Chabrol’s second film is a slightly stagey piece, set in Paris, as opposed to his first, rural offering. In a sense though, the character of Charles, played by Gérard Blain, is almost an extension of Serge, played by the same actor in the director’s eponymous first film. Charles is the cousin from the sticks who comes to stay with Paul (played by Jean-Claude Brialy, who is also the co-protagonist in Le Beau Serge), his worldly cousin. Both are studying law, but where Paul is a hedonist socialite, Charles immerses himself in his work, all the more so when rejected by Florence, who appears to choose Paul over him. The narrative is somewhat stilted and melodramatic; what is of more interest is the way the director seeks to explore these tensions between a version of an older, conservative, rural France, and a younger more liberated strain which prefigures the arrival of the sixties. There are moments when Les Cousins has the feel of an Antonioni or Fellini film, notably when an Italian aristocrat gets embarrassingly drunk at one of Paul’s decadent parties. In these moments, as in the slightly anti-climactic tragic ending, it feels as though the fabric of this new French post-war society is being stretched towards some kind of breaking point, although this might also just represent the habitual tension between the capital, with its celebrated decadence, and the rest of the country. Chabrol is never as formally innovative as Godard, nor as radical in his vision of humanity os Truffaut, rather it would appear his cinema is occupying another space, that of the self-examination of contemporary mores and morals.
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