LES COUSINS (director/writer: Claude Chabrol; screenwriter: Paul Gégauff; cinematographer: Henri Decaë; cast: Jean-Claude Brialy (Paul), Gerard Blain (Charles), Juliette Mayniel (Florence), Claude-Cerval (Clovis), 1959-Fr.)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
French New Wave cinema at its best. Chabrol's second feature film weaves an enigmatic moral fable of good and evil, as the mama's boy, the college student from the country, Charles (Gerard), who is studying law while he stays with his Philistine, playboy cousin, Paul (Brialy), who seems to be a student of parties, living as luxuriously as a student can in Paris.
We see this film through Charles' naive eyes, who can't believe what he is seeing. But, it is Paul who takes center stage, having a tremendous facility for socializing and meeting attractive girls, while he shows little interest or respect for the academics, reducing his reading to detective stories or pornography. He does enjoy Wagner's music, as he uses that music and the superficial conversations he has with the other students, to convey a certain sophistication about life that he does not really have. He is especially adept in his ability to bluff people into thinking that he a person of substance. He also exhibits, shall we say, bad taste, as he frightens a Jewish student in his sleep by mimicking a Gestapo agent.
Yet it is Paul who achieves success with the things many young people seem to value: such as having many friends, many sexual conquests, a car, material things, and a very active social life despite his disdain for people. While his supposedly well-behaved cousin seems befuddled in this environment, wanting to live a quality life, but instead, living like a leper. He reads Balzac, respects women, wants to marry a nice girl, and is only too happy to please his mother by doing well in college. In otherwords, Chabrol makes him out to be a loser and a square, someone who has no inspiration for living. A rather pathetic creature, whose goodness turns Chabrol's stomach. No matter how impure a picture Chabrol paints of Paul and his dissolute lifestyle, Paul has energy and is on the road to success. Charles is unable to find himself by doing what is conventionally right; such as, burying himself in books and class work. He does not seem to come any closer to finding a way out of the moralistic trap he has built for himself. When he shows disdain to Paul's older college buddy, the rakish Clovis (Cerval), he is reacting to his bourgeois way of looking at things. And when he falls in love at first-sight with Florence (Juliette), he shows no discernment, expecting everything to be just what he thinks it is; and, when his "nice" girl turns out to be a slut, who leaves him for Paul, he is crushed, not knowing how to adequately express himself to anyone his age, or to communicate with his peers what he sees as problematic ethics for their generation. But he does talk to the older bookstore owner, someone he feels a kinship with, as they both profess to being book lovers and are scornful of the flippant attitudes of the other students, with the older man acting as a surrogate father for the student, who is desperately in need of advise.
There is a great camera shot of Charles trying to enter a closed church after his break-up with Florence, and in the next instant we see the camera pan to the open door of the bookstore, where Paul finds it easy to talk to the owner of the bookshop and get his girl trouble off his chest. But he is disappointed when the bookstore owner can only tell him, that if his problem is only about a girl, that's no big deal. He will get over it. This all seems like logical advise, something we kind of expect a sympathetic parent to say to a hurt child. But for Paul, this is no little problem, it is an insurmountable problem, and he feels let down by the response. Chabrol has carefully painted a picture, indicating that there is no help in sight for those who need it, whether from the pillars of society or from the rebels.
Warning: spoiler to follow. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want to know how the film ends and proceed to the last paragraph.
The good Charles fails his college exams, while the badly behaved Paul passes the exam and throws a rousing farewell party to celebrate. This is too much for Charles to comprehend, and while Paul is sleeping he points a loaded pistol at his head but changes his mind. When Paul awakens from his drunken slumber, while fooling around with the pistol, thinking it is unloaded as it always is, he fires it and accidentally kills his cousin.
Chabrol's film would be interesting enough, just for its depiction of Parisian student life, but when he moves into grounds of philosophical ethics and questions what love is to those who think they have fallen in love, his concepts become challenging intellectual engagements. The film questions the institutions and the people who have trust in them, and one's own morality. This thriller becomes a matter of how one comes to terms with one's ability, and how society is based on the principle of the survival of the fittest. It is Chabrol's rather cynical, but fair look at how Parisian society operates and how young people suffer from the pangs of youth, sometimes even in a deadly manner.
REVIEWED ON 1/9/99 GRADE: A
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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