Les Enfants Terribles: (The Criterion Collection)
by Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Cocteau
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Director: Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre MelvilleBrand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Henri Decaë
Writer: Jean-Pierre Melville
Writer: Jean Cocteau
Editor: Monique Bonnot
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); French (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 105 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-07-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Arthur Mayer-Edward Kingsley Inc.
DVD Reviews of Les Enfants Terribles: (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: A Depraved Seduction
Summary: 4 Stars
During the first few minutes I thought Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles seemed like an odd choice of novels to adapt for a director known for his low view of human nature but that is only because I was not all that familiar with Les Enfants Terribles. The title should have given me a clue but I realized as I watched that Cocteau also is very interested in exploring man's and woman's less seemly side. Furthermore, Melville's gritty noir sensibility is every bit as much on display here in this coming-of-age story as it is in the noir masterpieces that came later. In this adaptation of Cocteau's novel Melville ruminates about the insular world of a brother and sister whose precocious and despotic imaginations are destabilized only by uncertain desires. The two teen siblings are Paul, an ultra-sensitive student who is infatuated with another male student named Dargolos, and Lise, his sister, who has been forced to stay at home to care for their ailing mother. There is an obvious and deeply disturbing symbiotic bond between these two and the unwholesomeness of the bond is immediately apparent. Though they are young there is nothing youthful or innocent about either of them; in fact, much of the time, they seem to act like little blonde fascist versions of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton--as with Taylor and Burton for these two cruelty and seduction are indistinguishable. Just how depravedly selfish these two are, or might be (again, the extent of their depravity is never made explicit) might disgust some viewers. (If the incest topic makes you queasy you should probably stay away from this.) But even viewers who can handle the topic might be frustrated that Melville does not give us the proper amount of background information on these two to allow us any real depth of insight into the evolution of these two tormented psyches. To be fair, though, Cocteau was writing before Freudian psychoanalysis and the idea that we needed fully fleshed out case histories to understand individual or symbiotically joined psyches had become part of the common culture. As it is Cocteau and Melville only give us bits and pieces of Paul and Lise's psyches and all we can do is make assumptions about what went wrong. Whether the cause of their rapid slide down the slippery slope of narcissism was lack of a tutor to socialize them or just a result of their having received an overabundance of creativity and beauty at birth remains a mystery to the end. And we can never say whether Paul's infatuation with Dargolos and then the later infatuation with Agathe was an attempt to replicate his bond with his sister or to escape it. All we really know at films end is that the strange bond that exists between Paul and Lise prevents either of them from bonding with anyone outside their own mutually imagined realm. They do invite two guests to live with them (or, I should say, the two are seduced by Paul and Lise's depraved behavior) but they are welcome only so long as they play by Paul and Lise's very exclusive rules.
There is plenty here even for the casual Freudian and those who think deeply about such films will no doubt come up with their own plausible solutions to this brother-sister mystery but, it seems to me, one can only guess at Cocteau's and Melville's intentions--and I think this lack of explicitness is intentional. I can't help presuming that Cocteau is making a point about creativity and dissent and how asocial (anti-bourgeoisie) desires lead to psychological depravity but that judgement relies upon a value system that I do not think Cocteau and Melville necessarily share with the rest of society. More likley its just their own creative prerogotive to acknowledge that such states of desire exist outside the normally sanctioned channels of being.
In any event, this is a very creative film that will elicit a variety of responses from Freudians and anti-Freudians alike (I'll be curious to read future posts here).
Note: If this kind of thing is your kind of thing you might also like Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Musil's Young Torless as well as the fictions of Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, & Paul Bowles.
Description of Les Enfants Terribles: (The Criterion Collection)
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