All language subtitles for Noel.Simsolo.2003.Around.Jean.Cocteau.DVDRip

Dominique Pa'ini,
Les enfants terribles is a mystery.

Is it Cocteau's film, or Melville's?
Some say one, some the other.

Cocteau and Melville
both claimed it as their own.

For example, Cocteau wrote
that Melville called him

to ask for film rights
to the novel.

Yet Melville said that after
Le silence de la mer, Cocteau called him

and asked him to make
Les enfants terribles.

Well, Les enfants terribles
is indeed a mystery,

but before addressing
your question,

it's also an aesthetic mystery,
the content of the film is a mystery.

It mixes everyday existence
with the extraordinary,

with magical intensity,

and this strange relationship
that isn't quite incest.

It's a mystery in that sense,

almost like
a medieval mystery play,

involving youths and damsels,
characters from a past culture.

I think calling it a mystery
is right on target.

As for the rest,
yes, it's anecdotal.

The Melville-Cocteau question
has never been settled.

Perhaps my point
in organizing this exhibition

was to show that the film
was 100% pure Cocteau,

that it sprung fully formed
from his mind and imagination,

from his passions.

It's a detailed summary

of everything Cocteau saw
as essential in his poetic work.

Even the mustachioed bust
is entirely his.

Yes, it's in the book, but in the film
it's such a powerful image,

an almost Renoiresque object
passed down

to link one action to the next.

From every viewpoint, the film
has influenced all modern cinema,

including Raul Ruiz today,

or directors like David Lynch,

who go so far as
to borrow Cocteau's technique

of jumping from one point to another
without explanation,

without formally explaining
everything in detail.

All the same,
when Les enfants terribles was made,

Melville had only one film
to his credit.

Cocteau was in the prime
of his filmmaking career.

He'd just finished
shooting Orpheus.

Curiously enough,
the film contains visual elements

that remind us
of Les parents terribles,

like Elisabeth and Agathe's
lengthy dialogue.

But there are Melvillian elements as well.
It's not clear which of them directed it.

It's a film about speed,

flights of lyricism, Cocteau's agitation,
so different from Melville,

whose model
was American cinema,

extremely grounded films,
like those of Hawks or Walsh.

Cocteau was more like Hitchcock.

But since
you're a great fan of both,

I'd like to return to the issue
of their conflicting reports.

When you see the film today,
it's strange,

because it has Melville, Cocteau,
Cocteau-Melville, and even more.

Honestly, there isn't
much of Melville in it.

I don't see much of Melville
in Les enfants terribles.

He was a great assistant
and technician,

but the power of Cocteau's literature
and poetry pervades everything.

The radical quality
of Melville's previous film,

Le silence de la mer,

and this velocity,
this lyricism that sweeps you away,

that spins and twirls,

the speed, the lyricism,
the lightning pace of the story,

which of course comes
from the sudden leaps in the novel -

In particular,
Michael's extraordinary death.

- He marries Elisabeth and then dies -
- Isadora Duncan-style.

Yes, but also like in Jean Epstein's
The Three-Sided Mirror.

The inspiration was the same.

Yes, the wheel that goes on spinning,
as Cocteau described so well.

All of this smacks of Cocteau,
but in terms of the mise-en-scene,

there isn't a single shot
from a normal human level,

which is Melville's style
more than Cocteau's.

Cocteau filmed from all angles.
He was omnipresent, like an angel.

Cocteau didn't just show angels
in his drawings and films.

He was an angel
in how he filmed.

There's always a strange
restlessness in Cocteau's films.

He's a "wizard of the weird."

They give the impression
of reality being slightly askew.

Yes, but the two kids were terrors!
And not the holy kind.

Especially Elisabeth.
She was a monster, a Chimera,

a bunch of parts
glued together.

A terribly violent character,

intolerably cynical, very harsh,

but that's why this character is a link
to Cocteau's cultural source: symbolism.

She's a frightening woman,

and 19th-century symbolism,
which was Cocteau's,

heavily exploited the image
of woman as man-eater,

the frightening woman,
the woman who devours.

And indeed,
she poisons those around her.

She loves her brother - or lover -
to the point of devouring him.

Here, they're one
and the same.

This reoccurs in Cocteau's work,

this remnant
of 19th-century symbolism.

With the play of reflections
in the mirrors,

she realizes that she is death
and kills herself. That's very Cocteau.

It's being caught up in appearances,
like the ending of Thomas the lmpostor.

"I am lost. I pretend to be dead,"
but in Guillaume Thomas's mind,

at that moment, fiction blends with reality
and Guillaume Thomas is dead.

That's what makes this film
so purely Cocteau's,

his way of "repainting" his origins,
namely Symbolism,

concluding it, signing it,

which is why
this exhibition has a room

called "Cocteau-graphy,"
meaning "the written Cocteau."

Everything is transformed,
colored by the Cocteau filter.

- So for you it's Cocteau's film?
- His and his alone,

and in my opinion, his masterpiece,
his greatest achievement,

which continues to have
a huge influence on contemporary cinema.

Jean Narboni,
in Melville's films,

whether it's Bob le flambeur,
Le samourai,

Two Men in Manhattan, or
Army of Shadows,

you sense Cocteau's influence,

as you do in the films
of Bresson and others.

Melville's second film,
after Le Silence de la mer,

was Les enfants terribles.

The big debate is,
"Is it Melville's film or Cocteau's?"

What do you think?

To me, it's Cocteau's film,
without a doubt.

So Melville
just carried out orders?

I don't know
how they divided up the work.

Melville and Cocteau
saw their relationship differently.

Cocteau said something
that's a bit of a poisoned chalice.

He wrote about Melville
in Entretien sur le cin�matographe,

"Yes, we argued, like old friends.

We've lost touch, and that's too bad,
but that was our friendship."

The next line
can be taken two ways:

"My novel, Les enfants terribles, passed
through Melville without a shadow,

as if he'd written it himself."

It could mean that Melville
had Cocteau's spirit,

or that Cocteau considered Melville
simply a vehicle -

- The illustrator.
- More than that.

The medium, if one wishes
to emphasize Melville's contribution.

But the living spirit,
the film's madness,

its rhythm,
which is unmistakably Cocteau's,

this feeling of rapid pace
coupled with immobility,

is completely different from Melville's
immobility, his slow pace.

Out of curiosity,
and to prepare for today,

I went to see Le silence de la mer,
made two years earlier.

- Based on Vercors' novel.
- Yes.

It was totally different.
Melville's slow pace,

later stretched out into the sort
of Oriental abstraction that he sought

and that some people
find academic, is already present.

His camera moves
like a ton of bricks.

"Look, the camera's moving."

He uses extreme low-angle shots
of Howard Vernon,

and even the visit to Paris
is heavy-handed, I must say.

But Cocteau's film
has a sort of madness,

a fever that's a kind of tension,
portrayed mainly by Nicole St�phane.

We get the feeling
they're out of their minds.

The film's off-screen narration
is Cocteau reading a text

written especially for the film.

It uses specific passages
from the novel,

but the novel itself
had very little dialogue.

The narration isn't used
as a commentary on the film.

Sometimes it merely
reiterates the visuals,

which is uncommon
in Cocteau's films.

So it feels like the narration
and the tone of Cocteau's voice

were to take back parts of the film
that had escaped his grasp.

Inversely, Melville wants
to take back the parts

that Cocteau "imposed" on him,
like a battle of the minds.

Though some elements
of the mise-en-scene

do indeed remind us
very strongly of Cocteau.

The scene between Agathe and Elisabeth
is filmed like in Les parents terribles.

Absolutely.
Even in the novel,

the scene where
Nicole St�phane/Elisabeth

forces Agathe to admit
she's in love with Paul,

Agathe's whole face
is in the shot,

nestled against
Nicole St�phane's shoulder,

we just see Nicole's chin,
her mouth tightening

as her mood turns foul.

That's exactly
how it was described in the book.

"There she was,
nestled against Elizabeth's shoulder.

If she could only have seen
that pitiless face above her..."

And the film's final scene, the elevator
rising in the Th��tre Pigalle,

was already perfectly
described at the end of the novel:

"The room flew away,

and all that remained was the figure
of a woman dwindling, fading,

disappearing in the distance."

It's very odd.
And in terms of the voice,

it reminded me of something
Cocteau said about another of his films:

"These people don't live.
We don't portray events that are lived.

These people live a life
that's being told."

That's Cocteau's entire system.

In addition to those scenes,

the beginning of the film has the same
atmosphere as The Blood of a Poet.

It's the same scene as in that film,
just edited differently.

I'd like to tell you
about a childhood experience.

When I was five or six,
at the local movie theater

I saw Les dames du Bois de Boulogne,
Les enfants terribles, and Orpheus.

They affected me deeply as a child,
though I didn't understand them.

What stayed with me was
the lighting and the actors' gestures.

Three specific images
from those films stuck in my mind.

At the end of
Les dames du Bois de Boulogne,

Mar�a Casares's hand
when she stops the car and says,

"My dear, you've married a tramp" -
that vivid black-and-white image.

In Orpheus, it was Marais' face
reflected in the ice like a mirror.

In Les enfants terribles,
it was the scene

where Nicole St�phane tears at her hair
and says, "Enough! Enough!"

She's going insane.
She tears at her own hair.

I realize right now that these
three scenes were pure Cocteau.

Cocteau wrote the scene
in the Bresson film.

Orph�e was Cocteau's own film.
And with this film,

it's becoming clear as we speak
that it's truly Cocteau's cinematic world.

I was even more disturbed
by other things.

Cocteau worked
with lots of directors.

Some were simple executors,
others were skilled craftsmen.

In Bresson's case,
it was obviously a Bresson film,

but at the end of
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,

we see Paul Bernard tell
Elina Labourdette, "Don't die. Stay!"

That kind of madness -
- That's Cocteau.

Melville was a young man
at the time.

He'd made an amateur film,
an admirable one, Le silence de la mer.

This was his chance
to make "a major film."

He produced and edited,
almost megalomaniac in his control.

In the credits,
it's "M-E-L-V-l-L-L-E" in huge letters.

Then he's faced with Cocteau,
and it wasn't like The Eternal Return,

where Cocteau
wasn't very involved

and left Jean Delannoy
to his academic directing.

Here, Cocteau resists
in that way of his,

with whining, arguments,
even fights in the editing room.

Melville learned a lot,

but having learned all he did,
perhaps he didn't want to admit it later.

I say he learned a lot

because just look at how Melville
generally filmed people dying.

It's nothing like Cocteau.

This film has a typical
Cocteau death scene:

The mother is seated,
exactly as described in the novel,

and it reminds us
completely of Cocteau's films.

Yes. There are two rupture points
that change the course of the film:

the mother's death, and especially
the moment when they freeze.

They're yelling, and suddenly
Elisabeth says, "I think Mother's dead,"

the scene you're referring to.

Something changes there, because
the dead woman will live on in the room.

During the funeral, we're told
that she died in such a strange way

that she's now equal to the living
and will live on in the room.

Then, the character we tend to downplay
or reduce to just his accident,

with that wonderful line about the car wheel
spinning and gradually slowing down,

is Michael,
who played a crucial role.

After a while, the madness
of the gallery he built

is also so strange and dysfunctional
that it is equal to the others,

and he too lives on in that room,
so there are two ghosts.

That's when we pass
from the second act to the third act.

In the first act, we "get lost,"
meaning we're acting.

Here we enter,
with that chessboard of fate,

into a Racinian tragedy.

Cocteau realized
he had his own ghosts.

Absolutely. There's that high-angle shot
of the chessboard of fate.