Les Cousins movie storyline. Charles (Gérard Blain) is a young provincial coming up to Paris to study law. He shares his cousin Paul’s (Jean-Claude Brialy) flat. Paul is a kind of decadent boy, a disillusioned pleasure-seeker, always dragging along with other idles, while Charles is a plodding, naive and honest man. He fell in love with Florence (Juliette Mayniel), one of Paul’s acquaintances. But how will Paul react to that attempt to build a real love relationship ? One of the major New Wave films.
Les Cousins is a 1959 French New Wave drama film directed by Claude Chabrol. It tells the story of two cousins, the decadent Paul and the naive Charles. Charles falls in love with Florence, one of Paul’s friends. It won the Golden Bear at the 9th Berlin International Film Festival.
Chabrol conceived The Cousins to be his first film, but the high production costs ($160,000) postponed the production until Le Beau Serge was finished. The two films employed the same leads–Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain—but with their roles reversed. Brialy now played “the insider” and Blain — “the outsider.” It was the first film that Chabrol wrote in collaboration with Paul Gégauff.
The film introduces a number of new elements which will soon be regarded as typically Chabrolian. It is set in a bourgeois milieu, and the overall style is self-consciously polished—making it closer to “cinema of quality” than the New Wave. There is also a typical ambiguity about the characters, the guileless Charles emerging as something of a prig, and Paul as a flawed but more complex and interesting character.
Charles’ guardian angel, an idealistic bookseller, is counterbalanced by Paul’s companion, the malevolent Clovis. The party scenes reveal “Chabrol’s taste for the theatrical and flamboyant.” The unwitting murder in the end is apparently inspired by “the theme of the exchange of guilt which Chabrol and Rohmer analysed in Hitchcock.”
Film Review for Les Cousins
Another morbid picture of the younger generation in France—this time the men and women students who attend college in Paris by day and carouse by night—is offered in the new French film, “The Cousins,” which opened at the Beekman yesterday.It was written, produced and directed by 27-year-old Claude Chabrol, whose recent picture, “Le Beau Serge,” contemplated the decadence and apathy of younger Frenchmen in the provinces.
To judge by both these pictures, which are in the stream of the “new wave” of French motion picture creation that recently brought us the brilliant “The 400 Blows,” M. Chabrol is the gloomiest and most despairing of the new creative men. His attitude is ridden with a sense of defeat and ruin. And if his cinema reporting is as reliable as it is clear-eyed, candid and cruel, then others, as well as he, have good reason to be concerned about the youth of France.For his evident conviction, as reflected most forcefully in “The Cousins,” is that a foul contamination has infected the nation’s intellectual youth. It is more than a restlessness and frenzy; it is a deep cyncism that is expressed in absolute hedonism and a maudlin wish for death.
This is indicated with shocking candor in the most powerful part of this film, which represents a veritable orgy in the swanky apartment of a student of law. This fellow has given a room to his country cousin who is an innocent and optimistic youth, still tied to the apron-strings of his mother and extremely naive about girls.Whether to educate this bumpkin, or simply because it is their customary behavior, the older cousin and one of his decadent playmates throw this Saturday night brawl, which for drinking and general carousing puts most Greenwich Village blow-outs in the shade. And at the height of the orgiastic doings, the host puts a Wagner record on the hi-fi, turns out the lights and appears among his guests carrying a candelabra, wearing a Nazi officer’s cap and reciting a German poem.
Done as it is in a vivid fashion, this scene and the idea hit hard. The concept of the youth of the nation corrupted by the Nazi image is profound. And the progress of the film, from this point on, while not so forceful, conveys the hopeless thought that this cousin, who is obviously a leader among the students, is an inevitable influence for ruin.
For he befouls a likely romance for his young cousin by himself taking over the girl, and he succeeeds in destroying the morale of the youngster by cynically bluffing his way through his law exams.M. Chabrol has more skill with the camera than he has with the pen, and his picture is more credible to the eye than it is to the skeptical mind. But it is not the less overwhelming, and it is beautifully played by much the same cast that performed for him in “Le Beau Serge.”
Jean-Claude Brialy is cold and brilliant, elegant and epicene, as the older cousin, Gerard Blain is soft and touching as the youth and Juliette Mayniel is thoroughly provoking as the girl who is diverted from a pure romance. Claude Cerval as the decadent playmate and Corrado Cuarducci as an Italian hedonist help to make the orgy something sinister and hard to forget.
Les Cousins (1959)
Directed by: Claude Chabrol
Starring: Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, Juliette Mayniel, Guy Decomble, Geneviève Cluny, Michèle Méritz, Corrado Guarducci, Stéphane Audran, Clara Gansard, Paul Bisciglia, Jeanne Pérez
Screenplay by: Claude Chabrol, Paul Gégauff
Production Design by: Bernard Evein, Jacques Saulnier
Cinematography by: Henri Decaë
Film Editing by: Jacques Gaillard
Set Decoration by: Bernard Evein, Jacques Saulnier
Makeup Department: Irène Charitonoff, Lucette Deuss
Music by: Paul Misraki
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Les Films Marceau (France)
Release Date: March 11, 1959
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