Les Enfants Terribles (1950)

 Les Enfants Terribles (1950) aka The Strange Ones

Expanding a scene from Le sang d'un poète (1932) where a snowball fight results with an inexplicably collapsed student, this movie, (written and narrated by Cocteau, but directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who clearly took visual cues from Cocteau,) details the loving, but turbulent, incestuously jealous relationship between a pair of siblings with a couple of friends and eventual roommates they pick up when their mother dies and after the unexpected inheritance of a mansion much too big for them all after their shared, single room quarters that they must recreate within it personal, intimate spaces of comfort.

The film only partially alludes to surreal themes from Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, but still deals with male/female muses and artistic temperaments even when these folks aren’t doing anything particularly creative other than their interior décor, unless one construes their pranks and petty crimes as part of their larger surreal sensibility, a case not difficult to make. Wasn't Bunuel’s clerical transvestism not this very same thing?

Melville uses some of Cocteau’s special effects: sliding platforms for an actor to stand, fake reverse photography, extreme camera angles, etc. and while they are noticeable, they also are not very intrusive. There is also a single surrealistic dream sequence, but it’s a bit difficult to make the argument for a full surrealistic fantasy. The whole feature, with its limited cast and limited spaces feels very much like (or could easily be adapted as) a stage play.

The characters incessant conflict is a bit off putting, but by its conclusion it all congeals into an emotionally logical whole, finally making sense.

Is it better to watch this after the Orphic Trilogy? Possibly. But it might also stand well on its own with an audience able to understand its semiautobiographical nature.

Not nearly as delirious as Ken Russell’s Gothic, but might pair nicely with it, or maybe not.
...Would it be too much?

With Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe, Renée Cosima, and Jacques Bernard.