Claude Chabrol crafts a sly moral fable about a provincial boy who comes to live with his sophisticated bohemian cousin in Paris. Through these seeming opposites, Chabrol conjures a piercing, darkly comic character study that questions notions of good and evil, love and jealousy, and success in the modern world. A mirror image of Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins recasts that film's stars, Jean-Claude Brialy and Gřard Blain, in startlingly reversed roles.