Les enfants terribles

Les enfants terribles

Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville • 1950 • France
Starring Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe

Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a brother and sister. Elisabeth (a remarkable Nicole Stéphane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world by playing an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their lair, until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville’s operatic camera movements and Cocteau’s perverse, poetic approach to character merge in LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES to create one of French cinema’s greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds.

Les enfants terribles
  • Les enfants terribles

    Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville • 1950 • France
    Starring Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe

    Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau’s immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a brother and sist...

Extras

  • Michael Cunningham on LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

  • LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES: About the Film

    In this short 2007 video, producer Carole Weisweiller, actor Jacques Bernard, and assistant director Claude Pinoteau discuss the making of LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES.

  • Nicole Stéphane on LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

    In this interview by journalist Patrick Simonin, made in 2003 for the French television channel TV5 Monde, actor Nicole Stéphane reminisces about her friendship with author and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and her experiences shooting LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES.

  • Around Jean Cocteau

    Is LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES a film by Jean-Pierre Melville or Jean Cocteau? In this short 2003 piece, director Noël Simsolo poses that question to film scholar Dominique Païni and critic Jean Narboni while strolling through an exhibition of Cocteau’s work at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris.