Not long after the middle of this movie, a rich American Jew appears. Michael (Melvyn Martin) drives a fast car, spends money all over town, and has captured the heart of an attractive Parisian, Elizabeth (Nicole StĂ©phane). He buys her a palace, and in the palace, he plays a jazz number for her on a piano. This moment, which lasts about two minutes and is the only part of the film in English (American English), is pure Melville. This is his cinema of jazz clubs, slick suits, hard liquor, easy money, and fast girls in racy getups. It's the cinema of his great crime filmsâBob le Flambeur, Deux Hommes dans Manhattan, Le SamouraĂŻ. This island of Melvilleâthe jazz piano, the crooner, the suit, the girlâin Les Enfants Terribles is surrounded by the sea of Jean Cocteau's cinema and poetry.
Remove this island of Melville, which can be done with almost no impact on the story, and what you have is a movie that in every way appears to by directed by its writer, Jean Cocteau. Only the sharpest eye and ear can separate the tone, texture, and acting of Les Enfants Terribles from Cocteau's own filmsâLa Belle et la BĂȘte, OrphĂ©e. We can only conclude that Melville was not so much the director of Les Enfants Terribles, his second full-length film, but merely its instrumentâa piece of equipment Cocteau used to communicate his boy-delicate philosophies and poetry of petty cruelties.
The movie opens with a beautiful young man, Paul (Edouard Dermithe), getting hit and hurt by a snowball thrown by another beautiful young man, Dargelos (Renée Cosima). Paul falls to ground, is examined by a doctor, and ordered to get some rest. Paul's sister, Elizabeth, receives this order and helps him recover. But he doesn't really recover. Instead, he retreats, with his sister, into a very small world. They share a room with two beds and lots of useless things on the floor and in the drawers and closets. The sister and brother kind of look alike and become obsessed with each other. They fight, scream, call each other names, cry, forgive, kiss and make up, play, fight, scream, call each other names, forgive, kiss and make up, play, fight, scream... The only thing that can break this cycle of cruelty is death.
The break begins when they move into the palace with the American, Elizabeth's lover, Michael. We can only guess that he bought the palace with the kind of crime capital that funds big heists and secret casinos in Melville's gangland. We can only guess at the money's source because Michael is killed in a car accident soon after settling into the palace. Now the brother and sister have the room (or lots of rooms) to really go crazy (in). And they do go crazy. And the movie ends as you would expect a movie directed by Cocteau to end: in a dream.
