David Hamilton
Tenere Cugine

"Tender Cousins" is a 1981 film by David Hamilton. The director, before becoming one, devoted himself to photography, and indeed from the very first image, one perceives a sort of soft, fluffy, and feathered effect that recalls the unworthy and outdated glossy wedding photography effects.

The story is set in the English countryside in the first half of the last century and follows a wealthy family spending a peaceful summer at their mansion.

However, the focus is on the adventures of a young boy, about fifteen years old, who is fancied by a little cousin and a couple of maids. He, however, is interested in the older cousin who is being courted by a fiancé of one of the relatives.

In this sort of romantic entanglement, the young boy is gradually introduced to his first sexual experiences, particularly by the maids, and finally, he will fulfill his passion, once matured, with the coveted cousin.

The young boy's point of view, among other things the narrator of the film, conveys everything with a candor and naive tenderness. The bodies of the young women who have fun with him are slender and candid, soft and sinuous, almost highlighting the concept of youth, of pure discovery that only a fresh adolescent can perceive (a pretext?). In the protagonist, it is impossible to perceive morbidity, in the scenes vulgarity is never crossed, and here the director has not been malicious.

However, if one tries to analyze Hamilton's work a little more deeply, it can appear somewhat morbid, perverse, but in such a subtle and skillful way that the viewer's initial unbiased judgment may be linked to the exercise in style on aesthetics and photography.

The pace is slow, accompanied by a musical theme, leitmotif of the entire film, that denotes the lightness of the light-hearted comedy, whose purpose should be to narrate the (mild) romantic troubles of a teenager. What remains, in the end, are only the young bodies exposed almost at scheduled intervals (probably to revive the interest of the bored viewer) displayed with "shameless elegance", in a story that is not very engaging, an exercise in style I would say, which Hamilton created to satisfy, probably, some of his small unfulfilled "perversions".