One of the most praised French films of its day, Jean Cocteau’s 1948 dark comedy “Les parents terribles” still summons a chuckle or two and a cineaste’s appreciation of its compact, concentrated mise en scene-focused compositions, cinematography and editing.
Its witty, mocking depiction of family dysfunction that’s created a childish, spoiled adult son and the tiniest suggestion of incest were damned daring in 1938, when the Cocteau’s play premiered, and even when the older, milder-mannered film came out with almost the same cast a decade later, after the trauma of World War II and the French Occupation.
The playwright and writer-director of the film, the great Renaissance Man of the 20th century French avante-garde, a poet, playwright, visual artist and filmmaker, is rightly celebrated as the most accomplished artist of his day.
But “The Terrible Parents” (released as “The Storm Within” in much of the English speaking world), bookended by Cocteau’s two undeniable masterpieces, 1946’s “Beauty and the Beast” and 1950’s “Orpheus,” can’t help but suffer by comparison. It’s an elegantly filmed play, with just half a dozen indoor settings — soundstagebound if not exactly stagebound.
Shorn of its controversy, with a cast carrying a lot more miles and care (WWII) than their characters, the intervening years have preserved “Les parents”‘ reputation if not its sparkle. It’s the “Citizen Kane” of post-war French cinema — overrated by decades of rote reviewing repetition.
The great Jean Marais plays Georges, middle-aged gentleman tinkerer in a cluttered, rambling upscale flat that’s seen better days. Yvonne de Bray is his fragile, fluttery diabetic wife, Yvonne, a role model for every creepy delicate flower Tennessee Williams ever wrote, from Blanche DuBoi and Mrs. Venable to Amanda Wingfield.
They live in relative comfort thanks to Yvonne’s sister, Léo (Gabrielle Dorziat), smart and waspish and quick to dismiss the not-quite-squalor they live in as the fault of her slovenly relatives. They’re NOT bourgeois, no matter what their pretensions.
“What is a bourgeois family,” she huffs, in French with English subtitles? “A rich orderly family with servants!”
They’re not rich. They have no real servants. And they’re slobs, with none worse than Yvonne’s dashing ditz of an indulged college student son, Michel (Marcel André, well-preseved but over 60 when this movie was made).
Michel or “Mick,” as doting mamma calls the twenty-two year-old, is absent when the film begins, with his mother twittering in concern and the aunt finding another reason to criticize this “closeness” and indulgence — “You ignored Georges the moment Michel was born.”
Léo’s bitterness has a bite, and a legitimate grievance. Georges threw her over to marry Yvonne 23 years before.
And then Michel gets home and mama Yvonne rallies and prattles about how she bathed him and tucked him into bed well into his tweens and he gushes over the mother he calls by the sexy pet name “Sophia.”
It’s when Michel gives his news, that he’s in love with an older woman of 25, someone “kept” by a much older man who has fallen just in love with him and in love with Michel, that this unhappy “happy” home goes to pieces.
Madeleine, her name is. A secretarial school student and bookbinder. Father Georges faintly recoils at every detail. He knows her. He’s the one who “kept” her until she threw him over for a more age-appropriate lover.
The comic dynamics here have Léo as the one everyone confides in. She learns from Georges the pickle he’s in. She takes in Michel’s swooning and Yvonne’s fury that some (much) “older woman” is taking her boy away. And when she sneaks off to meet Madeleine (Josette Day), she hears her out and learns Michel’s lover’s ardor for her nephew.
“Don’t look into the heart. There’s everything in the heart. Don’t look too deeply into mine, or yours.”
As threats of exposure and accusation bubble up and heartbreak looms, it will be up to lovelorn Léo to figure out some way this can be resolved, no matter how impossible the idea that “It’ll all work out” seems.
The story’s incestuous undertones have lost their edge thanks to ensuing decades of many other plays and movies that covered similar ground. The tale’s most resonant line might be “If there weren’t situations like this, there’d be no plays!”
“Les parents terrible” is still funny enough to provoke a chuckle here and there. Overage cast and tidy soundstages aside, it’s still handsomely mounted and filmed.
But the pacing is leaden, even if the players know their roles and functions in the proceedings as if the roles were written for them — in many cases, they were — and they’d played these roles time and again (which many had).
The material screams “madcap,” frenetic — a sophisticated door-slamming farce by Sturges, Lubitsch or Hawks. Cocteau preferred preserving his stage creation in amber. Barely a door slams, and “sophistication” is most amusing when it comes undone or the stuffy pretense falls — loudly and rudely.
We indulge the great filmmakers we take to our bosom as “favorites,” and let a lot of things slide as we do. A recent-rewatching of Welles’ “Touch of Evil” held me only up to the point that the delusional director dubbed his own voice for his longtime co-star Joseph Cotten’s for a line — a grating mistake that a major studio somehow allowed on a B-picture they could never have known would become enshrined as a masterpiece, a true “classic” of its type. Welles did this a lot and had loads of excuses when he did. It still grates.
Cocteau’s dark stage comedy is still watchable, still amusing and somewhat observant. But it’s no “Beauty and the Beast,” no “Orpheus” and no “Our Man Godfrey,” “Bringing Up Baby” or “Ninotchka” either.
Rating: TV-PG, inuendo
Csst: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Yvonne de Bray, Marcel André and Gabrielle Dorziat.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jean Cocteau, based on his play. a Les Films Ariane production now on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:41
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