Les Cousins (1959)
Directed by Claude Chabrol

Film Review

Le Beau Serge (1958) marked the beginning not only of Claude Chabrol's long and illustrious filmmaking career, but also of the French New Wave, the movement that would re-energise French cinema in the late 1950s, early '60s, whilst popularising the notion of the film auteur.  By the time Chabrol released his next film, Les Cousins, in March 1959, la Nouvelle Vague was still very much in the process of gestation and wouldn't make itself felt until François Truffaut's Les 400 coups had burst onto cinema screens in May of that year.

With its familiar Paris setting and predominantly youthful cast, both captured on film by ace cinematographer Henri Decae in a way that captures the exuberance of the period, Les Cousins is far more recognisably New Wave than Chabrol's debut piece, although it patently lacks the innovative flair and bravura daring that the director's more talented contemporaries - Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Truffaut - would casually flaunt in their early films.  Now considered a fairly minor work in Chabrol's massive oeuvre, Les Cousins was well thought of by the critics of the time and was a recipient of the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1959.

Despite their contrasting settings, visual style and overall mood, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins should be taken together as two halves of a carefully constructed diptych, one that establishes a key motif of Chabrol's work - the folly of taking things at face value.  The danger of judging solely by appearances - a common failing of the bourgeois class on which the director would mercilessly pour scorn throughout his career - provides the motor for many of Chabrol's films, and it is only by going beyond the misleading surface impressions that we really see what is going on - the subtle undercurrents and vague seismic twitches that have the potential to build, escalate and suddenly unleash death and destruction on our seemingly stable and ordered world.

What makes Chabrol's first two films particularly interesting is that, crudely speaking, they are mirror images of each other, each shedding light on the other.  In Le Beau Serge, a confident city boy (an unusually sympathetic Jean-Claude Brialy) returns to his backwater home town in the provinces to come to the aid of a long-lost childhood friend (Gérard Blain, harrowingly convincing as a dipsomaniac depressive), ruining his health in the process.  In Les Cousins, a somewhat more oppressive and cynical affair, the provincial lad (Blain again) comes to Paris to study law, only to have his dreams totally destroyed by his extravagant self-loving cousin (Brialy, naturellement, complete with Fu Manchu facial adornments).

In both films, the wildly contrasting protagonists (the virtuous outsider and deeply flawed habitué) are set up as rivals who, despite their supposed longstanding bond of mutual affection, seem impelled to bring down and ultimately destroy the another.  Chabrol and his frequent co-screenwriter Paul Gegauff do not insult us by guiding our sympathies one way or the other.  The excessively gauche Charles and obsessive poseur Paul are equally objectionable and it is only through the subtlest of means that the actors portraying them succeed in making them at all sympathetic.  It is what we feel, not what we see, that makes the film so rich and engaging.  Surface impressions count for very little in the mischievous art of Claude Chabrol.

On the face of it, it would seem that the shared destiny of Paul and Charles is being guided not by human malevolence, but by kismet, the fickle hand of fate that manifests itself most visibly in the sequence where the happily naive Charles walks out of a bookshop clutching a copy of Balzac's Lost Illusions, just a few scenes before his process of disillusionment gets under way.  As in a classic film noir, the music, lighting and shot compositions all lend an aura of encroaching menace to the drama as it nears its climax, and it is so easy to succumb to the illusion that providence is behind this ineluctable tragedy of cicumstances.  In truth, it is the two protagonists who are the architects of their misfortune, a subconscious desire to dispose of the other manifesting itself spectacularly in a despicably ironic denouement.

The ambiguous nature of the relationship between the two cousins and the cruelty of their mutual deceit is savagely underscored in the film's closing moments, the famous love theme from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde playing in the background as Paul silently contemplates his bitter victory over Charles.  This is not the outcome that Paul would have wished for but it is the one he was bound to arrive at, once the canker of male supremacy had taken root in his soul.  With a startling brutality offset by an eerily incongruous poetry, Les Cousins introduces a theme that would become recurrent in Chabrol's work - the violent repulsion of an unwelcome and possibly disruptive interloper from an exclusively bourgeois milieu.

Film Synopsis

Against the wishes of his adoring mother, Charles leaves his home in the provinces so that he can study law in Paris.  Accommodation is provided by his cousin Paul Thomas, who presently occupies a spacious luxury apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine belonging to a wealthy relative.  Paul is also a law student, but he shows little interest in his studies and prefers to fritter away his time with his party-loving libertine friends.  Lacking his cousin's confidence, loose morals and zest for living, Charles is out of place in Paul's hedonistic world and is further troubled when he falls madly in love with one of Paul's many female friends, an attractive young woman named Florence.

Influenced by one of his less benign friends, Clovis, Paul seduces Florence to convince her that she has no deep feelings for Charles.  The latter deals with this betrayal by burying himself in his work, knowing that he will break his mother's heart if he fails his exams.  The day before Charles is due to sit his exams, Paul passes his with flying colours, apparently without having done any work.  Naturally he must celebrate this victory with a riotous party, overlooking the fact that his cousin is frantically revising for his own exams.  Failure is Charles's reward for his abstinence and hard work.  Returning to Paul's apartment late that night he picks up his cousin's revolver and, after inserting one bullet into the barrel, he proceeds to his bedroom.  One chance in six.  Once again, the odds are stacked in Paul's favour...