"Actor: Edouard Dermit"

• Les Enfants Terribles | DVD | (30/08/2004) from £14.75   |  Saving you £5.24 (35.53%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Jean-Pierre Melville's second film, made in 1950, became a significant influence among French film-makers and earned Melville renown as a maverick who could do wonderful things outside his country's studio system. (Melville's independence was a forerunner of that enjoyed later in the decade by New Wave figures such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.) Les Enfants Terribles is based on a 1929 novel by poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau, who also wrote the script with Melville and according to some people interfered in everything from the casting (the rather stiff male lead was a Cocteau protégé) to the photography. Nevertheless, the story of a sister (an outstanding performance by Nicole Stephane) and brother (Edouard Dhermite) who withdraw into their own, insulated world to play out suggestively erotic dramas, has a fluid, lyrical movement that is part of a visionary whole. In some ways a harbinger of the coming pop narcissism of youth culture, Les Enfants Terribles is also a timeless tale of mythic exploration of existence and purpose. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Jean Cocteau - Testament D'Orphee | Blu Ray | (05/08/2019) from £12.00   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Jean Cocteau gave the cinema a truly abstract piece of work as his swansong, in which the mind of a poet (played by Cocteau himself) takes control of reality, twisting and re-moulding it until it bears not the slightest resemblance to reality as we know it in real life.

• Orphee | DVD | (27/10/2008) from £7.99   |  Saving you £14.00 (233.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Cocteau's fantastical updating of the Orpheus legend is cinematic poetry. Unforgettable and profoundly influential.

• Les Enfants Terribles | Blu Ray | (13/12/2021) from £15.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  In this compelling tale of incestuous obsession, a teenage brother and sister, Paul and Elisabeth, create an intense, private world in their untidy shared single room. Within the room, they live, sleep, argue and play out their erotically charged games without heed to the real world going on around them. However, when outsiders intrude into their intensely private realm, the scene is set for tragedy. A hauntingly atmospheric adaptation of Jean Cocteau's 1929 claustrophobic hothouse novel, for which he also wrote the screenplay and provided the voice-over, the film is dominated by a performance of fierce intensity by Nicole Stéphane as the scheming heroine Elisabeth Les Enfants terribles brought two very different film-makers together for the first time the mercurial, multi-talented Jean Cocteau and the single-minded, self-sufficient Jean-Pierre Melville. Despite clashing with one another, what emerged is a unique film that is as true to Cocteau's vision as to Melville's. Special Features Newly restored in 4K and presented in High Definition Audio commentary by novelist and critic Gilbert Adair (2004) Interview with actress Nicole Stéphane (13 mins) Other extras TBC

• Orphee | DVD | (30/08/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A retelling of the Greek myth set in post-war Paris. When a famous poet falls in love with the strange Princess Death he is compelled to follow her anywhere in search of inspiration - even into the underworld.