Another old master at LACMA: Cocteau

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Astonish Me! Jean Cocteau and the Cinema,” an all-too-rare retrospective of the films of France’s bold venturer into all the arts, continues Friday with screenings of “Les Enfants Terribles” (1950). A masterpiece of classic elegance and simplicity, written by Cocteau with its director Jean-Pierre Melville, it remains a powerful tragedy of the perverse, a work so deeply admired by Francois Truffaut that he saw it at least two dozen times.

Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) are the “terrible enfants,” a teenage brother and sister locked into a destructive incestuous passion. A fragile, delicately handsome 16-year-old, Paul has been ordered to bed indefinitely by his kindly, obtuse old doctor after having been struck in the chest by a snowball containing a rock. The older, dominating, almost mannish Elisabeth quickly takes charge, capably nursing Paul along with their dying mother.

The situation, actually very much to the liking of both, simply intensifies their relationship with its deeply established rituals and profound though unarticulated emotions. Not only do the brother and sister still share a cluttered bedroom but even childlike games of fantasy and treasure troves.

Dramatic changes overtake their lives, yet it merely strengthens the link between the two, who are very much trapped in that room, no matter how far they may stray from it. For all its fetid, hothouse atmosphere, “Les Enfants Terribles” evokes a timeless, universal sense of pity and terror. It leaves the viewer with a renewed sense of awe at the overwhelming forces that shape one’s life -- at how events that would seem to liberate us from our pasts actually serve only to make all the more inescapable the fate that has long been determined by our character and circumstances.

Despite “Les Enfants Terribles’ ” tragic sense of inevitability, it is often a very funny film, as Elisabeth and Paul carry on with outrageous self-indulgence -- and with an equal lack of self-knowledge. Their ranting and raving, baiting and parrying, however, invariably ends in moments of tenderness.

Early in his career, which would be famously inspired by American gangster films, Melville displays an already coolly detached, elegantly disciplined style.

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Revenge allegory

Cocteau also wrote the dialogue for Robert Bresson’s sublime 1945 “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,” a classic study of a woman’s revenge. So impeccable is the film that it may rightly be described as an exercise in style. Yet it is much more than this -- a timeless story and possible political allegory. Though Bresson borrowed this plot from an incident in Diderot’s “Jacques le Fataliste,” he gave his film a contemporary setting, that of France during the Occupation.

Advised by a friend that her lover Jean (Paul Bernard) no longer loves her, Helene (Maria Casares) in jest says to him that she would like to end their affair. To her horror, Jean expresses his relief. Hiding her shock, Helene plans revenge, using her friend Agnes (Elina Labourdette) as a ploy, rescuing her and her mother (Lucienne Bogaert) from poverty and setting them up in a nice Bois de Boulogne apartment.

Not only is the film’s ending suitably ironic, but also the entire film has a tone of highly subtle wit. However, it is a mistake to take “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne” as a comedy of manners more appropriate to its 18th century origins than Occupied France. For it is precisely in those times of crisis and despair that traditional forms and values are put to the test.

Regarded in this light, the meticulous conduct of the film’s four aristocrats, who could so easily be satirized but instead are viewed with detached compassion, seems almost noble rather than downright frivolous.

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More terribles times

Cocteau himself directed “Les Parents Terribles” (1948), which follows “Les Dames de Boulogne,” adapting it from his play.

As the title suggests, it can be taken as a companion film to “Les Enfants Terribles,” this time focusing on the intense relationship between a formidably possessive mother (Yvonne de Bray, in a tour de force portrayal) and her handsome 35-year-old son (Jean Marais, star of Cocteau’s classic 1946 version of “The Beauty and the Beast” and Cocteau’s longtime lover).

Marais sets the plot in motion by declaring to his family his love for a pretty young woman (Josette Day, who was Beauty to Marais’ Beast), who is not quite the innocent she seems.

Although its theatrical origins are obvious, “Les Parents Terribles” nevertheless has a strong impact, particularly in the performance of De Bray, admired by Cocteau for her “authoritarian gait, which like her voice, resembles no other.”

The retrospective continues next weekend.

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Screenings

“Astonish Me! Jean Cocteau and the Cinema”

“Les Enfants Terribles”: Friday, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.

“Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne” and

“Les Parents Terribles”:

Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

Where: LACMA’s Bing Theatre,

5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 857-6177 or www.lacma.org.