One of his earliest works, Claude Chabrol's The Cousins is a sly, intricate moral fable delivering a rather cynical, albeit honest portrait of life itself, one where circumstances and outcomes are rarely fair, being a film very much in-step with Charles Darwin's evolutionist theories centered around the survival of the fittest. The film is fixated on the relationship that unfolds between Charles, a young, naive, provincial man, and Paul, his cousin, a slightly older Parisian who lives a life of decadence, a pleasure-seeker who is always looking for his next fixation. Charles is a plodding, honest, and innocent character, a young man whose naiveity is slowly shattered by his interactions with Paul, a bourgeouis man whose carefree demeanor and fledging moralism are little obstacles to his never-ending string of successes. Whether it be academically or socially, Paul is a character who seems to always be one step ahead of the hardworking Paul, even at one point seducing one of Paul's love interest in Florence, doing so in an effort to prove his own superiority more so than anything else. Paul is a character who simply has never had to work hard for anything, with his priveledged existence often providing him with a much easier path than his hardworking cousin. A film which questions notions of good and evil through the juxtaposition of the sensitive, naive Paul, and the care-free, arrogant, Charles, Chabrol's The Cousins' is a story of innocence destroyed, delvering what could be best described as a Nietzschean-lens towards the morality of bourgeois. The Cousins is critical of a character who is capable of skating by in life without much effort, but while lots of similar films are biased in their assertions, particularly towards the evil aspects of money, The Cousins is a film that accepts that unfair aspects of life itself go far beyond monetary limitations, showing the viewer a character in Charles who works very hard but simply struggles to make something of himself in a world where he is such a loner, an outcast, compared to Paul and his more out-going, carefree, urbanites. While it's tempting to simply write off The Cousins as an exercise in nihilism, the film's finale rejects such simplification, finding Charles, for the first time in the entire film, confronted with the harsher realities of life. The circumstances which it took to shatter Charles' privledged worldview are extreme, yet it's in the film's finale moments that we find Charles at his most contemplative, confronted with the true stakes which exist for many in life, his own privledge unable to shade him from this any longer due to Paul's poor fate. One of Claude Chabrol's first features, The Cousins is a fascinating and well-made first entry by the celebrated french filmmaker, a film which explores moralism related to the bourgeouse, the privledged and the less priledged, a survival of the fittest story steeped in moral confrontations by its finale frame
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|