What makes it different from others?

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Les enfants terribles is a 1950s psychological drama (thriller? horror?) depicting two siblings with dark secrets. When I finally sat down to watch it, I was curious as to how far it could/would go in depicting what's up with these two, who have an incestuous relationship. The 1950s were a time of censorship in Hollywood, but not so much across the Atlantic. As it turns out, the depiction here is largely implied, whispered; at first, it seems unfathomable, given how rotten they are to each other. As it goes on, you can kind of figure out what this film is going for, and it is intriguing- the two are siblings in a very real sense. Siblings squabble, they have sibling rivalry, but they can also love each other. This takes it to the umpteeth degree, and I hit that epiphany when they're in standing in the bathtub. Two people are standing outside the bathroom and hear the siblings screaming; one says they sound unhappy, the other says they're happy, and water comes pouring out from underneath the door crack. It goes a bit far in both directions (Come near me, come to my bedside, come off the top bunk and join me).In other ways, Les enfants terribles picks up steam. The acting in the first scene may not be perfect; the narration feels slightly intrusive; but it picks up that dark feel, and we begin to feel, as the sister says, hypnotized.

Technically a cinematic masterpiece with some excellent acting, particularly on the part of Nicole Séphane, but this Greek drama of a family and some young people living together with relationship complications doesn't give an altogether good taste in your mouth. Why are people usually so mean and cruel in French films? There is very little humanity here, love is not sincere, Elisabeth is callous and cruel and actually evil in her possessiveness, it's like one of the worst novels of Balzac (of whom Charlotte Brontë complained that he always gave her such a bad taste in her mouth), and this lack of humanity gives this masterpiece an ugly touch of almost inhumanity. Its brilliance fades into the shadows of the meaninglessness of its cruelty and pettiness, they don't do much else than quarrel and fight throughout the movie, and it all seems so pointless. Did Jean Cocteau have any meaning with writing this play except to produce a technically perfect analysis of how young people perish in the destructiveness of their relationships? The language, the photo, the acting, the music, everything is perfect but is consumed by its own pettiness in a dwindling spiral of human claustrophobia.

'Playing the game' as the idiomatic expression meaning 'pretending to' in French. While Elizabeth played the game, Paul 'played the game'. And what a captivating game!A vertiginous ceiling-shot shows the four protagonists visiting their future house, walking on a chessboard-like roof. Like the human pieces of the infamous game whose mastermind is Elizabeth. Elizabeth, portrayed by Nicole Stéphane in a grandiloquent operatic BAFTA nominated performance, as the overly protective sister of Paul, Edouard Dermitte, a 16-year boy with a fragile health. An ambiguous relationship constantly flirting with incest. One of the strangest cinematic pairings. "Les Enfants Terribles" from Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau.Emotionnally speaking, "Les Enfants Terribles" plays as a succession of build-ups, twists and climaxes, guided by the beautiful sound of Bach and Vivaldi's Concertos, plunging you in the confusing mix of emotions that inhabit the hearts of Elizabeth, Paul, and their friends who undergo their caprices with a remarkable patience. The sound of violins takes your soul and transports you in the middle of a hypnotic nonsense when the narration from Jean Cocteau tries to enlighten us on what should rather be kept secret, the whole movie is about secrets, deadly and dangerous but did we need to hear what was going in the hearts or the souls of these twisted individuals while their actions, their expression were more eloquent? The film belongs to the theater world, which is even more spectacular on a cinema's screen, it conveys a sense of disturbing intimacy between Elizabeth and Paul who love to argue so much that they fail to hide how needy they are -in fact- to each other. Elizabeth is the tempestuous 'Yin' to Paul's tormented 'Yang', the mother, the mistress, the friend, enslaving Paul in a relationship to which he can only react through sarcasm and irony, to better hide this discomfort. In fact, the only self-confident character is Elizabeth, the one who pulls the emotional strings of every one, echoing the discomfort of the viewer. But once you get used to that discomfort, "Les Enfants Terribles" becomes the mirror of its own emotions: unpredictability, zaniness, theatricality, where even the artistic conflict between the two film-makers have ironically served the film's artistry and unique sensation. Cocteau's prose is nuanced and monotonous while the characters are deliberately over-the–top, when the movie could have been 'good' by classic standards, it became disturbing to the level of genius and making you realize that it's no use to rationally analyze something that invites to spontaneously let the emotions dictate your feelings. "Les Enfants Terribles" is an exhilarating experience, a kaleidoscope of emotions that creates a harmonious symbiosis between every form of artistic expression : music, theater, literature, it looks artificial sometimes, but it's so gutsy and brave that any attempt to decorticate the meaning of one scene separately is vain and pointless. The whole package works, the opening is intriguing, what follows disturbs, and the ending leaves with you a "wow" feeling that requires catching your breath before reconsidering what you saw. Nicole Stéphane IS over the top in the same perfect intensity that turns her into the secret daughter of Norma Desmond (from a masterpiece of the same year). She's so absorbed by her exclusive lust toward Paul that she can't behave normally without betraying her true nature, the only way to manipulate is to keep this exuberant feel as the right vehicle of her inner emotions.And Elizabeth is such an omnipresent character, almost God-like, that one should consider her as part of Paul's persona, and this is the only way to appreciate Dermitte's performance. While he could be seen as a lousy, or too histrionic actor, I feel there's something deliberately missing inside him, as if half of his soul belonged to Elizabeth, keeping it secretly among the various objects that constituted the treasured bric-a-brac. Look at his mouth, like paralyzed, unable to express one positive emotion, Paul rarely smiles and his smiles are not convincing because Nicole possesses the best of him, and his doom is that he ignores this or 'plays the game', even when his most feminine part inspires his male crush. Elizabeth and Paul are the same persona, and the film carries many Bergmanian undertones ... even illustrated in the poster.The dazzling black-and-white cinematography conveys the bizarre aspect of this duality. There's a beautiful shot of Paul sleepwalking on the stairs, appearing all in shadows like a ghostly figure only capable to escape from Elizabeth and emerge from the light when he's asleep, as if his subconscious was the only refuge from the doom that would lead to his demise. The surrealistic aspect gets more palpable as the movie progresses: in a beautiful dream sequence, Paul walks backwards solemnly as if Nicole managed to bring him back under her power, which she did by conjuring the only thing that could have deprived her from Paul, his love for Agathe. But Paul by sending the letter to himself, instead of Agathe, signed his own death warrant, proving that he couldn't see his life with anyone but him, with this very part of him cruelly belonging to his sister.That was Paul's tragedy and Elizabeth is the Goddess. The film borrows many elements from the Greek mythology, so cherished by Cocteau, and sublimated by the noir genre to which Melville would give its letters of nobility. Paul and Elizabeth's fates were already traced, they could live in the biggest room ever, there would be no room for Gérard, and certainly not Agathe, who unmasked Elizabeth's villainous side. Were the actors too old for these parts? No, their troubling Aryan blonde and curly hair with intense azure eyes and their marble statue-like beauty reminded of the forbidden love between Electra and Orestes with the noir direction underlining the troubling effect of their games ...... are they adult playing like kids, or kids playing adult games … does it really matter?

First, I have to admit that I nearly didn't write this comment at all. I read a rave review of Les Enfants Terribles by an earlier user and agreed with (almost) every word of it. What more was there to add? Then I searched my soul for a day or so, and had to admit that this film REALLY does not work for me - brilliantly directed, skilfully acted, moodily photographed and lyrically scored though it may be.For all its many splendours, this Melville film of a Cocteau novel suffers from a malady I can only describe as "creative schizophrenia." It is recognisably a work by two highly individual artists, each of whom creates his own distinctive and magical world. No film by Melville could ever be mistaken for anybody else's. The same is true of Cocteau.How do these two worlds mix together? To put it bluntly, not at all. This is most apparent in the (mis)casting of the androgynous and incestuous brother-sister duo. With his porcelain cheekbones and languid sensuality, Edouard Dhermitte is a classic Cocteau actor. (He was, in fact, Cocteau's lover at the time.) With her politicised Left Bank angst and 'butch' vitality, Nicole Stephane is a classic Melville heroine. (She had starred in his much finer 1947 film Le Silence de la Mer.) These two actors scarcely seem to belong on the same planet, let alone in the same family.Still more disheartening is the utter lack of allure of Renee Cosima, a pudgy young ingenue who is cast as the brother's two ambisexual love objects - the sadistic schoolboy Dargelos and the lovelorn model Agathe. Lacking even the tiniest flicker of charisma, whether as a man or as a woman, Cosima makes it difficult for us to empathise with the hero's erotic longings, or to care much about the hothouse melodrama that breaks loose as a result.Try as I might to warm to this film, I cannot help imagining it with a different cast. As the brother and sister, Helmut Berger and Dominique Sanda from The Garden of the Finzi Continis. As the androgynous sexual pirate Agathe/Dargelos, maybe Katharine Hepburn from Sylvia Scarlett or Indrid Thulin from The Magician or (why not?) the immortal Anne Carlisle from Liquid Sky. Most important of all - and I know this smacks of heresy - I would much rather Cocteau had directed it himself. One great auteur should be enough for any film.David Melville