Daily Archives: Monday, January 12, 2026

  • Les cousins

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Chabrol (1959)

    Claude Chabrol’s second feature earns its place in BFI’s French New Wave film-makers season as the movement’s first major box-office hit.  (The season paves the way for the British release later this month of Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague.)  For New Wave aficionados and/or cognoscenti, Les cousins – story by Chabrol, dialogue by frequent collaborator Paul Gégauff – is probably a valuable illustration of its director’s moral outlook and his visual expression of that outlook.  For those (like me) with an interest in, rather than informed allegiance to, the nouvelle vague, the film’s a bit boring.

    Les cousins has a town-mouse-and-country-mouse set-up.  The two young title characters are hedonistic sophisticate Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy) and anxious, naïve Charles (Gérard Blain).  Paul lives in a Paris apartment owned by his father.  Charles, from a provincial home shared with his adored mother, comes to lodge with Paul in Paris, where both are law students.  Party animal Paul seems never to attend lectures or do any reading.  Charles seldom has his nose out of a book; whenever he’s not writing home to his mother, he’s taking notes.  On a rare break from his studies, at a café where Paul and his friends hang out, Charles meets Florence (Juliette Mayniel).  Dazzled by her beauty and unaware of her promiscuity, he falls in love.

    In this social group, Charles is unusual enough to attract Florence’s interest, but not her exclusive interest.  Due to a misunderstanding, she turns up at the apartment at the wrong time to meet him, when Charles is still at classes.  In his absence, Paul, after persuading Florence that she and his cousin would be incompatible, sleeps with her.  Paul and Florence start living together; Charles, though he carries on swotting, can hardly fail to be aware of their relationship.  Florence has moved out by the time Paul passes a law exam and throws another party to celebrate.  Charles fails the exam and throws his notes and student ID into the Seine.  Back at the apartment, he loads a single bullet into his uncle’s six-chamber revolver (one of several firearms on display in the flat), points the gun at the sleeping Paul, and pulls the trigger.  No more than a click follows and Charles goes to bed.  Next morning, as the cousins talk together, Paul picks up the revolver and playfully points it at Charles, whose urgent warning that the weapon is loaded, is futile.  In the same moment, Paul pulls the trigger, killing him.

    To appreciate the main performances, it must help to have seen Chabrol’s first film, the previous year’s Le beau Serge (not included in the current BFI season), in which Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy also star.  According to Terrence Rafferty, the stories and the casting in the two films are ‘mirror images of each other … In the first film, Blain had the showier role, as a depressive small-town drunk, Brialy the quieter role, as the sympathetic friend and observer’.  Even without knowing Le beau Serge, though, you can recognise that both actors give good performances in Les cousins.  Thanks to Brialy’s sustained verve, Paul is bearable to watch (more than can be said for most of his circle of friends).  Blain, who slightly resembles Dean Stockwell, plays within a narrower range that also makes its mark.  The quality of their characterisations includes intimations that Paul and Charles are more than they appear to be.  Brialy suggests that Paul’s bohemian carelessness is cover for desperate ennui.  Blain gives Charles’ diligent celibacy passive-aggressive undertones.  The film’s closing stages, though shocking at one level, aren’t therefore a complete surprise.

    Photographed in black and white by Henri Decaë and edited by Jacques Gaillard, the film looks and moves well.  The climactic night-into-the-next-morning is particularly compelling to watch.  Yet the eventual fatal ironies, reflecting Chabrol’s avowed admiration for Hitchcock and anticipating the murder stories for which the Frenchman himself would become best known, seem designed chiefly to deliver a big finish, whose impact depends largely on tonal contrast with what has gone before.  And on Richard Wagner, although his music has already been heard in the film, upstaging Paul Misraki’s jazz-influenced original score, and underlining Wagner’s Nazi connotations.  At one of his parties, Paul puts an SS officer’s hat on his head and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on the record player.  (In another scene, he wakes up a Jewish friend (Paul Bisciglia), by shining a flashlight in his eyes and shouting ‘Gestapo!’)  Chabrol’s camera finally moves from Charles’ dead body to the record player, and ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan and Isolde draws Les cousins to a close.  This isn’t a very long film (112 minutes) but it’s too long to be heartlessly entertaining.

    8 January 2026

  • The Leopard

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Il gattopardo

    Luchino Visconti (1963)

    Sicily, 1860.  The army of Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies, fights the insurgency of Garibaldi’s volunteer redshirts, who win the day.  Don Fabrizio Corbera (Burt Lancaster), Prince of Salina, though prepared to indulge the romantic adventurism of his redshirt nephew, Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon), is dismayed by the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy.  Moving from his villa to his summer palace at Donnafugata, the Prince reflects on the constitutional change overtaking Italy and sadly anticipates the aristocracy’s displacement by the middle class.  Tancredi’s political and romantic attachments change.  He switches allegiance from Garibaldi to King Victor Emmanuel II.  Considered a suitable marriage partner for Don Fabrizio’s daughter, Concetta (Lucia Morlacchi), Tancredi forsakes her for Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), daughter of Don Calogero Sedana (Paolo Stoppa), a wealthy self-made businessman and now the Mayor of Donnafugata.  Without losing his affection for Tancredi, Don Fabrizio comes to see his nephew as a young man whose opportunism will serve him well in the new Italy.

    Cavalier Chevalley (Leslie French) comes to Donnafugata, as a representative of the next-door former kingdom of Sardinia, to plead with Don Fabrizio to join the senate of the unified Kingdom of Italy.  Chevalley pleads in vain; his host commends Don Calogero as a more suitable senator.  Don Fabrizio believes that Sicilians’ pride in their heritage leads them naturally to prefer tradition to modernity.  He sees himself and his noble forebears as ‘leopards and lions’, their bureaucratic successors as ‘jackals and hyenas’.  A grand ball at the palace of a neighbouring aristocrat, marking Angelica’s debut in high society, induces in Don Fabrizio a crisis of melancholy, as he struggles to contain despair for his own future, and that of his culture …  In the event, the Italian aristocracy didn’t die that quick a death.  Nearly a hundred years later, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 11th Prince of Lampedusa and 12th Duke of Parma, wrote The Leopard, his only novel, first published in 1958, shortly after its author’s death.  In 1963, Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, brought Lampedusa’s novel to the screen.

    The Leopard must be among the most visually mobile costume dramas ever made.  You could say the director’s social background helps – that moving within Don Fabrizio’s opulent surroundings, comes naturally to Visconti.  But that would be selling short his film-making skills (and he wasn’t born until nearly half a century after the Risorgimento).  Visconti convinces the viewer that the people on the screen are in their own natural habitat – or, in the case of nouveau riche characters, in socially unknown territory.  The sumptuous décor (Mario Garbuglia et al) and costumes (Piero Tosi) are never just displayed.  In the many sequences that feature plenty of people – from the fighting early on through to the justly celebrated ball scenes that climax the film – there’s always something interesting to notice in the margins of a shot.  From start to finish, Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography is complexly beautiful.  Whether in landscapes or interiors, the images have a retrospective quality but aren’t bathed in falsely nostalgic light.

    Watching the film in dubbed Italian (with English subtitles), it takes a little while to adjust to not hearing Burt Lancaster’s unmistakable voice.  As the film goes on, though, this becomes a benefit.  Lancaster is so physically imposing and expressive an actor that in an English-language film his speech rhythms, distinctive but very set, can be a drag on his performance.  Robbed of his own voice (Don Fabrizio’s lines are spoken by Corrado Gaipa), Lancaster, as an entirely visible presence, excels.  He wasn’t yet fifty when he made The Leopard but, without the aid of obvious aging devices, his Don Fabrizio becomes spiritually exhausted, an old man.  Lancaster is very impressive as both an incarnation of a dying breed and a man apprehending personal mortality.  He’s sometimes funny, too.  Don Fabrizio is infuriated by the noisy lamentations of his wife (Rina Morelli) that Concetta won’t be marrying Tancredi:  these continue through the evening into bedtime.  In their double bed, Don Fabrizio repeatedly takes out his exasperation on his pillow, which gets a thorough bashing.  When his wife finally quietens down, he crosses himself and kisses her goodnight with gentle relief.

    All three leading players are excellent.  As Tancredi, Alain Delon has wonderful natural vibrancy in his face and his easy, rapid movement:  he animates a young man full of appetite and ambition, in a hurry to get the most out of public and private life.  Although Tancredi’s preference for the daughter of an upstart businessman to his high-born cousin is symbolic in the story’s overall scheme, Claudia Cardinale’s amazing looks, which perfectly complement Delon’s, make it no contest between Angelica and the rejected Concetta.  Angelica is coming into bloom and very beautiful but, in her early scenes at least, she has also an earthiness that verges on coarseness.  She’s carefully demure when, in her father’s company, she first comes to Don Fabrizio’s palace; over dinner, Tancredi says something to make Angelica laugh and she can’t stop, scandalising the company – and injecting The Leopard with a new kind of energy.  During the ball, when Angelica persuades Don Fabrizio to dance with her (though he insists on a waltz, rather than the mazurka she suggests) and Tancredi watches on jealously, the emotional currents passing among the three actors are extraordinary.

    The important smaller parts are all effectively played.   These include, as well as those already mentioned, the Jesuit Father Pirrone (Romolo Valli), Don Fabrizio’s chaplain and confidant, and Tancredi’s friend, Count Cavriaghi (Mario Girotti aka Terence Hill), introduced to Don Fabrizio’s household as a potential suitor for the miserable Concetta.  There are plenty of familiar Italian screen types in evidence in The Leopard, but the actors concerned perform their roles with such skilful vigour that they move beyond caricature into something truthful – particularly Rina Morelli.  She and Lucia Morlacchi match up very well as a woe-is-me mother and daughter.

    Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale had both made vital contributions to Visconti’s previous film, Rocco and His Brothers (1960).  Like that predecessor, The Leopard has elements to suggest Visconti’s influence on Francis Ford Coppola when he made The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974).  The extended ball sequence, with its movement between the event’s main arena, and what’s happening behind closed doors at the same location, is clearly the standout example:  Coppola surely learned from this in crafting the opening wedding scenes in The Godfather.  The influence comes through, too, in less obvious instances:  a local festival in The Leopard, and the music playing there, chime with the great Feast of Saint Rocco episode in the streets of New York’s Little Italy, in The Godfather: Part II.  Mention of the Godfather films leads on naturally to Nino Rota’s music for The Leopard.  Although characteristically melodic, this score isn’t one of Rota’s best.  The main theme, which Visconti overuses in the first half of the narrative, is conventionally elegiac.

    The Leopard begins and ends with scenes involving Catholic ritual.  At the start, Don Fabrizio and his family, alongside their servants, kneel in the private chapel of the Prince’s villa, where Father Pirrone supervises their recital of the rosary.  The quiet prayer is disturbed by the noise of gunfire and shouting from outside the villa.  These sounds of civil unrest interrupt proceedings in the chapel for a short while before normal service is resumed.  Except that it isn’t really:  the scene conveys that nothing has changed but everything is changing.  The men leave the chapel to attend to the corpse of a young soldier discovered in the villa’s grounds.  At the other end of the story, Don Fabrizio leaves the ball alone and heads home by foot in the early morning.  Trudging through nearly deserted streets, he stops to make way for a priest, heading for a nearby house to deliver last rites, and genuflects.  Visconti’s closing shot shows Don Fabrizio walking away from camera and into a dark alley.  The film is formidably long – 188 minutes in the 1983 restoration that Sally and I saw at this memorable BFI screening – yet its momentum never stops building.  The central themes of The Leopard are soon clear, but they’re continually enriched.

    3 January 2026