Film DVD Culture
Les Enfants Terribles (1950)
Dir. Jean Pierre Melville, Criterion Collection, 2007

Realism and fantasy collide in Les Enfants Terribles, the 1950 collaboration between celebrated directors Jean Cocteau and Jean Pierre Melville. Cocteau adapted the film from his successful 1929 novel which he wrote in a week-long haze of opium withdrawal. He commissioned Jean-Pierre Melville to direct after seeing Melville’s directorial debut, La Silence de La Mer. They’re an unlikely pair. Cocteau was known in literary circles as the “frivolous prince” for his willowy line drawings, poetry, and romantic, navel-gazing films featuring a high beef-cake factor. Melville became famous for his war pictures and hard-boiled Zen noirs.
The result is like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers with no sex. Equal parts Romeo and Juliet and Sunset Boulevard, with a dash of Cocteau’s roguish melancholia thrown in. The lush camera work and cornucopia of quotations from other films is thoroughly proto-New Wave. It’s no surprise that Bertolucci’s vampirish send-up to the genre borrowed so heavily from the film. What’s surprising is how boring Enfants (like Dreamers ) can be.
Les Enfants Terribles is the story of Paul (Edouard Dermithe) and Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane), a brother and sister who retreat into a private fantasy world after Paul is struck in the chest with a snow-ball. Paul‘s weak heart requires constant supervision and Elisabeth willingly plays the role of psycho-sadistic nurse. They spend most of their time in their bedroom awash in old books, magazines, night creams and cray-fish. When their hermetic circle expands to include Gerard and Agathe—two hopelessly sweet, bourgeois saps—Elisabeth happily extends her passive-aggressive needling to them as well.
Melville and Cocteau have different agendas, so its difficult to imagine them collaborating. The meaning of a Cocteau film is usually generated through flights of fancy. The result is either poetically moving or downright silly. The magic and perversity of Cocteau’s book seems cartoonish when subjected to Melville’s realism. In Melville’s defense, the screenplay so thoroughly obscures the book’s meaning that it’s surprising the author adapted it himself. The fantastical element so essential to feeling the story is consistently present only in Cocteau’s lilting narration, and Melville’s astute choice of Bach and Vivaldi for the score.
In some places, however, the marriage succeeds. A dreamlike, impressionistic snowball fight with achingly erotic undertones opens the film. Henri Decaë, Melville’s long-time cinematographer, inventively employs unorthodox camera angles and close-ups. Elisabeth pulls the audience into the childrens’ claustrophobic universe by complaining to the camera; she pre-dates Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s similar ploy for audience sympathy in Pierrot Le Fou by fifteen years. The performances gain momentum as the story progresses. By the end of the film Elisabeth’s controlling mania has reached Norma Desmondesque fever-pitch.
This Criterion release has a load of special features including interviews with actress Nicole Stéphane and other crew members and a short film about Cocteau and Melville’s collaboration. Despite it’s imperfections, Les Enfants Terribles is a worthy rental for Cocteau lovers and serious students of the Nouvelle Vague.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Freaky Realism: Michael Taussig's Palma Africana
By McKenzie WarkMAY 2019 | Field Notes
Magical realism has become something of a sappy genre. The book that really put the genre on the map, Gabriel García Márquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), was not sentimental. Its magical dimension derived from the attempt to find a fictional form for a moment of real violence: the massacre of 3,000 striking United Fruit Company banana plantation workers in 1928.

The Once and Future Queen: Amber Sparks's Weird Realism
By Kurt BaumeisterFEB 2020 | Books
Amber Sparkss third story collection And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges is, as the title suggests, teeming with tales of retribution, though reducing the book or even its concept to that of a glorified burn book would be way off the mark. Desire, anger, murder, madness, robots, gods, monsters, apocalypses, love, hate, violence, magic, fairy godmothers, women as heroes, and men behaving badly (badly-behaved men who often pay with their lives, or hearts, or souls for said bad behavior): all these things live within this books pages.

Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933
By Daniel PatemanFEB 2019 | ArtSeen
Commemorating the centenary of the armistice of the First World War, the Tate Modern presents Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 1933. Comprised substantially of loans from The George Economou Collection, the show attempts to revive the overlooked artistic term Magic Realism, while also exploring the changing fortunes of the short-lived Weimar Republic.

Collaboration in Printmaking: An Influence on Creative Thinking
By Bill GoldstonDEC 19-JAN 20 | Editor's Message
I have often wondered how artists feel about working in printmaking. Does it influence their creative thinking in their primary medium? Do they enjoy working with another person to make their images? Are they excited about the act of printmaking or is it just another source of their livelihood? I have asked several to express their opinions and hope you find their responses informative.