Les Parents Terribles

Director: Jean Cocteau Jean Cocteau

Overview

In this drama, an obsessively possessive mother marries a milque-toast and spends her days trying to control the lives of her family. She is against the marriage of her young son to a stunningly beautiful woman who is later learned to be her weak husband's mistress. The husband himself is desired by the young husband's aunt. When the whole sordid truth is revealed, the deposed matriarch commits suicide. The story was filmed in two settings, in the matriarch's family flat, and in the newlyweds' apartment.

Product Details

Release Date:	10/30/2018
UPC:	0741952845898
Original Release:	1948
Rating:	NR
Source:	Cohen Media Group
Presentation:	[B&W]
Sound:	[stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:40:00
Sales rank:	48,034

Special Features

Interview with Assistant Director Claude Pinoteau; Camera Tests; Introduction by Richard Peña; Original Trailer; Re-release Trailer

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Jean Marais	Michel
Josette Day	Madeleine
Yvonne de Bray	Yvonne-Sophie
Gabrielle Dorziat	Aunt Leo
Marcel Andre	Georges
Jean Cocteau	Narrator,Narrator
Georges Auric	Composer

Technical Credits

Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau	Director,Screenwriter
Francis Cosne	Producer
Alexandre Mnouchkine	Producer

Editorial Reviews

An object lesson in how to transfer a stage play to film without in any sense opening it up, Les Parents Terribles is a wonderful, harrowing, knife to the throat delivered with a smile, a black tragic farce that is unforgettable. Adapting his own play, director Jean Cocteau abandons the fantasy element with which he is most often identified and creates a different kind of artifice, a theatrical world that is bluntly and blatantly theatrical, to the extent that it transcends the stage and achieves a rare and unique kind of cinematic life. The film doesn't introduce new locations, doesn't move the characters to lunch on the banks of a picturesque river or to an extraneous sequence in the bustling marketplace. It emphasizes the claustrophobia of its two settings, letting that reflect the trapped feelings of its characters. Yet Cocteau doesn't simply point and shoot. His camera moves in unexpected, sometimes bizarre ways that captivate, that illuminate, that magnify and grab. His precise, sometimes off-kilter, cutting adds a flavor of its own. And Cocteau is able to lavish attention on his excellent cast, giving them plenty of opportunity to show their considerable talents. The entire cast turns in superb work, but none more so than Yvonne de Bray, whose terrorizing, hilarious, vicious mother is a masterpiece. Parents is at times difficult to watch in its brutality, but well worth the effort.