Jean-Pierre Melville (1950)

I thought I’d not seen it before.  Once the school snowball fight that starts the film was underway, I began to suspect that I had.  I had the same suspicion at several subsequent points yet at the end I thought:  even if I see Les enfants terribles again I still might forget I’ve already seen it (if I didn’t write this note).

How come?  After all, Jean-Pierre Melville’s screen version of Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel is an unusual concoction.   The story of a fatally inseparable sister and brother, Elisabeth and Paul, moves from their cramped shared bedroom to the vast mansion Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) inherits after an exceedingly short-lived marriage.  Henri Decaë’s camerawork includes striking high-up shots of the characters moving across a black-and-white tiled floor beneath a grand staircase.  Melville’s witty use of Bach and Vivaldi juxtaposes the elevated music and the pungent intensity of the sibling rivalry-cum-folie à deux.  The swirl of undercurrents includes homosexual and gender-fluid, as well as incestuous, elements.  At school, Paul (Edouard Dermithe) has a crush on another teenage boy, Dargelos, who injures him with a snowball that conceals a stone.  Dargelos and the young woman Agathe, whom Elisabeth meets when both are working as models for a couturier and who becomes part of the obsessive ménage, are played by the same actress (Renée Cosima).   The principals are nothing if not distinctive in appearance and Nicole Stéphane has style and authority. The soundtrack includes, in plentiful supply, the voice of Cocteau, who narrates the story (and who collaborated on the screenplay with Melville).

But I understand why I forgot this famous adaptation of a famous book.  It’s essentially a single idea, spun out elaborately.  For someone with a visual memory stronger than mine, the succession of ingenious images may be indelible.  For someone more interested in the development of character and themes, Les enfants terribles is seriously repetitious and it’s inevitable that Elisabeth and Paul will both die.  In other words, you’re told at the outset what the piece is about and how it’s going to end.  The mental residue isn’t that of a full-length film – something more like a summary statement plus illustrative clips.

1 August 2017