christmas parties, where as usual in France, it's all about drinking, having fun and partying, things so common that one can only welcome whatever will break that routine. And "Cousin, Cousine" provides a very sociological slice of French bourgeois life in the 70s in a time where divorces and mixed families were uncommon but not rarities.

Long story short, what "Cousin Cousin" accomplishes is to make you believe in a love story where it's not about sex or lust, it's not about petty vengeance, just about mutual attraction and two people sharing common pleasure in togetherness... the whole thing enrobed with a gallery of sympathetic characters who have all in common that they will all remind us of someone we know. And watching Marthe and Ludovic together, no matter how disapproving we are, we can't blame them from living their romance to the fullest and when they take a hotel room for an afternoon and then it turns into a night, it doesn't just feel real, it feels exhilarating. The greatest delights come from their shamelessness and how disconcerting it is for their entourage.

And the final shot is just like "The Graduate" except this time with grown-ups who know (and we know) they've made the right choice, the puzzlement of the family behind the doors might show disbelief but maybe a secret envy...

French cinema is perhaps the only cinema in the world where a man can cheat on a stunning woman like Marie-France Pisier and it looks fairly "normal" and believable. "Cousin, Cousine" does not break much new ground thematically, but it does have plenty of charm and wit, as well as a wonderful cast (especially the two leads, Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux). It is also pointed in its observations about male hypocrisy and double-standards, probably the contribution of female co-screenwriter Daniele Thompson. Nominated for several Oscars, this dramedy belongs in the same period of popular French films as "La Cage Aux Folles", although it is considerably more low-key. *** out of 4.

This popular French comedy deservedly received a lot of international acclaim and awards on its original release and still pleases when watched today almost 40 years later; apart from the Cesars and the Golden Globes, the film received 3 Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film (which it lost to Ivory Coast's BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOR – which I also caught up with just now), Best Actress (Marie-Christine Barrault losing out to NETWORK's Faye Dunaway) and Best Original Screenplay (again won by NETWORK). Interestingly enough, in both the Actress and Screenplay categories, there were two foreign nominees apiece: Barrault and Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman's FACE TO FACE and, for Screenplay, Lina Wertmuller's SEVEN BEAUTIES and, incidentally, both directors made the cut among the final 5 nominees for Best Direction!

Barrault and her female co-star Marie-France Pisier (a Cesar winner herself here and, for my money, more deserving of an Oscar nod than the latter) are the only familiar names in a sympathetic cast; even director Tacchella seems to have been a one-hit wonder. Bafflingly, COUSIN COUSINE had been 'announced' as an upcoming Criterion title since the earliest days of DVD (in fact, the copy I watched culled from a US TV screening sports the tell-tale "Janus Film" header before the film's opening credits) but this release never came to pass! For what it is worth, this is one of the earliest examples of a Gallic success being revamped for Hollywood consumption, when it was remade by Joel Schumacher as COUSINS (1989) with Ted Danson, Isabella Rossellini and Sean Young.

In any case, the plot line is simple enough: an extended family is reunited for two weddings and a funeral (anticipating the popular 1994 British farce FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL by 20 years!) and a series of infidelities come to the fore between two particular couples. Barrault's chronically womanizing husband (Guy Marchand) had been cheating on her with (among many others) the vulnerable Pisier, whose own restless spouse (Victor Lanoux) starts an initially secretly platonic but subsequently openly passionate affair with Barrault. There are several memorably delightful episodes which add to the charm of the film: during the wedding reception of Barrault's mother, the groom proposes to sing but when vetoed, proceeds to indulge in "mooning" (baring his buttocks in public); when Marchand decides after the opening wedding ceremony to mend his philandering ways, he is shown running from one flame to the next to end their relationship...ultimately being thrown off a bus by the burly female driver!; at the second marriage, Marchand again keeps getting into fisticuffs with the bridegroom's father, a former business partner who had defrauded him, etc. The whole is set to a jaunty musical accompaniment courtesy of yet another obscure element, one Gerard Anfosso.