Cousin, Cousine (1975)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Cousin, Cousine directed by Jean Charles Tacchella was probably the first French movie I ever watched, at least in French with English subtitles. I was in my first year of college French at Indiana University and this movie was suggested by my teacher, a very enthusiastic grad student and mentor to all of his students. At that time the Midwest was my birthright and I had rarely traveled outside its familiar confines. I knew that I wanted to get away from where I had lived almost my entire life up until then, but I didn't know how to do it or know where to go. I was studying French mostly because it was a required part of an undergraduate degree. I suppose that I just saw it as another course, like economics or history. After watching this movie at an off-campus art house movie theater, I couldn't help but think that the French were very different from the people I knew. At that time, as far as I was concerned, "different" was the same as "good." I immediately developed an overly-romantic view of France that I hold to this day. Cousin, Cousine also gave me an overly-romantic view of love that I have maintained to this day.I just watched this movie again recently, a film that was made in 1975 yet holds up extremely well, both as a timeless work of art and as something capable of speaking directly to me. In some ways I think that I haven't changed a single bit over the course of what has been my adult life. I still think this movie is just about the sexiest thing ever put on film, a story about two people who become best friends before consciously and deliberately deciding to be lovers.I don't even know where to begin as far as my praise for this beautiful film. I love everything about it, even the music remains wonderfully whimsical—a lot of movie scores from the 70s are woefully dated. Cousin, Cousine has soured me on a generation of American films that don't have the slightest clue about how to portray ordinary people. The central characters are a handsome couple but not movie star perfect. They haven't been air-brushed, surgically enhanced, and stair-mastered to within an inch of their lives. All of the characters in this movie have ordinary (if not dumb) jobs. Hollywood's idea of a normal person's job is an advertising executive, and forget about accurately portraying all of the other details of middle class life. I think it was this movie that started my prejudice for books and movies about ordinary people, people I can recognize from my own very ordinary life.If you haven't seen Cousin, Cousine I think you should give it a look, if you can find it. It should only take about the first 15 minutes or so to turn you into a Francophile.

A French comedy about adultery. Two distant cousins meet at a wedding--Ludovic (Victor Lanoux) and Marthe (Marie-Christine Barrault). They're both married with children. They hit it off and become good friends. Their respective spouses think they're sleeping together. They're not but they decide why not try it?HUGE SPOILER!!! A BIG hit in the US (and even nominated for Best Foreign Film) this is a light-weight, fluffy and totally unremarkable film. It's flatly directed and the story wanders all over the place. It also presents adultery as being no big deal (!!!) At the beginning when Marthe's husband Pascal is breaking up with the multiple women he's been sleeping with it's presented as cute, charming and even funny! This was obviously long before AIDS but I still find that attitude pretty disgusting. Adultrey is not funny and cute and shouldn't be presented that way. Seriously, how about the kids in the respective families? Their feelings or thoughts are never bought up. To make it worse it ends with Marthe and Ludovic run away with each other and THIS is presented as a good thing!!!! The morals (or lack of them) in this film is bewildering. It gets a 4 only because the whole cast is good, it IS pleasant (if morally bankrupt) and Barrault and Lanoux play off each other well. There's also some minor female nudity. I can't recommend this at all but a lot of people liked it back in the 1970s. Use your own judgment.

Two adult cousins go well beyond the kissing stage in this lighthearted French comedy, a popular choice for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, thanks in large part to its casually forthright attitude toward the joys of physical affection. The two lovers, each already married, are blithely unconcerned with the opinions of others, taking an altogether healthy pleasure in scandalizing their extended (bourgeois) family by retiring to the bedroom for hours on end during holiday reunions, and so forth. A surplus of natural charm, combined with a refreshing (and typically French) lack of romantic melodrama, make it an easy film to enjoy, and an unsurprising candidate for the inevitable glossy Hollywood remake, fourteen years later.

I saw this in high school when it first came out.It is very charming and sweet.It was one of the first foreign languages I saw with subtitles. Since then I have been a strong follower of foreign films.It is interesting that there are some strongly negative responses in the other comments, that such a gentle sweet film can register such strong responses.I look at it as a bit of a fantasy ... that it is not there to really ask us to work out the nitty gritty of what happens to children or the other relationships. It sorta says ... how would you be in this situation? Anyway .. a very nice foreign film.