a world apart
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean-Pierre
Melville and Jean Cocteau (screenplay based on Cocteau’s fiction), Jean-Pierre
Melville (director) Les Enfants
terribles / 1950
Having
seen director Jean-Pierre Melville’s first major film, Le Silence de la Mer, French writer and director Jean Cocteau asked
Melville to direct a movie based on Cocteau’s fiction, Les Enfants Terribles.
Despite some problems with the final
result—particularly concerning numerous narrative voice-overs, read by Cocteau
himself—Melville was a remarkable choice.
While latter versions and a recent dance-opera feature far more lurid and
literal scenes, Melville, given the sexual restraints of audiences of the time,
allows more to the imagination, which, in turn, helps to create a kind of
dissociation between the two central figures and the rest of the world.
Why, we can only wonder, might a
snowball lobbed into his stomach—even with a rock embedded into—bring the young
teenage student, Paul (Édouard Dermit), to a collapse with blood dribbling from
his mouth and resulting in the need for a long period of home rest? And what is
Paul’s true relationship with the boy who tossed the snowball, his friend,
Dargelos (played by the actress, Renée Cosima)?
And, even more importantly, what is the true nature of Paul’s relationship with
his sister, Élisabeth (Nicole Stéphane)?
Even the overtly “pretty” appearance of
the actor playing Paul (acted by a young protégé of Cocteau who Melville
thought was not right for part), suggests a kind of frailness and bisexuality,
thus hinting that Paul is purposely bluffing, attempting to find a way out of
his school to be nearer to Élisabeth. The fact, moreover, that he carries with
him a photograph of Dargelos, dressed as a woman for all-male school play in
which he performed, further suggests that Paul’s love for him is a homosexual
one. And the fact that brother and sister sleep in the same room, fighting like
lovers, and sharing in a series of secret games—games the complete nature of
which are never revealed—casts an eerie spell of what is obviously their
incestuous-like relationship. In short, by not spelling it out, Melville
engages us in deep speculation, casting an almost mythical spell on everything
in which they are involved. The siblings’ drawers of “treasures” become
something like fetishes which engage and ultimately kill them. And the fact
that Dargelos and, later, Agathe, are played by the same woman, explain Paul’s
sudden infatuation with the latter, even though it is apparent he is a gay boy
entirely dependent upon his sister’s love.
Some English translations of Cocteau’s
original work titled the book The Holy
Terrors, but these adolescents are neither “holy” nor “terrors,” but are,
as in the French, “terrible infants,” adolescents who have obviously grown up
without proper adult supervision (the mother, like a southern belle, has early
in her life retired to her death bed, and is killed off early in the film). And
if they love and deeply care for one another in their adolescent alliance, they
fight with one another more like Martha and George in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
That behavior also helps to explain the
couple’s need for others around them: in order to properly play out their
tortuous relationship, they need an audience, which Paul finds in the presence
of the handsome Gérard (Jacques Bernard) and
Élisabeth
discovers in her fellow model friend Agathe. In many ways, these two become
mirror like images of the brother’s and sister’s desires and love. And it is
only logical that when they threaten to truly intrude upon the dream-world that
the young siblings have conjured up, that the stronger of the two, Élisabeth,
must destroy them.
Expressing his love for Agathe, Paul
attempts to ask her to marry him. But even in this longing for something
outside of his bedroom fantasy, he is too weak to engage her directly and
writes a letter to someone staying in the mansion of horrors that Élisabeth has
inherited from her short-lived husband. Intercepting that letter, Paul’s sister
tears it up and tosses it into the toilet, creating a web of lies that marries
off Agathe to Gérard.
The sudden introduction of a highly
toxic poison, sent to Paul by Dargelos—the two, we are told, long shared an
interest in poisons—is like a love potion to the now forlorn and lovestruck
Paul. It may seem to be a kind of pointless deus ex machina, but it is
necessary for this permanent insider to kill himself before he truly suffocates
in his sister’s embraces.
His suicide, moreover, paves the way for
her own, as, a bit like Hedda Gabler, she brings out the gun to end her own
life.
Melville’s work reveals Cocteau’s own
operatic tale as a kind of fable that speaks of a private world of the
imagination (not unlike Cocteau’s own hothouse films, Beauty and the Beast and Orphée)
in which the characters struggle hard to keep the real world—however one
defines that—at bay. These two children are determined, as Peter Pan puts it,
to never grow up, dying for a world where together they magically lived out
their lives surrounded by a perceived toxic adult world.
Los Angeles,
February 18, 2018
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