The Storm Within

A family in a cramped Paris flat: a sick, obsessive mother, a faded father, an aunt who never leaves the house, and a twenty-two-year-old son. When the son announces he is in love, the arrangement collapses; the woman turns out to be the father's mistress. The film is not interested in a love triangle. It is interested in the sickness a family manufactures to hold itself together: the mother is attached to her son as a lover rather than a child, and everyone in the house has grown used to it. Jean Cocteau calls the arrangement, in so many words, a gypsy caravan. The form comes from the theatre and does not hide it: two main spaces, crowded scenes, long speeches. Against that, the camera moves among the actors and breaks the distance of the stage with close-ups. The source is Cocteau's own play Les Parents terribles, written in 1938, and he filmed it with most of the stage cast. Jean Marais plays the son, Yvonne de Bray the mother, Josette Day the young woman. Who it is for: viewers who love the French theatrical tradition, Cocteau, and acting-led cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting cinematic movement. The film stays in two rooms and its register is deliberately hysterical.