The Cousins

"Some are glorified by their faults; others are damned by their virtues," wrote La Rochefoucauld. And The Cousins, an Adult Fable which rolled in from France a while back on the crest of the "new wave," sighs that, though very sad, this is a fact of life.

We almost invariably hope for something from a European film that we don't expect to find in a big-studio domestic production. Our hopes are based on the fact that foreign films generally seem freer of the metallic assembly line odor. They are more likely to involve men than molds, because we sense that they are the product of men rather than molds. But Europe has been automated, too. One wonders now, how much of its former quality the mass-produced Renault has had to sacrifice; and one suspects that writer-director-producer Claude Chabrol had A Blueprint for a Successful French Film somewhere in the back of his mind while working on The Cousins.

M. Chabrol has made an engrossing picture, and there are several exceptional scenes in which the Old Originality shines through. But although he uses the film medium well, and achieves a skillful montage effect at points, Chabrol offers little that is creative. Whereas the contemporary French cinema has often been artistic in its freshness (Hiroshima, Mon Amour is an outstanding example), here it is mechanized in its very "artisticness."

The film concerns an innocent small town boy, the clean-living Charles, who comes to Paris to study law and stays with his city cousin, Paul. Gerard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy do their best to make these young men believable, but though there is somewhat more to the plot than the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse, there is not much more in the way of palpable characters.

We learn very quickly that the city cousin knows the real joys of bourgeois living, and we are given a sweeping view of his universe of pimps, party-dolls, and sham. In the midst of all this, the country cousin (who spends most of his time writing home to Mama) falls in love with a used beauty (Julliette Mayniel) who appears none-the-worse for wear. The impossible longings of Charles for this girl are well-portrayed, but the plot is foreshadowed to death. Charles loses the girl, flunks his exams, and dies. Both reality and destiny are against him. Paul wins the girl, passes his exams, and lives, for, after all, this is the way the world is. True, we feel fittingly remorseful when the clean-living hero goes down at the end; but that is all.

Like the Renault, The Cousins has its selling points, even if it is not a wonderful buy. The examination of Paul's existence is a perceptive and frightening study in purposelessness, and its Siamese twin, hatred. Chabrol dismisses as illusory Charles' concept that the Earth is a planet where hard work and honesty pay off. He does not content himself with bitterness, though, and descends into cynicism. He involves the audience in a world where only the pimp's concept of love can prevail. And this world is proclaimed as not only the real, but the ineluctable and unchangeable world.

The audience is allowed no distance to evaluate the state of affairs that Chabrol presents; there is only emotional involvement and an ultimate hollowness.