LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1949)
JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE
Plot
Lenfer - cest les freres et les soeurs. Paul and Elisabeth are teenage siblings who live in the same room in a state of shambolic and twisted dependence. They have only one parent, an invalid mother, whom Elisabeth looks after. Together they have invented The Game, a childish but eventually sinister attempt to order the chaos around them. When the siblings recruit two more people to The Game, Gerard and Agathe, this odd microcosmos eventually begins to fracture and the unnatural bond between the brother and sister is violently broken. In the last scenes Dargelos, the character who opens the film, resurfaces as the dark angel of the piece. Classic - if at times melodramatic - cinema. Made in 1949, the film captures a sense of the disorder and loss of innocence of post-war France.