150 Word Review: 'Les Enfants Terribles' (1950)

Sibling rivalry

Photo: O.G.C.

The original indoor kids. Director Jean-Pierre Melville adapts poet/filmmaker/polymath Jean Cocteau's famous novel about eccentric siblings who choose a life of fantasy instead of reality. Melville, on occasion, captures Cocteau's hallucinatory melancholy, especially during a dream sequence that owes much to the old master's early surrealist cinematic experiments. Nicole Stéphane and Edouard Dermithe star as a towheaded brother and sister who spend their days in robes, playing little games in their messy, whimsically decorated bedroom. They are lured out of their protective little fortress by love.

They are alien, almost ethereal, bored angels bonded by blood and trauma. Les Enfants terribles starts as a gritty fable about isolated outcasts, clever little homebodies, but ends in darker territory far from where they were raised. Their games get out of hand. Renee Cosima gets two roles: a rotten boy and Agathe, who loves Dermithe's sickly character. Cocteau lurks as the movie's narrator.

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