398 Les enfants terribles

[colinr0380]

I agree davidhare, I'm liking the film more each time I see it again - I love the sleepwalking scenes, the snowball sequence and the dream sequences which do a great job of evoking Cocteau while at the same time looking more 'grounded' (for want of a better word) by Melville's style in comparison to their similar scenes from Cocteau's previous films.

I forgot to talk about Elisabeth, who in the extra features I think is spoken of in rather limited terms as simply being monstrous or as irredeemable. I usually end up feeling a lot more compassion for her than anyone else in the film, even Paul who at least has his fantasies to hold on to. I thought her final speech where she talks about having "to make life unbearable, to make it sick of me" is quite a moving explanation for her combativeness - she seems to be testing the people around her to see if they'll still love or care for her and not abandon her even if she acts terribly. Unfortunately Paul always had someone else on his mind!

[HerrSchreck]

Speaking of Cut From The Same Mold, what amazed me at first sight of even the stills from the film-- before I'd even seen it for the first time-- is the resemblance between Nicole and Edouard Dermithe. They look like fucking twins.. its really amazing.

I find so much of what the movie about registers in the look of things, the feel of things, a sense of sharp vaguery about the photography that's just brilliant. The feeling of Being Close To Things In Your Room when out of school with the flu, your blankets, the domain of your bed, making forts or race cars out of blankets & headboard, how it's your kingdom, your imagination crashing in on reality resulting in Your Own World As A Kid.. not that feeling specifically, but rather the way that snatches of that little world come back to you as an adult with a sweet taste. Prompted maybe by a cold & damp foggy day in the fall and for some reason beyond your understanding while walking over piles of wet leaves down a block lined with rusty iron and old leaning tenements, snatches of that feeling come back to you.

THAT'S what I get out of that film, the photography is a miracle, really. The bare walls of school, cheap wallpaper curling under steam heat hissing behind the dean's desk.. snatches of long stretches of school boredom & daydreaming. The gleaming, luminously vague look of the cinematography shows the mutual understanding between Dacae & Melville & Cocteau regarding the spirit of the material's core. Which is, to begin with, the tone of Cocteau's nostalgic ruminations on who he was and where he came from.

Brilliant!

[movielocke]

This might be the first Melville film I've seen that I didn't unreservedly love. The film is a beautiful melding of Cocteau and Melville, but it never really connected for me. It was shocking to see such an explicitly homosexual message to a film from the forties, did Cocteau "hide" the gay from censors behind the coy incestuous tones? I felt the film really went to efforts to explore explicitly the gay aspects of the film, while using the incest as a beard. that beard quality to the incest is rather... amusing, I suppose.

I was also had a continual sense of dejavu while watching the film, not just because it was clearly influential on innumerable characters in new wave films, but also because I saw The Dreamers, and it seems as though that latter film is more or less a remake of this one.

Overall, it's a fascinating little film, but far from my favorite from either auteur.

[hearthesilence]

This is one of those transfers that upscales to look like true HD.

Finally the saw the DVD and I bet most people watching the close-up shots on this DVD upscaled on an HDTV would mistake them for true HD. Looks marvelous.

Also, it's easy to see how Wes Anderson can have such affection for this film - the tone and characters share many attributes seen in his own films.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm late to the party on this one, but found it a surprisingly agile narrative for a tragicomedy. Entire life-altering events are almost passed over in the blink of an eye (such as Elisabeth's marriage and husband's fate), which effectively sells their superfluousness in the grand scheme of where the key principals' problems stem from and attentions lay: In a codependent sad affair, that's given plenty of room to breathe, painfully so at times. I liked the little nouvelle vague influences, even if they feel a bit empty and directionless at times - some of the faux-poetic voiceover narration doesn't really land all that well, but it's often mysterious enough to at least drum up interest. The comedy is pretty front-heavy, and I wish the film had maintained a more balanced tone for more of its first half. It doesn't really have a gradual descent into tragedy, but maybe that's the point: the dynamics and (normally-melodramatic) activity are banal and bathetic, aided by its artifice. I found myself impatient towards the end - again, probably intentional, due to the bathos sewn into the tone - and was glad when the film was over, but it was definitely an interesting piece of work and an admirable approach at adaptation.