Les Parents Terribles at Quad Cinema

I did not set out to go to Les Parents Terribles at the Quad Cinema. I was on my way to Strand Books and as I walked past the Quad I saw it was on. The  existence of this film was revealed to me while searching for Les Enfants du Paradis at the Performing Arts Library, and I simultaneously learned that the print is available almost nowhere. It seemed too good to be true to have it lying in wait for me, as it were, and in I went.

There was some sort of celebrity event going on, with a backdrop labeled with sponsors' names and a
velvet rope and a hoard of photographers displaying symptoms of high anxiety, and the cinema employees were loudly complaining about the handful of us who were waiting to see an obscure French film of the 1940s, as though we were pieces of furniture that needed to be moved out of the way. An ancient Francophile drew himself to his full four feet nine and a half inches and accused the management of "being quite brutal", and as a consequence we were all offered  free popcorn and handed into our seats as if we were treasured objects of great fragility. This certainly didn't hurt and in no time we were staring at the blunt opening credits as Jean Cocteau's signature rose on the screen before us, accompanied by the unapologetically melodramatic music which plays throughout the film, and we were off.

It would be quite inadequate to say that only the French would write such a script wen the ancient Greeks wrote such stuff all the time, to public acclaim. However it is possible that in the twentieth century only Jean Cocteau would write such a script and get away with it.  Two doting parents observe that their handsome son has spent the night away from home. The husband’s sister enjoys torturing the infatuated mother with details of the affair that the son is no doubt having with a woman somewhere. The son returns to enjoy the discomfort of his jealous mother which is resolved by a fairly rough yet intimate amount of physical contact in the mother's bed. The husband’s sister, who is having "a thing" with her brother, the husband and father, insists that they all meet the new lover, knowing that the son's new conquest is the mistress of her brother and that the inevitable crisis will serve to draw her brother closer. This wish is fulfilled when the son renounces his family, the mother kills herself, the husband turns for consolation to the sister and the sister gloats.

Les Parents Terribles first appeared in 1938 as a play and it also works brilliantly as the film which Cocteau directed himself in 1948. Naturally, the script has its critics and it has even been deplored. However it is fairly truthful to observe that everything that can happen often does happen, as was usually the case with Jean Cocteau. He was merely observing the facts of life which, for him, were never lacking in drama.