Les enfants terribles
France
1950
106 Min
Black and White
1.33:1
French
Synopsis
Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a brother and sister. Elisabeth (a remarkable Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world by playing an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their lair—until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville’s operatic camera movements and Cocteau’s perverse, poetic approach to character merge in Les enfants terribles to create one of French cinema’s greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds. —The Criterion Collection
Director
Jean-Pierre Melville
Jean-Pierre Melville (born Jean-Pierre Grumbach) was an amateur filmmaker as a teenager who, after the start of World War II, began making his own independent short and feature films. He hit his stride in the ‘50s with his memorable adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s novel, Les Enfants Terribles, and, over the next 20 years, specialized in intelligent and exciting crime films, most notably Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos (aka The Finger Man), Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge, and Un Flic. Melville also acted in his own Deux Hommes Dans Manhattan, as well as Cocteau’s Orphee, Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (aka Breathless), and Claude Chabrol’s Landru (aka Bluebeard). He died in 1973.
(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:102465 )
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Filip Åkerman
22Jun11
I knew about "The Dreamers" (which I haven't seen) but also "Trouble Every Day" is very similar to Cocteau's story. Even if Melville's film is the more brutal!
Drew Boggemes
19May11
Melville and Cocteau's elegant, albeit quietly salacious study of the line between love and contempt, which is often perversely blurred, is a tense, thoroughly engrossing masterpiece whose ability to shock has not diminished whatsoever.
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By asuraf on January 12, 2009
Much of the bonus material on Criterion’s release of this somewhat forgotten French masterwork is dedicated to the debate over whose film it really is, director Jean-Pierre Melville, working independently… read review
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