Primo, Prima

This movie was great. It was shown on Bravo cable channel here in America. I was a little buzzed from a night out and came back and found this flic on.

I got it right at the beginning and was taken by the charming chemistry between the two cousins and the very sly and low-key nature of the relationship. That was a great part of the appeal of the movie for me. I also liked the two lead performances. Both were quite quietly confident and did not feel the need to throw themselves at the viewer in order to be seen.

I enjoyed the fact that they thought about how best to get a rise out of their significant others. Well, I thought that was interesting and it showed two thoughtful people considering how best to achieve their goal and not totally consumed by lust. The reactions of the two effected spouses were very funny too. The two who were in the affair were very funny as they tried to contrive more and more ways to get back at their spouses. It was very interesting and not as glossed over as Hollywood films in which it takes the two cheating partners about 17.23 seconds to jump in the sack together. This movie played itself out and one could see how they moved from a platonic to a full relationship.

"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.

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.

Pleasant romantic comedy about French social mores with Barrault and Lanoux starring as cousins - by marriage - who first become friends who eventually fall in love. They finally have an affair, flaunting it beautifully to their entire family. Some early development of farce, but not taken far enough, although there is a wonderful funeral sequence where everyone seems preoccupied with other things, rather than a deceased member of the family. (Pascal incessantly looking at his watch; the children assuming the funeral is another party.)Great performances from Barrault and Lanoux highlight the fun. Barrault and the film were Oscar nominated in 1975.

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.