Les enfants terribles
Capsule by Dave Kehr
From the Chicago Reader

Jean Cocteau selected Jean-Pierre Melville to direct the 1949 film version of his novel on the basis of Melville's only previous film, Le silence de la mer. Working closely with Cocteau, Melville developed a location-based style that eventually became one of the strongest influences on the directors of the New Wave generation. The story of Les enfants terribles is typically Cocteau: two adolescents (Nicole Stephane and Edouard Dhermitte), willfully cutting themselves off from the adult world, bind themselves together through a series of strange, enigmatic games--which end in incest and death. In French with subtitles. 102 min.

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