Product Details

• Actors: Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe, Renée Cosima, Jacques Bernard, Melvyn Martin
• Directors: Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville
• Writers: Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville
• Producers: Jean-Pierre Melville
• Format: Black & White, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: English, French
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Arthur Mayer-Edward Kingsley Inc.
• VHS Release Date: November 11, 1998
• Run Time: 105 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303956955
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,075 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Jean-Pierre Melville's second film, made in 1950, became a significant influence among French filmmakers and earned Melville renown as a maverick who could do wonderful things outside his country's studio system. (Melville's independence was a forerunner of that enjoyed later in the decade by New Wave figures such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.) Les Enfants Terribles is based on a 1929 novel by poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who also wrote the script with Melville and according to some people interfered in everything from the casting (the rather stiff male lead was a Cocteau protege) to the photography. Nevertheless, the story of a sister (an outstanding performance by Nicole Stephane) and brother (Edouard Dhermite) who withdraw into their own, insulated world to play out suggestively erotic dramas, has a fluid, lyrical movement that is part of a visionary whole. In some ways a harbinger of the coming pop narcissism of youth culture, Les Enfants Terribles is also a timeless tale of mythic exploration of existence and purpose. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Depraved Seduction, July 25, 2007

By	Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Les Enfants Terribles: Criterion Collection (DVD)

During the first few minutes I thought Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles seemed like an odd choice of novels to adapt for a director known for his low view of human nature but that is only because I was not all that familiar with Les Enfants Terribles. The title should have given me a clue but I realized as I watched that Cocteau also is very interested in exploring man's and woman's less seemly side. Furthermore, Melville's gritty noir sensibility is every bit as much on display here in this coming-of-age story as it is in the noir masterpieces that came later. In this adaptation of Cocteau's novel Melville ruminates about the insular world of a brother and sister whose precocious and despotic imaginations are destabilized only by uncertain desires. The two teen siblings are Paul, an ultra-sensitive student who is infatuated with another male student named Dargolos, and Lise, his sister, who has been forced to stay at home to care for their ailing mother. There is an obvious and deeply disturbing symbiotic bond between these two and the unwholesomeness of the bond is immediately apparent. Though they are young there is nothing youthful or innocent about either of them; in fact, much of the time, they seem to act like little blonde fascist versions of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton--as with Taylor and Burton for these two cruelty and seduction are indistinguishable. Just how depravedly selfish these two are, or might be (again, the extent of their depravity is never made explicit) might disgust some viewers. (If the incest topic makes you queasy you should probably stay away from this.) But even viewers who can handle the topic might be frustrated that Melville does not give us the proper amount of background information on these two to allow us any real depth of insight into the evolution of these two tormented psyches. To be fair, though, Cocteau was writing before Freudian psychoanalysis and the idea that we needed fully fleshed out case histories to understand individual or symbiotically joined psyches had become part of the common culture. As it is Cocteau and Melville only give us bits and pieces of Paul and Lise's psyches and all we can do is make assumptions about what went wrong. Whether the cause of their rapid slide down the slippery slope of narcissism was lack of a tutor to socialize them or just a result of their having received an overabundance of creativity and beauty at birth remains a mystery to the end. And we can never say whether Paul's infatuation with Dargolos and then the later infatuation with Agathe was an attempt to replicate his bond with his sister or to escape it. All we really know at films end is that the strange bond that exists between Paul and Lise prevents either of them from bonding with anyone outside their own mutually imagined realm. They do invite two guests to live with them (or, I should say, the two are seduced by Paul and Lise's depraved behavior) but they are welcome only so long as they play by Paul and Lise's very exclusive rules.

There is plenty here even for the casual Freudian and those who think deeply about such films will no doubt come up with their own plausible solutions to this brother-sister mystery but, it seems to me, one can only guess at Cocteau's and Melville's intentions--and I think this lack of explicitness is intentional. I can't help presuming that Cocteau is making a point about creativity and dissent and how asocial (anti-bourgeoisie) desires lead to psychological depravity but that judgement relies upon a value system that I do not think Cocteau and Melville necessarily share with the rest of society. More likley its just their own creative prerogotive to acknowledge that such states of desire exist outside the normally sanctioned channels of being.

In any event, this is a very creative film that will elicit a variety of responses from Freudians and anti-Freudians alike (I'll be curious to read future posts here).

Note: If this kind of thing is your kind of thing you might also like Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Musil's Young Torless as well as the fictions of Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, & Paul Bowles.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cocteau's Masterpiece of Imagination and Longing, April 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Les Enfants Terribles (Paperback)

Cocteau's novel is gem of a book which deals with the power of make-believe to transport the characters into worlds of their own making. Specifically, Les Enfants Terribles tells the story of a brother and sister who, after the death of their mother, create a sanctuary in one enchanted room and via their active imaginations. These fantasies become the axis on which their lives revolve until it spirals out of control and ends in a climax befitting a Greek tragedy. Reading this book is like reliving a fever dream in which the reality and fantasy blur.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars my all time favourite movie, September 12, 1999

By A Customer

I saw this movie on television, it was trasmitted at the dead of night, such a pity! The plot, acting, cocteau,s narrative and particularly the atmosphere created by use of Bach adaptation to the Vivaldi violin concerto was just awesome!