Les Cousins

Claude Chabrol followed up his debut hit Le Beau Serge by negating it. Chabrol would later say that Les Cousins was actually the film he had in mind all along, but held off on making it until he was more financially secure, choosing to make Le Beau Serge first because it was "simpler." This may well be true, but don't take from that anecdote that Les Cousins is not also simple--a handful of characters, one (extraordinary) set, an enormous amount of interpersonal tension, and a loaded gun. What more does a movie need? Where Le Beau Serge cast Jean-Claude Brialy as an intruder into Gérard Blain's provincial world, the roles are here reversed. This is a country-mouse-visits-city-mouse story, with Gérard Blain the provincial mama's boy who has come to stay with his sophisticated Parisian cousin Jean-Claude Brialy while he studies for his law exam. Blain plays Charles, Brialy plays Paul--and here we find the first of the irreducibly Chabrolian traits already in place. Chabrol would later say that he never encapsulated his entire artistic vision in any one film--instead, each film was a component of a larger whole, a localized riff on themes developed differently in adjacent works. The entirety of the Chabrol canon is like a massive jazz fugue, cycling through familiar themes and ideas in fractal ways. If you haven't seen a number of Chabrol films, that concept may not register easily--so let's take it in small doses: the Paul and Charles characters would "stick" for years to come. They would be played by different actors, and dropped into different contexts, but the basic character types would remain fixed. As would their names. Get used to Paul and Charles here--you'll be seeing a lot of them over the next couple of decades. For that matter, the Charles and Paul characters were based on Chabrol himself and his buddy Paul Gegauff, respectively. Charles was the earnest but parochial soul, vulnerable to the predations of a Paul. And Paul, just like the real Paul Gegauff, was a monstrous cynic and right selfish bastard. By the way, Gegauff co-wrote the screenplay to this, and remained Claude's closest collaborator until Gegauff was murdered by his own wife on Christmas Eve. If you needed some evidence that he was a hard man to get along with, let that serve. To be fair, the future iterations of Paul and Charles were triangulated against a third pole, named Hélène--and almost always played by Stephane Audran. That character doesn't really surface here--this is just Chabrol #2, mind you, out of a career that spanned from 1958 to 2010 without stopping for air--but Audran appears in a minor but memorable role. It's essentially impossible to properly catalog how many roles she played for Chabrol over the years. We could tally up all of her screen appearances, but that's too reductive, given the tumultuous and dramatic private life she and Claude shared. The roles she played offscreen in his life were at least as significant as the ones on. While Audran gets to sparkle as one of the supporting players, the main female lead of Les Cousins is Juliette Mayniel. Both cousins pine for her, but what chance does a good-hearted, hard-working, intensely serious young man from the boondocks have in winning the heart of a girl when he's up against a boorish reprobate who looks like Satan and spends his time throwing drunken orgies? Charles doesn't even get to first base with his girl before Paul steals her away. She moves in, and poor Charles has to struggle to block out the noise of their lovemaking so he can focus on his studies--and then Paul comes and steals that away from him. Paul passes the exam without once cracking a book (it is self-evident he bribed the examiners), but Charles fails the same test despite not once allowing himself a moment's respite. That's a lot of tension to be boiling over in the confines of Paul's Paris apartment--and just to make things interesting, Paul's choice of interior décor is weapons. Swords like the walls, guns are out for the taking. Charles and Paul are both apt at any given moment to take a gun in hand, stroke it casually, use it to dial a telephone or make a rhetorical gesture. The only reason no one's been shot dead yet is that Paul doesn't keep the guns loaded. But he does keep the bullets close at hand. Chabrol made Les Cousins just three years out from the brilliant Japanese teen drama Crazed Fruit, which inaugurated a Japanese New Wave much like the French one Chabrol launched. For that matter, if we take Chabrol at his word on when he first started scheming Les Cousins, he was putting the story together within a year of seeing Crazed Fruit, so the similarities are worth noting. Both involve a young rube coming to live with a slightly older but much more worldly relative, and falling into his decadent and selfish lifestyle. In both films, the younger man becomes smitten with a girl, deludes himself into seeing her as more pure than she really is, and becoming enraged when she chooses the brother/cousin instead. Both films escalate towards a tragic finale--but it is in that finale that Chabrol diverges. There is bloodshed at the end of Les Cousins--I spoil nothing by admitting to that--but don't assume you can see where the story is heading. Some tragedies are worse than others, and Les Cousins opts for the bleakest conclusion it can find. Like Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins managed to offend different groups for different reasons. Some were put off by his increasingly slick stylization--the Spartan neorealism of Le Beau Serge has been jettisoned here in favor of a glossier and more Hollywoodish look. Others objected to his over-the-top depiction of decadent Parisian youth culture. Chabrol shrugged off such criticisms, noting that even the most excessive scenes were as documentary in nature as anything he did in Le Beau Serge, and if anyone doubted that they needed to spend more time seeing how his friends spent their time. (And then he'd surreptitiously cast his eyes over towards Gegauff). Les Cousins took home the top prize at that year's Berlin Film Festival, and was the first true box office smash of the New Wave--it outpaced ticket sales on Le Beau Serge six to one. Chabrol continued to evolve as an artist, but he did so in ways that the French audience wasn't entirely ready to embrace, and for the next six or seven years he was perceived to be in a slump. In 1967, he effected a crucial "comeback" with Les Biches, more or less a gender-reversed remake of Les Cousins. The Criterion Collection's DVD and Blu-Ray of Les Cousins is a beaut. The disc sports a lovingly produced booklet and an audio commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin. The packaging also boasts a "new and improved subtitle translation," and while I don't doubt they commissioned new subtitles, it's hard to know what to compare them against. I am not aware of this gem having ever been on US home video before. For more information about Les Cousins, visit Criterion Collection. by David Kalat