Les Enfants Terribles

1950 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Paul and his older sister Elisabeth are close. Really close. Following a snowball fight accident and the death of their mother, they become recluses, shutting themselves off from society so that they can play bizarre games and argue in the privacy of their own room. When Paul falls in love with the boy who injured him with a snowball and later a girl who looks a lot like that boy, Elisabeth starts to get a little jealous.

I really expected to like this one a lot more than I did. I think it suffers from being seen so close to Troll 2. But with the talent involved (I love both Melville and Cocteau), I had enormously high expectations despite the stylistic differences in their films. In a way, this combines those styles fairly well with Melville's stark and simple narratives and character studies balancing Cocteau's dreamy free-floating surrealism, but I have to admit that I just wasn't all that interested in these siblings while watching this. I was a little bored. Parts of whatever narrative this has float like poetry, but the movie seemed too long and didn't have a single goblin or double-decker bologna sandwich. Sacre bleu!