Delving Into Chabrol

Sometime last month, I realized that Claude Chabrol was generally a blind spot in my French nouvelle vague cinema education, limited to the Criterion releases of LE BEAU SERGE and LES COUSINS (both excellent), Kino Lorber's recent release of THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (which I very much enjoyed, and whose principal disguise element took me utterly by surprise), his two superb segments of the FANTÔMAS miniseries with Helmut Berger, and his Mabuse pastiche DR. M (of which I recall very little). I was particularly interested in seeing LES BICHES as it stars three of my favorite actors from that period (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stéphan Audran, and Jacqueline Sassard) in a storyline that sounded compelling.

I checked the available sources and was surprised to learn that the bulk of Chabrol's work has been terribly neglected in the digital era; there were a couple of early Arrow Academy DVD box sets (reportedly of poor non-anamorphic masters), some scattered individual titles on DVD and BD, and Blu-ray box set of four titles which had just been issued in France, without English subtitles. I wasn't happy about having to acquire the non-anamorphic transfers, but an eBay purchase of the pair became inevitable if I was ever going to get past this itch. Since then, I've been posting on Facebook notes of my reactions to the various films as I've watched them, and I thought I should be sharing these (and some original additions) on this blog, so here they are - reset in chronological sequence and slightly amended here and there for this presentation: 

Madeleine Robinson chides housekeeper Bernadette Lafont in À DOUBLE TOUR.

À DOUBLE TOUR (1959, Kino Lorber DVD): I was most impressed by its three-dimensional structure: scenes initiated as if sequential gradually reveal themselves as documenting earlier scenes from a different character’s perspective. A funny film that turns dramatic then tragic, it’s wildly erratic in tone and pitch, but it’s anchored by Madeleine Robinson’s deservedly Volpi Cup-winning performance, the always sassy and appealing Bernadette Lafont, and the first major role of Jean-Paul Belmondo, whose screen persona is already bursting with bravado and almost completely defined.

Bernadette Lafont and Stéphane Audran in LES BONNES FEMMES.

LES BONNES FEMMES (1960, Kino Lorber): One would call this a transitional film for Chabrol had it not been for the color films bookending it, which go their own way outside the pattern, but this return to black-and-white forms the bridge between LE BEAU SERGE and LES COUSINS and his later crime thrillers. There is almost no narrative to this picture, which is arguably the most traditionally "nouvelle vague" of all his works, yet also an audacious experiment in freeform filmmaking. The focus is a group of young Parisian women who work together in a shop under the supervision of an older manager (played by Italian actress Ave Ninchi of the FAMIGLIA PASSAGUAI films with Aldo Fabrizi; it's uncanny to see her playing a more natural character - and the revelation of her secret "fetish" is a highlight of the film), and who also sometimes socialize together in smaller groups or pairs by night. En suite, Bernadette Lafont (raucous Jane), Stéphane Audran (ambitious), Clotilde Joano (sensitive), and Lucille St. Simon (involved in an uncomfortable engagement) form an amalgam of French womanhood - quite unlike the sophistication of their image abroad - and the film drops them into a series of situations with one purpose: to create a chaotic, bubbly, riotous, alternately happy and sentimental semblance of real life. Once this is achieved, Chabrol shifts gears to tragedy, showing us that taking a more reticent or serious view to life, of holding back from experience in favor of awaiting magic to happen, may turn out to be the worst possible choice to make. The climax of the film is appalling and tragic, horrific but presented with an almost romantically distant regard, but it is followed by a oblique coda in which life goes on. A very powerful film.

Jean Seberg deceives the affections of Michel Bouquet in THE ROAD TO CORINTH.

THE ROAD TO CORINTH (1967, Arrow Academy DVD): Also known as WHO'S GOT THE BLACK BOX?, this is a frothy (if dry), tongue-in-cheek spy picture, featuring Jean Seberg in the kind of story one can imagine the Belmondo of BREATHLESS reading. The use of color seems a stroke of Chabrol's insincerity with the material, which is alternately adventurous and sometimes just plain silly. As the villain, Michel Bouquet's perversely amiable presence throughout the film is its most unexpected comic delight. Obviously undertaken as a sport, it's not particularly good - and if I had to compare it to another movie, I'd be out of luck - if not for Jess Franco’s LUCKY THE INSCRUTABLE! 

Anthony Perkins, Stéphane Audran, and Maurice Ronet in THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS.

THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS (1967, Kino Lorber BD): This film features the most astounding, startling, surprise twist I've ever seen in a suspense thriller. I am so glad it's not widely written about and wasn't spoiled for me; as I watched the first half hour a second time, I came away with even more admiration for the illusion it created and sustained so well. Grab this and watch it before someone on the internet spoils it for you. The lovely Kino Lorber disc offers only the English version of the film (a French version, 10 minutes longer, also exists) but it appears that most, if not all, the performances were spoken in English at least for this variant.

Three of a perfect pair: Stéphane Audran, Jacqueline Sassard, and J-L Trintignant in LES BICHES.

LES BICHES (1968) and LA FEMME INFÍDELE (1969, both Arrow Academy DVD): These were the first two films I watched in this retrospective study, and I had an unexpected reaction - I didn’t like them very much. I didn’t hate them, but despite their enticing premises and scripting, I found them both disappointing; lacking in directorial confidence, I found them both a bit underdone and sometimes very overdone, as in the former's scenes involving the two idiot roommates played by Chabrol's "A to Z" regulars Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi. The dated transfers don’t exactly plead their best case, but I don't believe my response was to influenced by their presentation, at least not entirely. Of the two, I found LA FEMME INFÍDELE the more accomplished, and it was anamorphically fumbled into the wrong aspect ratio! I am especially sad about LES BICHES; with its great cast and its careful and curious attention to how new relationships settle into their own laws and precepts, I expected it would become a new favorite. As time has passed, and the more Chabrol titles I've seen in the interim, I've come to suspect my high expectations of these two led me astray. I want to revisit them again once some time has passed, and feel sure that my second viewings will be at least somewhat more favorable.

Michel Duchaussoy is tempted to murder Jean Yanne in THIS MAN MUST DIE.

THIS MAN MUST DIE (1969, Arrow Academy): This was the first film in my Chabrol retrospective that I had no problem stamping as a masterpiece. Michel Duchaussoy plays a writer whose young son is slaughtered by a drunken hit-and-run driver, distracted by the woman riding with him. Despite an absence of leads, the bereft father determines to find the driver and kill him. In the course of fulfilling his plan, the protagonist meets and falls in love with the woman, who is the killer's sister-in-law and is welcomed into the family of the man he seeks - a truly abhorrent man (brilliantly portrayed by Jean Yanne) whose own son wants him dead. As sometimes happens in Chabrol, the plan is morally unacceptable but sometimes its fulfillment leads to such an elegant design of circumstance that it seems to bear the imprimatur of the sacrosanct.

Jean Yanne and Stéphane Audran in LE BOUCHER.

LE BOUCHER (1970, Arrow Academy): Another great one; a study in restraint and suspicion as two mature adults find love at a time when a series of murders are taking place in their small town community. The slowly developing relationship between Jean Yanne (playing a very different man than in THIS MAN MUST DIE) and Stéphane Audran (likewise, playing a woman disappointed in love who has withdrawn from romantic relationships), stops all outside time in its telling. Truly refined filmmaking, each scene a slice of life, the small town existence perfectly rendered, and a potent and tragic story of two people damaged by life who experience such a palpably intimate connection yet never touch. It felt to me like a giallo at times; it is a giallo in the same way THE FIFTH CORD or THE POSSESSED is a giallo. To clarify: In its essential Frenchness, its lack of flashy murder scenes and hot, overstylized decor, LE BOUCHER is obviously not a giallo as commonly regarded. But I detected something about it, a tone, that felt kindred to those two films I named, which are so considered: the way it delineated traits of the killer with traits shared by Audran's heroine, who was being taught something about herself by the storyline and its precise test of character; the way the camera seemed to dictate the story as much as the characters; and the conscious design of certain revelatory setpieces. As it was made in 1970, it precedes much of what we understand or think about gialli, but Chabrol was innovating, fusing what he had learned from Hitchcock what he had learned from his other masters (perhaps Bresson or Clouzot) while moving in his own direction - as Argento would with Hitchcock and Antonioni.

Michel Bouquet and Anna Douking in JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL.

JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL (1971, Arrow Academy): A searing fusion of Chabrol's obsessive interests in the subjects of murder and marital infidelity. Michel Bouquet, my favorite of Chabrol's repertory players, is remarkable as a successful advertising executive who is having an affair with his best friend’s kinky wife (Anna Douking). By the time the main titles stop rolling, he has accidentally killed his lover while obeying her demand that he strangle her, but just up to a point... and though her death was technically accidental, the inprint of masochism left upon him by their abusive relationship, makes him begin to wonder if in fact something in him wanted to kill her - or if this is a sign of how she changed him, making him obsess over technicalities as a way of punishing himself in her stead. Far from your usual police procedural (though it’s that too), this is a fairly riveting study of adult relationships, moralities, and philosophies all put to the most extreme tests. The scenes of Bouquet’s confessions reminded me of a similar agonizing scene in Oliver Stone’s BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989), which yielded similar results. I was particularly impressed with Pierre Jansen’s score for this one.Though I've yet to watch the second half of Volume 1 of the Arrow Academy Chabrol set, last night I jumped ahead to Volume 2's THE BREACH/LA RUPTURE. A very good psychological drama in the “hell is other people” category, with a strong Stepháne Audran performance, decorative casting touches that presage Polanski’s THE TENANT, and a surprising LSD-laced climax. The last name in the credits, mentioned in charge of décor, is Françoise Hardy.

Romy Schneider in INNOCENTS WITH DIRTY HANDS.

INNOCENTS WITH DIRTY HANDS (1975, Arrow Academy): Though this low-key thriller was again photographed, scored, and edited by Chabrol's usual team of Jean Rabier, Pierre Jansen and Jacques Gaillard, it has an appreciably glossier look than his other films of this period and boasts two stars from outside his usual repertory casts. Romy Schneider (in the same year she made Zulawski's THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO LOVE) and Rod Steiger (badly miscast, often wearing a silly beret and dubbed in French) play an unhappily married couple - an alcoholic, impotent, whining writer (Steiger) and his frisky young wife, who determines to do away with her husband and escape into a new life with her young lover and the old one's fortune. The situation itself is as familiar as an old marriage, but the gold Chabrol (adapting a novel by Richard Neely) mines from the situation and its dared solution is rare and complex; in the context of what evolves into an Hitchcockian police procedural, he examines the elusive nature of happiness, most evident when we are least aware of it, and it also extends the philosophical discussion begun in JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL of what murder may be so long as the killer, victim, and affected parties are all in agreement.  

Screenwriter Paul Gégauff exposes an unpleasant dark side in PLEASURE PARTY.

PLEASURE PARTY (1975, Arrow Academy): Deeply involving if ultimately repugnant study of an experiment in open marriage, starring its own screenwriter Paul Gégauff, as well as his wife Daniele and young daughter Clemence, in a presumably somewhat autobiographical story as he plays himself - the names of the wife and daughter are changed (to Esther and Elise). When the film begins, Gégauff is such an attractive man - he’s fit, looks something like Klaus Kinski, he’s open, outgoing, interested in and somewhat knowledgeable about everything, he takes a genuine interest in his family - but when his wife takes him up on his suggestion that she should have affairs (as he has done in the past), she gets more involved than he expected, develops new interests, and takes up a new career. Suddenly the loving wife is no longer there. Consequently, neither is he the loving husband, as his thwarted ego and neediness turn him into an abusive, overbearing, egotistical monster. The tensions culminate in an irredeemably ugly incident - and one is left to wonder how much of this story was factual, given that Gégauff - who also scripted most of the Chabrol films mentioned above, as well as Rene Clement’s PURPLE NOON - soon after divorced Danièle and married another woman (as here), who then (differently than here) stabbed him to death at the age of 61.

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