Les Cousins [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Claude Chabrol provides a few new wrinkles to the old "city mouse/country mouse" fable in Les Cousins. Bucolic Gerald Blain heads to Paris, where he enters into a romantic rivalry with his urbane cousin Jean-Claude Brialy. Their mutual object of affections is Juliette Maynal. Despite Brialy's glib tongue and worldly approach, he is beaten-nay, ruined-by the supposedly ingenuous Blain. In this second of Chabrol's feature-length efforts, the director introduces the generic character names "Charles" and "Paul", the former representing bourgeois values, the latter the embodiment of modern decadence. In various guises, Charles and Paul would reappear in virtually every subsequent Chabrol-directed domestic drama.