Claude Chabrol

"Le Boucher" is more of a study in passive complicity or associative guilt than a murder-mystery, but it's still a difficult movie to write about without spoiling the plot for newcomers, so I'm going to sidestep the problem. It reminds me of a tragic variation on "La Belle et la Bête", in which Belle is too romantically jaded and too much the mistress of her own desires - i.e. she is not innocent enough - to save the helpless Beast from his uncontrollable lust for blood. In the most telling scene of all, schoolmistress Mademoiselle Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and her pupils visit some cave paintings by Cro-Magnon man. The teacher asks, "Do you know what desires are called when they rise above the savage state? Aspirations." The irony is that Belle condemns the Beast to his savage limbo by being completely unresponsive to his tender advances, his aspirations. While the film undoubtedly owes a debt to Hitchcock, Chabrol's beautifully observed provincial French setting completely surpasses the other's invariably artificial backdrops. Pierre Jansen's score is wonderfully creepy and Stéphane Audran and Jean Yanne are magnificent. A quietly perfect little masterpiece. "Mademoiselle Hélène! Mademoiselle Hélène!"

Without giving too much away, "La Femme Infidèle" is a murder story bookended by two phases of suspicion: a husband's (Michel Bouquet) questioning of his wife's fidelity, and the wife's (Stéphane Audran) realisation that her husband may have committed a crime of passion. What makes the film so special is the novel concept of murder as a declaration of love, an act of savagery capable of bringing two people closer together rather than blasting them apart: extreme marriage therapy, if you will! The other thing that Chabrol does very well here is to deglamourise the act of murder itself, portraying it as an ugly, sordid business, fraught with complications. Curiously, this generally sombre film lightens considerably when events take a drastic turn, and a healthy dose of darkly comic Hitchcockian suspense is introduced. A brilliant little movie.

When a leftist terrorist organisation kidnaps the U.S. Ambassador to France, the French police employ their own, state-sanctioned form of terrorism to quell popular support for the anarchists. "Nada" is too complex a film to analyse succinctly here, but it sometimes felt like I was watching a Costa-Gavras political thriller, as directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Certainly, Maurice Garrel, as a disillusioned revolutionary, masterminding the abduction out of loyalty to a still fanatical friend (Fabio Testi), has a Melvillian world-weariness/fatalism about him. The interesting relationship between Testi and Michel Duchaussoy, respectively the gang's leader and its former spokesman, expelled for ideological differences but loyally reticent under police torture, also smacks of Melville. However, the rich vein of black comedy running through the movie is unmistakably Claude Chabrol's. Detractors, who would have you believe that this director is merely a Hitchcock copyist, would do well to witness his brilliant handling of this film's two major set-pieces: the kidnapping scene and the police's retaliatory farmhouse siege. His matter-of-fact use of violence, particularly in the latter scene, is absolutely chilling. Of the superb cast, Maurice Garrel and Michel Aumont, who plays the canny but brutal policeman in charge of the case, are especially fine. A film ripe for rediscovery in these troubled times. I loved it!

A rich businesswoman (Stéphane Audran) takes a homeless street artist (Jacqueline Sassard) under her wing, and initiates a twisted and deadly ménage-a-trois when her protégée's affair with an architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant) threatens the status quo. Such is Claude Chabrol's mastery at this sort of thing that he is able to reveal latent malice and emotional turbulence without ever once resorting to histrionics, and to create an intoxicating, erotically charged atmosphere without ever resorting to sexual explicitness. Although there's a palpable sense of impending tragedy throughout, I found the climactic 'Epilogue' oddly unsatisfying, lacking the sound, psychological underpinning of "Le Boucher", for example. Both of the female leads are fantastic; Trintignant avoids playing the stereotypical, sleazy seducer, but his character is comparatively underdeveloped and lacks depth. Jean Rabier's photography and Pierre Jansen's score are both outstanding.

When her high-strung, drug-addicted husband attacks and injures their son, a lowborn but decent and hardworking woman (Stéphane Audran) fights her aristocratic parents-in-law for custody of the boy. With a scene depicting the corruption of a girl with learning difficulties, this jet black comedy from Claude Chabrol is occasionally too cruel to laugh at, though only the worst kind of prude would deny that the payoffs invariably justify any amount of uncomfortable squirming. Chabrol fans will recognise a lot of familiar faces (Audran, Michel Bouquet, Michel Duchaussoy, Dominique Zardi, to name just a few) but Chabrol irregular Jean-Pierre Cassel walks away with the movie as perhaps the most morally bankrupt private investigator in cinema history. Cassel, of course, would play Stéphane Audran's husband in Buñuel's "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" a couple of years later.

Given that Nicholas Blake's "The Beast Must Die" is one of my favourite crime novels, I was looking forward to this adaptation by Claude Chabrol, though I suspected beforehand that it might be slightly disappointing. Essentially a bereaved father's diary, recording a vengeful scheme to find and punish the man who killed his son in a hit-and-run accident, the book contains a stunning surprise that only really works properly on the page. The film works best as a touching, gradually developed love story between the father (Michel Duchaussoy) and the woman (Caroline Cellier) he uses as an unwitting pawn in his game of retribution. The final scene, in which our hero finds redemption in a fatherly act of self-sacrifice for a substitute son, is absolutely lovely. Jean Yanne is terrific as the villain.

There's a strange, dreamy aloofness about this film that makes it difficult to invest in emotionally, but it's a phenomenally dry comedy about a murderer's quest for atonement, in the face of bourgeois indifference to his crime. When a sadomasochistic game goes too far, Charles, a married man, strangles his lover, the wife of his best friend, and then does battle with his guilty conscience. Though it begins and ends brilliantly, the story does sag in the middle, before Charles' guilt gathers self-destructive momentum, and it suffers from a lack of suspense, attributable to the other characters' apathy toward the crime. "Juste Avante la Nuit" agreeably reunites Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran, a couple of years after Chabrol's superb "La Femme Infidèle"; Bouquet is marvellous but Audran isn't really given enough to do this time around, unfortunately. Flawed but fascinating.

Though it finally takes itself a little too seriously and ends rather perfunctorily, for the most part this comedy - about an increasingly flagrant extramarital affair which results in a double murder - is delightfully entertaining. It does take a few satirical sideswipes at corrupt politicians, which no doubt contributed to the film's temporary ban in France, but "Les Noces Rouges" works best as a simple, unpretentious bed-hopping farce. I, for one, never need much of an excuse to look at Stéphane Audran, or the Citroën DS, for that matter, however Jean Rabier's lovely autumnal photography is certainly a bonus. The film also boasts a splendidly mournful, Bernard Herrmann-esque score by Pierre Jansen. Acting honours go to Audran and Claude Piéplu, as her slimy, chain-smoking, cuckolded husband.

A beautiful woman (Romy Schneider) and her lover hatch a plot to murder her rich, impotent, alcoholic husband (Rod Steger). Things seem to be going to plan until both husband and lover fail to return from the pre-arranged 'boating accident', and the woman finds herself the unwanted focus of two missing person investigations. Hmmm... I can't think of very much to say about this. After a clumsy start, things improve immensely once the police start sniffing around and asking awkward questions of Schneider, who at this stage is just as mystified as we are. Unfortunately, Chabrol tries our patience with a succession of ludicrous plot twists in the second half and the movie outstays its welcome. Schneider is superb and Jean Rochefort turns in a very droll performance as her crafty lawyer. Rod Steiger is fine but his dubbed voice is very distracting; he's probably better in the English language version, where there ought to be a closer correlation between his dialogue and the shapes his lips are making.

In a small French village, a trio of unscrupulous property developers attempt to force the local postman and his invalid mother (Stéphane Audran) to sell their home. Missing persons, murder and madness ensue and a police detective is sent to investigate. I can't help thinking I'd have liked this one better if I hadn't seen quite so many of Chabrol's other movies; it's not bad but there's little here I haven't seen before. It begins brilliantly with a great credits sequence and the masterly introduction of the various characters as we follow the postman on his round, but the story does sag in the middle, before Jean Poiret's Inspecteur Lavardin arrives on the scene. The best thing about the movie is the excellent cast.

Your enjoyment of this movie is likely to be proportional to your affection (or otherwise) for the likes of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", "The Avengers", Dean Martin's 'Matt Helm' movies, Ken Russell's "Billion Dollar Brain", the original "Casino Royale", etc, etc. The presence of Jean Seberg is certainly a bonus. Try to imagine a French version of "The Avengers", set in Greece, and you'll have a good idea of what's in store here. The paper-thin plot isn't really worth going into, but the location photography is nice and some of Chabrol's compositions are geometrically interesting. Like other products of its time, for example "The Avengers" and "The Prisoner", "The Road to Corinth" is often funny-peculiar rather than funny-haha. One particular scene, in which Seberg, toying with the idea of prostituting herself to raise $1000, is shown a pornographic film by a man in a limousine, reminded me of the Richard Lester of "Help!", for some reason. Seberg's 'Perils of Pauline-like' brushes with death are great fun. One for the Seberg or Chabrol completist, or for connoisseurs of campy Sixties entertainment.

A smug philanderer decides there's nothing wrong with his common-law marriage that a little more casual sex won't fix, instructing his docile partner to start sleeping around, too. However, when the initially reluctant partner takes to free love like a Scot to drink, the man - now frequently left in charge of his young daughter while the free-thinking monster he created is out doing who knows what with whom - struggles to control his libido-sapping jealousy. Although this synopsis may read like a comedy, "Une Partie de Plaisir" is actually quite a nasty little movie, difficult to watch in places. Scripted by and starring regular Chabrol collaborator Paul Gégauff, the film actively courts 'art-imitating-life' notoriety with the casting of Gégauff's ex-wife Danièle as his unfortunate partner, and the couple's daughter Clémence as their onscreen progeny. Despite the universal appeal of the theme, however one chooses to express it - the grass is always greener... you don't miss your water... if it ain't broke... etc - it is impossible to sympathise with Gégauff's character, even before he graduates to violence and self-pity, because his troubles are entirely of his own making. There's also something abhorrently narcissistic about his perpetual state of half-undress and his aimless noodling at the piano, just to show us how talented he is. The best bits are the few tender moments between Gégauff and his daughter, particularly the haunting closing scene. The climax is truly horrible; the delicious irony of Gégauff's violent death at the hand of his second wife (in 1983) will not be lost on anyone who watches this.