Word: cocteau
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...Strange Ones. Striking adaptation of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles; the story of an adolescent brother & sister living in a strange dreamworld of their own (TIME, July...
...Strange Ones. Striking adaptation of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles; the story of an adolescent brother & sister living in a strange dreamworld of their own (TIME, July...
...Strange Ones (Jean-Pierre Melville; Mayer-Kingsley) are an adolescent brother & sister whose deep affection for each other is colored with inevitable tragedy. Adapted by France's Jean Cocteau from his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, The Strange Ones is a baroque, grotesque, always fascinating excursion into a dark-bright dream world, set off by a glacial commentary delivered in the author's own dry, precise voice...
This twilight zone of murky pathological recesses and phantom feelings is, in Jean-Pierre Melville's direction, as effective cinematically as it is poetic. As in Cocteau's 1948 movie, Les Parents Terribles, the camera roves freely and fluently through the disorder of the children's room. There are odd, feverish screen compositions, e.g., the great, grappling close-up in which, as Agatha tells Elizabeth of her love for Paul, only Agatha's forehead is seen on the screen, with Elizabeth's strange, grey face hanging above it. As the Cocteau children, Nicole Stephane with...
...Cocteau does not indicate any purpose in his story, although roughly it concerns the casting off of worldly love and gaining of final resurrection. No further description could explain why Orpheus has such a powerful effect. As Death says to Orpheus, "you search too much to understand what happens, dear man. It is a grave mistake...