kissing cousins
by
Douglas Messerli
Paul
Gégauff (screenplay, based on a story by Claude Chabrol), Claude Chabrol
(director) Les Cousins (The Cousins) / 1959
Often
described as being related to director Claude Chabrol’s first film, The Beau
Serge, his 1959
feature The Cousins, this time
around, brings the country cousin, Charles (Gerard Blain) to the city and into
the apartment of his decadent cousin,
Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), who, with his thinly -trimmed beard, is even made up
to look a bit like the devil he is.
It is not merely that Paul’s hip
apartment (filled with African masks, antique guns, and marine-related
paintings) at the center of which is a large, open hearth, is a location of
nightly heavy drinking and sexual orgies—which in 1959 may have seemed
particularly “morbid,” as The New York
Times’ Bosley Crowther described them—but that Paul himself, apparently
into sadomasochism, likes to put on Wagner and wear a Nazi gestapo hat. His
nasty friends, Clovis (Claude Cerval)—an ironic name, surely, given that King
Clovis was the founder of France—and an Italian count (Carrado Guarducci) join
him and his women friends in his nightly carousals.
Clovis is particularly furious that
Florence seems to be pretending something she is not, and arranges for her to
be found in Paul’s bed when Charles returns from his college classes—classes
which, it’s evident, Paul never attends.
Taking up one of Paul’s wall-hung
handguns (can there be a better example of male-male expression?), Charles puts
a single bullet into it, determining, in a kind of reverse Russian roulette, to
let chance make the decision of whether or not his beloved cousin lives. As in
everything else, Paul, it seems, is lucky, and survives.
Chabrol does not even let us hear the
gunshot; we see only a small puff of smoke. And Charles, at first, seems not
even to have felt the bullet’s entry into his body as he stands a few seconds
in utter disbelief before slowly falling to the floor (a kind of death that
Fassbinder will later brilliantly exaggerate in his The American Soldier).
Paul, obviously shocked by the turn of
events, goes to his cousin to momentary stroke his forehead—with a wonderful
visual mix of hands and feet and heads—before retreating, as the doorbell
rings, forcing him to face his tragic future.
His fate was determined, we now
recognize, from the moment he invited his loving cousin into his life.
Los Angeles,
September 30, 2016
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