One of the most important films of the French New Wave, now rarely shown, Chabrol's exciting, stylish and complex film today has added value as a fascinating excursion into Parisian student life in the fifties. Les Cousins is the story of the country mouse and the city rat: Charles (Gérard Blain), a wholesome, more or less vestal virgin of a country lad, comes to Paris to live with his sophisticated, more or less debauched city cousin, Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy). Charles' girlfriend (Juliette Mayniel), drawn to his purity, is seduced by Paul and his hedonism; she is a pivot between them and her choice is telling. There is a perverse authenticity in the indolent cynicism of Paul's Latin Quarter life-typified by the film's climactic orgy, during which Paul performs a devastating rendition of a Nazi officer to the strains of "Tristan and Isolde." Not that Paul is not a disturbing, even Mephistophelian figure, but there is something suspect, vaguely sickening, in the irrelevance of Charles. Among American critics, Pauline Kael was one of the few to appreciate the film and its moral ambiguities. She noted that Chabrol (who, as a critic, is noted for his work on Hitchcock), "particularly admires Strangers on a Train, which suggested a peculiar role-transference between two men and dealt with a particularly corrupt social climate of extreme wealth and extreme perversity.... (In Les Cousins) the moral antagonisms seem clear and then Chabrol (who is himself a very sophisticated moralist) turns the meanings upside down."