Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Les cousins

(France, 1959)

I’m okay with movies made about people I don’t like. But they need to be interesting. Halfway through this one, I wasn’t interested in anyone or anything that was going on. It was a lot of pretentious French men and women from the Parisian “Beat” generation, who thought they were quite cool. And they weren’t. This was the second film of Claude Chabrol, one of the “New Wave” directors who invented a new film language, and he went on to make some good ones, but this one doesn’t qualify.