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LES COUSINES

1970, France

Alternative titles: From Ear to Ear; The French Cousins; The Coffin

Louis Soulanes's adaptation of Fletcher D. Benson's novel The Perverse Women's Night (which likely takes a cue from Jean Genet's The Maids) is a rarely-seen oddity - a bizarre, insular family drama about two demented cousins, Elisa and Josine (Nicole Debonne and Danielle Argence, who look strangely like Mary Woronov and Mimsy Farmer) who entertain themselves by tormenting Elisa's sister Lucile - a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic.

The two able-bodied and flimsily-dressed cousins share an incestuous lesbian relationship and delight in torturing Lucile, who can only follow their actions with her darting eyes, but cannot scream or react physically.

Their mother is fully aware of the situation but takes no disciplinary or preventative action.

Lucile is a nervous wreck, dreading the next random punishment she'll be dealt by her bored tormentors.

A spider crawling up her nightgown is played up for maximum effect, and when Elisa holds a limbless doll in front of Lucile, she watches her paralyzed sister's eyes fill with terror, and then proceeds to listen to her sped-up heartbeat with puerile sadism.

When the two indiscriminately promiscuous cousins invite friends over for a free-for-all sex party, they are suddenly seized with the desire to hang one of their male suitors by the neck from the ceiling, shrieking in ecstasy as they raise him up on the rope.

This act of murder bonds the cousins further, and their complicity means they now have to get rid of the body together.

While the two cousins are having their Thana-tastic sex party in the other room, Lucile somehow finds the skeletal remains of a baby, and the nature of her disability becomes clear: after the death of her illegitimate child years earlier, her body seized up with grief; a traumatic event that manifested as a very real physical disability (not unlike Camille Keaton in What Have You Done to Solange? or Carroll Baker in Knife of Ice).

Inexplicably released in the U.S. as From Ear to Ear, Vincent Canby said of the film in his New York Times review: "Although it is unpleasant, it is without importance, like bad breath, greasy food, junk mail or a slight fever.”

Maybe it can't stand up next to the great masterworks of cinema, but for those surveying representations of female neurosis onscreen, it is absolutely essential.

#les cousines #from ear to ear #the french cousins #louis soulanes #nicole debonne #robert lombard #neurosis #lesbianism