LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1950) B/W 105m dir: Jean-Pierre Melville

w/Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe, Renée Cosima, Jacques Bernard, Melvyn Martin, Maria Cyliakus, Jean-Marie Robain, Maurice Revel, Rachel Devirys, Adeline Aucoc, Emile Maths, Roger Gallard, Jean Cocteau, Annabel Buffet, Karin Lanny, Héloise Remy

A haunting film version of Jean Cocteau's novel. The story concerns two adolescents, deliberately detaching themselves from the adult world. While isolating themselves from others, they intertwine through a barrage of mystery games that leads to incest and death.

The following contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film:

From Have You Seen ... ? by David Thomson: "A the time it was made, fights and controversies hung over Les Infants Terrible. Director Jean-Pierre Melville and novelist Jean Cocteau were not on the same wavelength politically. Melville had been in the Resistance, while Cocteau had been a cultural figure in occupied France. There was also dispute over control of the film. On the first day on set, Cocteau --- having just shot his own Orphée--- was heard to say 'Cut' at the end of a take. And when he sought to make changes in the script he and Melville had worked on together, Melville retaliated, 'No changes. I signed on to do Cocteau's novel.'

"Enough time has passed for the film to be seen as a masterpiece, and as something really made by Melville. But what is masterly is the delivery of a rare, ambiguous atmosphere --- that of teenagers who refuse to 'grow up' and seek to inhabit a pretend world in defiance of adulthood. It is a natural thing, charming yet dangerous: You see it obliquely in Rebel Without a Cause (a far more prosaic film in many ways) when the three kids play 'house' in the deserted mansion. . I am bound to say that part of the fascination of Les Infants Terrible. lies in the way this precious, theatrical world may have as its corollary, in the lives of most teenagers, the cinema itself. (This was treated very well in [Bernardo] Bertolucci's The Dreamers, from a Gilbert Adair novel that consciously plays off Les Infants Terrible.)

"The place is Paris, just after World War II (it was the 1920s in the novel, published in 1929). Paul and his sister Elizabeth (of a certain, vague age) take refuge from the world in an apartment. Paul is ill: He has been wounded in a fight with Dargelos, a schoolmate, whom he loves. They Play games, and in time they are joined by Gerard and Agathe. Gerard falls in love with Paul, and then with Elizabeth. But Paul is drawn to Agathe, who looks like Dargelos. Elizabeth tries to rule the group, but the tensions are too great, and in the end both Paul and Elizabeth die. It is their secret alternative to adulthood.

"A synopsis can make it sound confused, yet the flickering of attraction is so close to adolescent experience, secretive and exultant, and so subject to power plays. The film's intensity begins in the exquisite gray imagery by Henri Decae and by Emile Mathys's work on the prop room sets. But it's the faces that are haunting, above all Nicole Stéphane as the Empress figure Elizabeth. Cocteau's lover, Edouard Dermithe, is Paul (Melville fought the casting). Renée Cosima plays Dargelos and Agathe, and Jacques Bernard is Gerard.

"Just as fascinating is the harmony or the counterpoint between Cocteau's voice as a narrator and the lovely, simple camera movements that are characteristics of Melville. One has to say that the world is not one to which Melville would ever return, but was there another occasion when Cocteau's vision was delivered with such strength and such intimations of a lost life? Enmity is not the worst breeding ground for a great film. Love and friendship may be deceptive and overrated."