Two cousins related by marriage, Marthe and Ludovic, meet at a family wedding for the first time. Marthe is the bride’s daughter and Ludovic is the groom’s nephew. After a raucous cousin jack pasties reception with plenty of dancing and drinking, Marthe and Ludovic are left waiting for their respective spouses, Pascal and Karine, who are off having sex. While they wait, they get to know each other: Marthe is a secretary and Ludovic is a dance instructor who changes his occupation every three years.
Ludovic meets Marthe for lunch and tells her that her husband is having an affair with his wife. Later, Pascal informs her that he’s broken off all of his affairs and that, from now on, she will be the only one. When Marthe tells him she knows about Karine, he says he only had her “three times in the bushes”. Sometime later at a family gathering at Marthe’s mother’s house, Ludovic’s daughter, Nelsa, shows slides she took at the wedding—including compromising photos of Pascal and Karine.
During the slide show, Martha’s mother’s new husband dies. On the way back from the cemetery, Marthe and Ludovic get better acquainted, with Marthe revealing that she enjoys swimming and singing. Later that week, Marthe and Ludovic meet for lunch, buy bathing suits, and go swimming in a public pool. They enjoy each other’s company so much that they decide to take the rest of the day off together to go shopping and see a movie. Although their relationship is platonic, Pascal and Karine begin to grow jealous. Marthe and Ludovic playfully arrange to meet by chance at a restaurant with their respective families, to see how Pascal and Karine react.
At another family wedding, with Pascal and the groom’s father fighting over a business deal gone wrong, Marthe and Ludovic decide to leave and spend the day together. They return to find a drunken Pascal harassing the guests, and soon they all leave the disastrous wedding and bring Pascal home. Marthe’s mother and Ludovic’s father develop a close friendship and plan to spend time at his vineyard. That Saturday, Marthe and Ludovic meet and spend the day together making love.
The following morning, they extend their stay another day, making love, exchanging recipes, and bathing together. In the coming days, Pascal reverts to his philandering ways, Karine leaves Ludovic and then returns, and Marthe’s mother and Ludovic’s father discover they’re not as compatible as they thought. Marthe and Ludovic’s relationship, however, continues to grow in love. At a Christmas family gathering at Marthe’s mother’s house, Marthe and Ludovic lock themselves in a bedroom and make love throughout the evening while their families eat, drink, watch Midnight Mass, and exchange gifts. French film in the US since A Man and a Woman. The film was the 35th highest-grossing film of the year in France with 1,161,394 cinema admissions. Cousin Cousine tells the story of an impossible love affair, and the two people who make it gloriously possible.
That would be enough in itself—blind faith in romance is so rare these days—but for some lucky reason the movie gives us more. It gives us, first of all, one of the most engaging and likable couples in recent movies. It gives us a feeling of a real human milieu, of the families these people belong in. In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film “an exceptionally winning, wittily detailed comedy that is as much about family relationships as it is about love. In a rather startling way, no one seems to get seriously hurt in this film, even though there are deaths and profound disappointments, not because Mr. Full cast and crew for Cousin cousine”. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. A cousin is a term in genealogy. A cousin is not a direct ancestor or descendant, but is a relative who shares a common ancestor. A family tree showing how each person is related to the orange person.