Film Review
Having made a remarkable feature debut with
La Belle et la bête
(1946), cinema's most inspired retelling of the
Beauty and the Beast story, Jean
Cocteau garnered further acclaim with his subsequent adaptations of two
of his most popular stage plays,
L'Aigle à deux têtes
(1948) and
Les Parents terribles
(1948). Released within a few months of one another, these two
films could hardly be more different, in both their subject matter and
cinematic approach, and yet they are unmistakably the work of the same
creative genius, revealing not only Cocteau's artistic prowess and
flair for experimentation but also his extraordinary comprehension of
human nature.
From the very outset, Cocteau intended that
Les Parents terribles would be as
close to the original stage play as possible. Unlike
L'Aigle à deux têtes,
which opens up the narrative and adopts a more traditional cinematic
approach,
Les Parents terribles
is constrained to fit within the three act structure and two sets of
the play as Cocteau had first envisaged it. Some of the original
text is discarded, to concentrate the drama and give the film an
acceptable runtime, but apart from this the film is entirely faithful
to the play. Cocteau's intention was not merely to deliver a
filmed piece of theatre, but to see whether it was possible to take the
theatrical form and transform it into an original piece of film
art.
Les Parents terribles
may not be Cocteau's most experimental film, but it is the once
instance where the experiment is an unqualified success. It is
also the only one of his films in which Cocteau appears to be totally
in his element.
The film came two years after the highly successful 1946 stage revival
of the play that Cocteau had first written in 1938. The early
productions of the play were well-received by the critics and public
alike, but they were frequently disrupted by censorship and protests
from those who took offence at its supposedly immoral content (such as
the veiled allusions to incest). The notorious rightwing
journalist Robert Brasillach was particularly outraged by the play and
dismissed it as filth. Cocteau had originally created
Les Parents terribles for Yvonne
de Bray, a legend of the French stage whom he greatly admired.
Ill health prevented de Bray from taking the part of Sophie in the
original 1938 production, but she triumphed in the role in the 1946
revival, which ran for over 500 performances. Along with the four
other great actors to feature in the revival - Jean Marais, Gabrielle
Dorziat, Josette Day and Marcel André - de Bray was more than
willing to reprise the role in Cocteau's film adaptation and gives a
performance of exceptional power. The same play was subsequently
adapted for cinema in Britain as
Intimate
Relations (1953), directed by Charles Frank, with William
Russell and Marian Spencer cast in the roles originally created for
Jean Marais and Yvonne de Bray.
In making
Les Parents terribles,
it is possible that Jean Cocteau may have been inspired by Carl Theodor
Dreyer's
Master of the House (1925), a
film which employs a similarly confined setting and extensive use of
close-ups to emphasise the mutual dependency and simmering antagonism
of the protagonists. The film's camerawork is particularly
effective and introduces techniques that would be developed and used
more widely by later directors, including those of the French New
Wave. The stifling sense of confinement that we feel in the
scenes set in the rambling bourgeois apartment (nicknamed La Roulette,
or Gypsy Caravan) is achieved partly by Christian Bérard's set
design but also by the use of excessively large close-ups, which fill
the entire screen with parts of the protagonists' faces. These
close-ups not only exaggerate the monstrosity of the titular parents,
they also reveal thoughts and emotions that no amount of dialogue could
ever convey, forcing us to sympathise with the characters and see
things from their perspective, so that what begins as a modern farce
ultimately ends up as a Greek tragedy of epic proportions.
To achieve the kind of continuity and intimacy that a spectator would
experience in the theatre, the camera frequently moves within a take,
either tracking its way through the over-furnished apartment like a
cautious explorer in a jungle, or whip-panning between protagonists to
avoid an unnecessary cut. The overall effect is one of intense
claustrophobia, and consequently a terrifying proximity with each of
the protagonists who appear to be trapped forever in this suffocating
hothouse. The final tracking shot, where the camera suddenly
pulls back from the characters, was marred by camera shake, so Cocteau
added a voiceover line to suggest the effect was intentional: "Et la
roulotte continuait sa route... (and the caravan continued on its
way...)" When the 'Fin' caption finally appears, we are relieved
to be let out of the madhouse.
An effective mix of drama, social satire and farce,
Les Parents terribles is Jean
Cocteau's most overt assault against the kind of insular bourgeois
morality that free-thinking artists of his ilk held to be a threat to
French society and individual fulfilment in the 1940s. The play
and the film can also be interpreted as a coded attack on society's
then far from tolerant attitude towards homosexuality. At the
time, Cocteau was in an openly gay relationship with Marais and easily
drew the fire of the rightwing press, to the extent that much of his
stage work was censored. Like the play, the film version of
Les Parents terribles was highly
praised by the critics and enjoyed commercial success. The critic
André Bazin was particularly impressed by the film, as it
conformed with his idea of pure cinema. Cocteau himself
considered this to be his best film and it has come to be regarded as
his greatest technical achievement. Today,
Les Parents terribles may be overshadowed by the
director's grander fantasy pieces -
La Belle et
la bête and
Orphée (1949) - but
it remains a work of startling originality, the
cruellest, funniest and most revealing of all Cocteau's films.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Jean Cocteau film:
Orphée (1949)