Critics reviews

Though the film is technically adept and ingenious in both cinematography and overall formalism — Cocteau himself believed it to be his greatest success as a director1 — it is also notable for the fact that he wrote Les Parents terribles (initially as a play) for his lead actor, partner and muse, Jean Marais, shortly after they met and fell in love.

Jean Cocteau was many things—novelist, poet, playwright, visual artist, and filmmaker—which is to say that no individual work can illuminate the full scope of his genius. Still, his 1948 film of his 1938 stage play Les Parents Terribles comes pretty close.

The family is wacky like in a Capra movie, which blunts the criticism of the family implicit in the play. While the material is in some ways not dissimilar from something Fassbinder might have done in the 1970s, it struck me as piffling. Going to see it was a strange night out.

The timing couldn’t be better for reviving Cocteau’s least-seen masterpiece, Les Parents terribles: a peerlessly witty, imaginative, and haunting tale of volatile emotions in a chaotic family. . . . What makes the film so exciting is how briskly and persuasively Cocteau takes everything to extremes.

The influential French critic André Bazin called this film one in which “the notion of the ‘shot’ is finally disposed of.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but the unobtrusive formal virtuosity on display here — particularly the fluidity of the shooting and cutting (the cinematographer was Michel Kelber, the editor Jacqueline Sadoul) — demonstrates Cocteau’s unique command of the medium.