"Actor: Rachel Devirys"

• 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