Writer Jean Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville joined forces for this elegant adaptation of Cocteau's immensely popular, wicked novel about the wholly unholy relationship between a teenage brother and sister. Elisabeth (Nicole Stephane) and Paul (Edouard Dermithe) close themselves off from the world and play an increasingly intense series of mind games with the people who dare enter their clandestine world - until romance and jealousy intrude. Melville's operatic camera movements and Cocteau's perverse poetic approach to character merge in this film to create one of Franch cinema's greatest, and most surprising, meetings of the minds. Henri Decae provides cinematography.