“Jean-Pierre Melville's classic adaptation of Cocteau's novel, made with the artistic collaboration of Cocteau himself, is the story of an obsessive love between brother and sister, isolated in a room whose walls are intended to defend their union against the world but which instead send their passion back and back on them. More an environment than a story, the film moves as in a dream to the pace of poetry, slowed with the weight of its symbolic charge yet electric at every turn. The baroque assemblage of sickbeds, bathrobes, personal mementos and idiosyncratic movements (into which Vivaldi and Bach concertos are brilliantly integrated) was shot on a shoestring in ‘real' settings.” -J.B.

“We decided to shoot the picture in apartments and hallways, in settings that I improvised on the spot.... The result is that intensity outweighs technique... settings are not settings, actors not actors, that the cameraman did not try to shine by means of beautiful shots but tried to seize the intangible at any price and by whatever means....” (Jean Cocteau)