084 - Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children), 1950, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

084 - Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children), 1950, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.

Snowball fight!

The boys are throwing snowballs after school.

They look as though they are having a great time.

Until Dargalos hits Paul with a snowball in the face.  It knocks him down and makes him bleed.  Dargalos put a rock in it.

Dargalos is a beautiful boy.  All the boys love him.  The teachers love him.  Paul loves him.  He gets away with everything.

In fact, Paul was seeking him out, looking for him.  When Dargalos hit him.

Gerard is Paul's friend.  He loves Paul's sister.  He loves Paul.  He will take Paul home.

The teachers ask what happened.  Gerard states that Dargalos put a rock inside the snowball.  The teachers ask Dargalos if that is true.  Dargalos smugly tells them to ask Paul.

Paul wakes up and defends Dargalos.  He says it was just a snowball.  Nothing more.

The teachers cannot see how a mere snowball could cause bleeding.  But Paul has insisted.  They let it go.

Why did Paul defend Dargalos?  As it turns out, he will never see him again.

The snowball fight takes place at the school where Jean Cocteau really attended.

Remember Jean Cocteau?

We first met him when we watched Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et le Bette) (003, January 3)!

He directed Beauty and the Beast in 1946.

Before that, he wrote this novel, Les Enfants Terribles, in 1929.  It featured a snowball fight.

Then he directed his first feature film, The Blood of a Poet, in 1930.  It also featured a snowball fight.  In fact, he invited an audience to come watch the filming of it.

Jean Cocteau was a fascinating person.

When it came time to make the film version of Les Enfants Terrible, instead of directing it himself, he hired the young director Jean-Pierre Melville.

Jean-Pierre Melville at this time had made only one movie, yesterday's The Silence of the Sea (1946).

Jean Cocteau was impressed with the young director, and since this film is about young people and even contains the word children in the title, he thought it would be good to have a young person direct it.

Jean-Pierre Melville apparently kept much of Jean Cocteau's imagery and style.  As we get to know Melville, you will believe this, because this film does not seem like a Melville film at all.

Melville is best known for thrilling crime dramas.  After that, he is known for his dramas of the French resistance.

One does not think of him as a director of staged family bedroom dramas.

But imagine the honor of being a young director and being asked by a beloved older director to direct for him.

Cocteau supplied both the screenplay and the voiceover narration for the film.

Gerard brings Paul home.

At home we meet Paul's sister, Elisabeth.

And we enter into a world of dysfunction.

A world without adults.

A world where brother and sister, led by older sister, allow their thoughts and words to go anywhere they will no matter how frivolous or foolish, manipulating each other, belittling each other, cohabiting codependently with each other, living lives without honor or purpose, until they eventually spiral downward to destruction.

It is a kind of Lord of the Flies of the bedroom.

The father is gone, an alcoholic who used to beat the mother.  The mother is in another room, on her deathbed, almost completely absent from their lives.

Elisabeth complains that she has to wait on the mother hand and foot while the boys are out having a snowball fight.  Then she complains that she will have to wait on Paul hand and foot.

Gerard seems to be an upstanding, emotionally healthy person.

But he attaches himself to the siblings and becomes a part of their dysfunctional world.

He begins to sleep in their room.  Elisabeth sleeps in the bed on the left; Paul, in the bed on the right; Gerard, on a pallet on the floor.

The siblings indulge in something they call The Game.  It is exclusive to the two of them.  It enables them to shut out the rest of the world and enter into a psychological space for them alone.  But it involves a series of jabbing insults and verbal abuses.  It is not clear what benefit one would gain from this activity.

They also call it Getting Lost.  Getting lost means playing their game.  "I'm getting lost.  I've gotten lost."

When one is playing the game, you do not disturb him.

Gerard and his uncle take the two on a vacation to the sea.

They have never been out before, so they put on airs.  By trying to look sophisticated, they look foolish.

They act out on the train.

They shoplift at the beach and force Gerard, against his protests, to do it with them.  When he comes out with a hairbrush, they make him do it again, as a brush is something useful.  So they make him take a large watering can.

They fight at the hotel.  They argue over who will take the bath and end up taking it together.  This is not shown, and they are wearing clothes when the bathroom door is closed.  After the door is closed, all one hears is shouting.

Back home they argue some more.  Gerard overlooks it because he loves Elisabeth, and all he notices or remembers is that during the conversation Elisabeth refers to him as Dear.

The Mother dies.

Elisabeth needs a job.  She gets a job as a live model for a department store.  They teach her to walk with haughtiness and disdain.  She does it naturally.

The supervisor says it is as though you have modeled your whole life.

Is this a compliment or an insult?

She is not talking about her beauty or form or technique.  She is talking about her haughtiness and disdain.

Elisabeth meets a girl name Agathe and brings her home.  She looks strikingly like Argalos.  In fact, the actress who plays Agathe also played Argalos.  And pulled it off.

Paul falls in love with Agathe at first sight.

Agathe sees a picture of Dargalos in their room and thinks it is herself.  Paul is smitten by her

Elisabeth realizes all the pictures on his wall--boxers, American movie stars--look like Dargalos and Agathe.

Elisabeth moves Agathe into the Mother's empty bedroom.

Now there are four of them.

Elisabeth meets a rich man, or "a man with a car."  Michael.

They get engaged.

Michael has the ability to change everything for them.  And he does.  He invites the whole gang to come hang out at his big house.

They come hang out.

He sings and plays the piano for her.  In English.  A clever song that may symbolize the whole film.  On each refrain the singer says of his lover, "You were smiling at me," until the last refrain when the singer realizes, "You were smiling at him and laughing at me."

Michael is killed in a car crash on the road from Cannes to Nice.

Elisabeth inherits 18 rooms and a gallery.  She calls herself a widow.  She wears a veil.

The voiceover narrator tells us that that is why she married Michael.  Not for his money but for his death.

To be a widow.

Not that she knew or had anything to do with it, but that her personality somehow intuited it ahead of time.

The four of them end up in the house together.

And the downward spiral escalates.  Until the final, logical conclusion.

You may read this write-up and wonder why.  What is the point?

This may not be your idea of a good time on a Friday night with a cup of Coke and a tub of popcorn.

It may be one of the least entertaining films we have seen so far this year, as far as entertaining goes.

It certainly made less money than La Silence de la Mer did before it.

But it appeals to a different kind of taste, and it has had a lasting influence on other filmmakers.

Films may be made with different goals.

Sometimes a filmmaker is working out a technique.

Sometimes a filmmaker is conducting a character study.

Sometimes a filmmaker is just telling a story, and this is the story he has.

Sometimes a filmmaker is trying to tell the truth.

Art holds up a mirror to nature.

Does something occur naturally in nature?

If it occurs naturally in nature and art holds up a mirror to it, then the mirror reasonably will capture it and reflect it back.

This is the human condition.