Les cousins

Eight Thrillers by Chabrol
1959/b&w/112 min. | Scr: Claude Chabrol, Paul Gégauff; dir: Claude Chabrol; w/ Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, Stéphane Audran 

Les cousins is the story of the country mouse and the city rat: Charles (Blain), a wholesome, virginal country lad, comes to Paris to live with his sophisticated city cousin, Paul (Brialy) who pursues a debauched student life in the Latin Quarter. As in Le beau Serge, their relationship becomes a power struggle between between two opposing moralities, a theme re-enforced by Chabrol's use of the actors from his previous film. Pauline Kael, one of the few American critics to appreciate the film and its moral ambiguities, noted that Chabrol who "particularly admires Strangers on a Train… suggests a peculiar role-transference between two men and deals with a particularly corrupt social climate of extreme wealth and extreme perversity." "While his New Wave peers made films that were intrinsically romantic (Truffaut), classically analytical (Rohmer) or self-consciously modernist (Godard, Rivette, Resnais, Varda), Chabrol's were a combination of social derision and black humor-an almost 'scientific' examination of characters whom he was not afraid to make unsympathetic. The critical jury is still out about whether the cynicism of the Parisian cousin in Les cousins is just the nature of the character or the position of the film-maker, or whether the vacuousness of the women in Les bonnes femmes should be seen as sociological observation or misogynist portrayal. What is undeniable in each of these films, though, is the novelty and freshness of Chabrol's study of his chosen milieu of disaffected youth."—Ginette Vincendeau, Sight and Sound