Tender Cousins (1980)
A young boy has a crush on his cousin sister, who has a crush on her sister’s husband. Everything is dumb, French country side is beautiful, Anja is Gorgeous & Innocent.
A hazy summer crush becomes a wicked country-house carousel just as Europe prepares to blow itself apart.
Julien is fourteen-and-a-half, hopelessly besotted with his sixteen-year-old cousin Julia, and convinced that persistence will eventually make her notice him. Unfortunately, Julia has grown beyond childhood games and is far more interested in Charles, the handsome young officer engaged to Julien’s vain older sister Claire. Meanwhile Julia’s younger sister Poune adores Julien, creating a neat little chain of unreturned desire in which everybody wants the wrong person. The family estate is also crowded with eccentric boarders, servants and relatives, including a German professor obsessed with capturing the human soul, his encouraging daughter Liselotte, and Clémentine, an actress whose glamorous days appear to be slipping away. Julien gives Julia a treasured pocketknife, spies on her, reads the signals badly and sabotages Charles’s car when jealousy gets the better of him....
Charles proves to be exactly the sort of fiancé one suspects: while courting Julia behind Claire’s back, he eagerly chases the household’s new maid. Julien and Poune arrange for Julia to catch him in the act, but victory does not deliver the romantic reward Julien expects. Then war is declared during Julia’s birthday celebration. The men leave for military service, the dreamy holiday atmosphere collapses, and Julien suddenly becomes useful around the undermanned estate. That small rise in status changes how the women treat him—and how he treats them—until his worship of Julia gives way to a cockier, less innocent version of himself. David Hamilton stages all this as part bedroom comedy, part coming-of-age fantasy and part melancholy farewell to a world living on borrowed time. The plotting can be daft and the performances uneven, but the film has an oddly memorable tension between adolescent wish fulfilment and the approaching catastrophe outside the gates. It is frivolous, uncomfortable and occasionally very funny, with history quietly preparing to kick down the door while everyone indoors remains preoccupied with jealousy, gossip and who is sneaking into whose room.
Set during the last deceptively peaceful weeks of the summer of 1939, the film occupies a rural French estate of gardens, fields, horses, shaded terraces, bedrooms and the inevitable hay barn. Hamilton photographs the place through his trademark gauzy lens, bathing white dresses, bare shoulders and sunlit foliage in the soft-focus glow of a perfume advertisement. Although the period details evoke pre-war bourgeois France, the sensuality is unmistakably a product of permissive 1970s European cinema spilling into 1980: languid, voyeuristic and more interested in mood than realism. Even the declaration of war arrives like a dark cloud drifting over an endless picnic. The vibe is less torrid drama than naughty pastoral farce—slow, pretty and slightly unreal—though the knowledge of what Europe is about to endure gives its golden afternoons a faintly mournful aftertaste.
Anja Schüte plays Julia with a cool, self-possessed presence that explains Julien’s infatuation without turning the character into a conventional temptress; she seems curious, proud and not nearly as certain of herself as she pretends. Valérie Dumas brings Poune a mischievous, wounded sweetness, while the adult actresses provide most of the film’s knowingly flirtatious comedy. There is frequent soft-focus nudity and simulated sexual activity, but nothing hardcore. Because Schüte was herself fifteen during production and the story deliberately involves underage characters, the material cannot honestly be presented as carefree cheesecake today. Hamilton aims for innocence and romantic fantasy, yet several scenes now feel deeply questionable—the very discomfort that makes Tender Cousins both an artifact of its era and a film unlikely to be made in anything like the same fashion again.
When German actress Anja Schüte did her debut role of Julia, in renowned British photographer & film director David Hamilton‘s 1980 French film “Tender Cousins“, she marked the Peak of his Aesthetic & Creative career.
A young teenage boy Julien falls in love with his french country cousin Julia, who, like many teenage girls, has a crush on her sister’s fiancé and does not reciprocate his feelings… until she does.
Like with all David Hamilton movies, put your brain aside, give it some rest, grab a bottle of wine and a smoke, and just Enjoy the fresh-as-a-morning-breeze, breath-taking Beauty of Idyllic Innocence, Hamilton Style!!
This 31 minutes juice is extracted from the 1 hour 31 minutes film trying to keep Anja Schüte on the screen all the time.
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