Themes: Infidelity, Mothers and Sons, Crumbling Marriages
Main Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Yvonne de Bray, Gabrielle Dorziat, Marcel André
Release Year: 1949
Country: FR
Run Time: 105 minutes
Plot
Also known as The Storm Within, Les Parents Terribles was adapted by director Jean Cocteau from his own stage play. Yvonne de Bray plays a manipulative, possessive mother, married to weakling Marcel Andre. At present, Yvonne is violently opposed to the impending marriage between her son Jean Marais to Josette Day. It gets more complicated than that: Day is Andre's mistress, who in turn is coveted by de Bray's sister Gabrielle Dorzat. These stunning revelations loosen the hold that De Bray has on her household. Her power gone, she seeks solace in self-destruction. Utilizing several of the original stage production's cast members, Les Parents Terrible was one of Cocteau's personal favorites (that's his voice as off-screen narrator); the property was ineffectively remade in England as Intimate Relations (1953). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
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. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Les parents terribles is a 1948black and white film adaptation of the stage play Les parents terribles by Jean Cocteau. Cocteau also directed and wrote the screenplay for the film, which was also known under the English title The Storm Within.
In a grand apartment, where the disorder of an elderly couple and the order of old aunt Léonie are mixed together, Michel is the pampered child of this strange "roulotte" who seems to be rolling away from the world. Yvonne idolizes her son so much she forgets her husband. She would even forget herself if she did not have to take care of his insulin treatment...
When Michel sleeps out for the first time, he vows to his mother (who he nicknames "Sophie") that he loves Madeleine, a young woman who he wishes to present to her. At first reticent, then jealous and exclusive, Yvonne ends up capitulating before her son's sorrow and his sister Léonie's insistence. In the meantime, we discover that Madeleine already has an "old" lover who she wants to break up with, who is none other than Georges, Michel's father... Aunt Léo attempts to bring order to this tragic comedy of life...
At the time of shooting the final sequence (where one sees the apartment elongating), an incident nudged the camera. John Cocteau kept the sequence, transforming the problem into an advantage and commenting on that the drama had unfolded itself in this "roulotte" in a jerky way...
