Cousins

Don't worry, it's not incest.

I was first turned onto Joel Schumacher’s Cousins after listening to Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This. I’ve been breezing my way through her 80s erotica season, and while Cousins is more of an edgy romantic comedy than a Claude Chabrol remake, Longworth (briefly) mentions it on an episode about Sean Young and No Way Out. That was enough for me.

Released just two year after Moonstruck, Cousins has that same sort of rare, intimate familial specificity. We open with a wedding between an older American man and an Italian widow, and get glimpses at the cast of characters that populate the event. There’s a horned up teen with a video camera, an acerbic Nonna, financially estranged bros, and our four leads: married couples Larry (Ted Danson) and Tish (Sean Young), and Maria (Isabella Rossellini) and Tom (William Petersen). Maria is the daughter of the bride, and Larry is the nephew of the groom.

Until we see the vapid Tish and the untrustworthy Tom run-off for a quick fuck, it’s unclear just what Schumacher’s film is going to be about. But then Larry and Maria meet, are left alone, and share an instant and easy chemistry. These cousins (by marriage) are going to fall for one another.

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Cousins is by no means a radical film. I enjoyed it immensely though, and its sexual politics can be somewhat surprising.

Maria, suspicious of her where her husband and Tish ran off to, decides to confront Larry at work and tell him that she believes their spouses are having an affair. Larry reacts calmly, at first. He espouses some sort of free love philosophy, and we almost buy it, that is until he breaks down and admits his jealousy and anger. Nonetheless, what’s most surprising about the film is the extent to which all parties do nothing about their circumstances. Tish and Tom know their spouses know about the affair and do nothing. Maria and Tom continue to hang out “as friends” and avoid confrontation as well.

Of course this speaks more to the state of their respective marriages than of Schumacher's desire to make a film about open relationships and polyamory (thank god because I’m bored by the discourse). But its approach to cheating felt new and not what I had expected from a hetero love story.

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A few months ago, when White Lotus season two started airing, the internet was crowded with a lot of insufferable takes about infidelity, a major theme of the season. The consensus, or at least a consensus I agreed with, is that straight people have an overinflated/reactive viewpoint of cheating. The show posits the possibility of cheating as the most horrific thing in the world to these couples.

The LGBTQs seem to have a more nuanced relationship to it, however, and there’s an understanding that the rigidity of monogamy opens doors to all sorts of actions that wouldn’t otherwise say anything significant about a relationship. Cheating may not be good, but there are also really bad things in the world, like murder.

Cousins seems to think in a similar vein. It’s refreshing and unusual to watch a film that doesn’t have any sort of doomsday feeling attached to it. Maria and Tom acknowledge their spouses are behaving badly, but the movie still manages to stay breezy and uncomplicated. It film even gives Tish a sort of redemption arc, as she comes to realize — as many people who have affairs do — that she was never really in love with Larry. They were wrong partners for one another. Tom stays a dick.

Anyway, the craziest thing about all of it is that it comes right after Isabella Rossellini and composer Angelo Badalementi made Blue Velvet, a very different movie.

Cousins is available to stream on Amazon Prime.