danielhsf

I saw this twice in a single day. And couldn't stop watching this after. Each time I start watching a Hollywood movie I can't help but surrender back to this surrealist nutjob where nothing is really definable.

Much of the literature I've read on this focus on the unlikely collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville, with most putting it in context of Cocteau's other films. But I've always thought that Cocteau's Orphée, made during the same period, feels static and leaden amidst the classical style of its 50's direction. Les Enfants Terribles, while retaining a very classical premise, is completely revolutionary, resembling the unruly romanticism of Rimbaud's poetry. Nothing in the film stays the same - everything is constantly shifting; dyamics are constantly changing; even the sets change in subtle ways. Everything is made purposefully ambiguous and ambivalent such that paradoxes and contradictions abound in a single emotion. But ultimately, as all great Melvillian films are, the film is about the futility of humanity in the face of life and death.

I could go on and on about this movie; Melville is truly one of the great poets of cinema.

Freaking brilliant film! I enjoyed the hell out of it. In crafting an old-fashioned Faulkner-style Southern Gothic tale of brotherhood turned sour, David Gordon Green has created a masterpiece that is not only intensely atmospheric, but also deeply moving and at times downright scary. From its highly stylized opening to the ending, this textured and rich film will provoke endless discussion to its meaning and its many implications. Green has layered the action here thick and rich such that there is so much depth to the brotherly relations of the two generations, and the shocking (and it's really shocking) violence that ensues is but a cypher for all the undercurrents swirling around underneath, all played out beautifully a human tragedy against the forests and plantations where such human dramas had been played out for ages and centuries beyond.

Like all of his previous films, the Southern landscape has always been a large part of David Gordon Green's painterly canvas and this film is no exception. He is the only present filmmaker who has directly inherited William Faulkner's sense of reverence for the landscapes--where, dwarfed by the heat and dense forests of forgotten yore, the characters play out their little epic dramas--and his pulse on the treachery and love that bind the people together. The Southerners in their works are not mere rednecks who chew straw on their patio and watch their livestock all day, they are fiercely intelligent folk whose strength and willpower to survive come in no indirect relation to the harsh landscape they are born in -- fighting humid and sweltering heat most of the year, and short, raw punishing winters, they have no other options than to carve a hard existence whose dramas often mirror that of the temperamental weather.

But at it is with all Southern tragedies, the core of the film is the duality of the human heart -- its savage darkness and the triumph of goodwill. The relationship of the father and the uncle of the two boys--brothers who turn from love to hate by greed and jealousy--is put to contrast with the relationship between the two boys, who may not even be blood related, but share a bond stronger than the violence that threaten to destroy both of them.

The film is split clearly into two halves, with the narratively looser, lyrical second half more resembling David Gordon Green's previous works than the nightmarish first half. While the film definitely succeeds as a thriller on domestic violence (the pivotal scene gets the uneasy feeling of a nightmare so down pat, that it is one of the most disturbing scenes this year, even if it wasn't meant to be a horror film), it also works as a meditation on the insular family tragedy put against the world at large, which is shown as corrupt and dirty. The father's desperate attempts at protecting his children from the heartbreak and loss of the outside world shatters at the arrival of the uncle, fresh from prison, forcing the children to immediately grow up awkwardly and painfully, and to escape into the filthy decay of the outside world.

Whether or not the human spirit indeed triumphed in the face of violence and decay is purposefully left unclear. The ambiguous and abrupt ending, while depicting a sense of warmth and care, gives the viewer a sense of unease at the same time, and that ambivalent feeling is left hanging long after the screen turns black and the credits start rolling. This ambivalence is felt throughout the entire film, with the destructive darkness of human treachery often lurking underneath the beauty and comfort of the human spirit, and the two halves of the film often express that ambivalence with a little of each half peeking through in both. As such, it remains a complex film that will reward anyone who dares plunge into its obscurity. For whether it is light or darkness at its surface, there is always an undertow of uncertainty plowing through.