Les Parents terribles (1948)
Directed by Jean Cocteau

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.

Film Synopsis

Yvonne and Georges consider themselves a perfectly respectable bourgeois couple, although she is virtually a bedridden recluse and he occupies himself with his strange inventions. They live in a large, over-furnished suite of rooms with their 22-year-old son Michel and Yvonne's spinster sister Léonie, who was once in love with Georges.  When Michel reveals that he is in love and plans to get married, his parents are appalled.  His mother cannot bear the prospect that she might soon lose the son she has become devotedly attached to, whilst his father is far from pleased when he learns that Michel's prospective fiancée Madeleine is his own mistress!  Léonie concocts a plan that will force Madeleine to renounce Michel, but she later has a change of heart and makes up her mind to reunite the young lovers, heedless of the effect this will have on her sister...