Les cousins: The Nature of the Beast
By September 19, 2011
Jean-Luc Godard, lover \\of paradox, once characterized Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959) as “a deeply hollow and therefore profound film,”
SYNOPSIS: In Les cousins, Claude Chabrol crafts a sly moral fable about a provincial boy who comes to live with his sophisticated bohemian cousin in Paris. Through these seeming opposites, Chabrol conjures a darkly comic character study that questions notions of good and evil, love and jealousy, and success in the modern world. A mirror image of Le beau Serge, Chabrol’s debut, Les cousins recasts that film’s stars, Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain, in startlingly reversed roles. This dagger-sharp drama won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and was an important early entry in the French New Wave.
| Charles | Gérard Blain |
| Paul | Jean-Claude Brialy |
| Florence | Juliette Mayniel |
| Bookseller | Guy Decomble |
| Geneviève | Geneviève Cluny |
| Yvonne | Michèle Méritz |
| Count Arcangelo Minerva | Corrado Guarducci |
| Françoise | Stéphane Audran |
| Marc | Paul Bisciglia |
| Concierge | Jeanne Pérez |
| Martine | Françoise Vatel |
| Clovis | Claude Cerval |
| Director | Claude Chabrol |
| Producer | Claude Chabrol |
| Photography | Henri Decaë |
| Screenplay | Claude Chabrol |
| Dialogue | Paul Gegauff |
| Sound | Jean-Claude Marchetti |
| Music | Paul Misraki |
| Editing | Jacques Gaillard |
By September 19, 2011
Jean-Luc Godard, lover \\of paradox, once characterized Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959) as “a deeply hollow and therefore profound film,”
September 29, 2011
Mondo Digital gives Claude Chabrol’s first two films, Le beau Serge and Les cousins—also the first films by the legendary French director in the Criterion Collection—a proper introduction: