A Film Canon

Despite lending itself to Melville's taste for minimal, archetypal characterisation, as well as his corresponding attention to the minutiae of claustrophobic domestic spaces, The Terrible Children is effectively screenwriter and narrator Jean Cocteau's film, opening with the snowball fight that haunts his entire body of work, and represents the violence that physical beauty engenders, whether as a index of disempowerment, or as a deflection of transgressive consummation. In this case, that beauty is localised to schoolboy Paul's (Edouard Dermithe) chest - an object of incestuous and homosexual desires - from which an organic, caparacial space is gradually extrapolated, identified with the bedrooms that he shares with his sister, Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane), and variously described as "a monstrous, strange, dead-end", a "desert island", a "chinese village" and, ultimately, the sacrificial altar of a "great temple of destruction." This, in turn, dwarfs the duo into the stark two-dimensionality of Cocteau's line drawings ("Introspection demands discipline they lacked. They only found darkness and phantom emotions."), as well as providing some insight into their elusive "Game" - a systematic reinvention of everyday objects into so many fetishistic, ceremonial accoutrements to "the absurd room...reimprovised anywhere." That said, Melville and Cocteau artfully transform perversion from a pretext for voyeurism, or scopophilia, to a preoccupation with the "absurd, useless and inconvenient", most explicitly in Louise's subsumption of her painstaking schemes into a self-embalming, suicidal impulse ("I have to make life unlivable, make life hate me...hate me so it much it will vomit me out...spit in my face"), but most originally in a deliberately unpleasant, grating, tedious cinematic experience, replete with unnecessary repetitions and circumlocutions, a striking dearth of sympathetic, charismatic or even particularly interesting figures, and a negation of every potential crisis with a bland, deadening bathos.