The Strange Ones (Jean-Pierre Melville; Mayer-Kingsley) are an adolescent brother & sister whose deep affection for each other is colored with inevitable tragedy. Adapted by France's Jean Cocteau from his 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, The Strange Ones is a baroque, grotesque, always fascinating excursion into a dark-bright dream world, set off by a glacial commentary delivered in the author's own dry, precise voice.
Blonde, boyish Elizabeth (Nicole Stephane) and ailing, somnambulistic Paul (Edouard Dermithe) live like "two limbs of the same body," isolated from the outside world in an unreal, fabulously disordered...