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.
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)?
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?
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.
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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