INTIMATE RELATIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 26

INTIMATE RELATIONS

(Adelphi Films) R: 16 and over only. UCKY cosmopolites who have seen Cocteau’s film Les Parents Terribles and read the play (in the original French, of course), will no doubt be shocked when I praise Intimate Relations, an English version adapted and directed by. Charles ‘Frank. Under the same roof in this story live a neurotically possessive mother and her son; her husband, starved of affection by his wife, who has found it with another woman; and her unmarried sister, who has always loved the husband, Secretly, miraculously, the son has met@and now wants to marry, a girl who turns out to be the other woman in his father’s life. Don’t think so much plot revealed will spoi] your night out: it’s only the beginning. : Cocteau didn’t pretend his story was realistic: he invented the family because it appealed to him to make a tragicomic mixture and to involve his characters by means of a vaudeville plot in situations comparable to a house on fire, when people crush each other at the door. If the story at first seems a bit unbelievable it soon becomes intensely dramatic; and both action and dialogue make it possible to explore several sorts of relationship between people that, well handled, can’t fail to be interesting. I found them ‘fascinating. They probably

wouldn’t be nearly so fascinating if all involved didn’t talk their heads off, and even in translation it’s good talk. Since talk is rather a bad reason for liking a movie, I shan’t praise also the theatricality of this one. It is theatrical, terribly so. Still, in filming Les Parents Terribles Cocteau himself made a point of preserving its theatrical flavour and never adopting a filmic one-even though he claimed it as "cinematically speaking" his biggest achievement. Un-

derlining the importance of the dialogue, he comments also that because the French language plays a leading part in it, it did less well abroad than his other films. ; * Absorbed by this film, then, in spite of its faults, 1 found especially good the scenes in the flat of the girl, who is played by Elsy Albiin in a way that really captures her monstrous dilemma. The mother’s behaviour would anyway be in a colloquial sense theatrical, and Marian Spencer is never tempted into restraint; but her neurotic horror when she feels she is losing her son is very real, Russell Enoch does an imaginative job as the boy, and Ruth Dunning and Harold Warrender give adequate support. I don’t imagine, though, that this cast is much more than a pale shadow of the one Cocteau brought together; and I’m pretty sure that, when cue credit has been given for an English version of a French play better than I expe-ted to see, it’s almost certainly the genius of Jean Cocteau that holds our attention. more than anything else.