Les Enfants terribles (1950, Jean-Pierre Melville) (Patreon)

49/100

Spoilers ahoy.

I like most films de Melville and I also like most films de Cocteau, but Melville directing in the style of Cocteau leaves something to be desired. In particular, there's an uncanny, oneiric quality to Cocteau's best work that clearly wants to manifest itself here, despite an ostensibly naturalistic context, but never quite does. I suspect that Melville, whose sensibility was far more coldly pragmatic, found all of the stuff about Lise and Paul's game (capitalized as the Game in Cocteau's novel, if I can trust an English translation) and the bizarre fetishization of their shared bedroom (likewise capitalized: the Room) kind of silly, downplaying it as much as he felt he could get away with. Consequently, the folie à deux aspect barely registers—Lise just seems incestuously possessive—and her final action comes across as despairing rather than perversely conspiratorial. (In the book, she attempts, but fails, to kill herself at the precise moment that Paul expires. That's a magnificent ending; the one we get here, though superficially similar, has no real impact.) It's also a problem that Edouard Dermithe plays Paul with the same shallow petulance that he either had just employed or would shortly employ in Cocteau's great Orpheus, released the same year; while this approach worked fine for Cégeste (who's dispatched, more or less, quite early on), it makes Paul seem no match at all for Nicole Stéphane's almost carnivorous embodiment of Lise, thus destabilizing their crucial power balance. Enfants terribles should be electrifying even or perhaps especially when restricted to the siblings' hermetically-sealed bubble, whereas I felt restless until Agathe finally showed up, in turn rendering Gérard less superfluous. Gets more powerful toward the end, as Lise goes full sociopath, though Paul's reconstruction of the Room within Lise's inherited mansion still lacks a certain WTF element that Cocteau himself would surely have foregrounded. Don't mind me, though—I also still dearly, sorrowfully wish that Kubrick had made AI.