Inspector Bellamy

Claude Chabrol's final film, Inspector Bellamy, begins with a dedication and ends with a quote, and in between is one of the French master's most confounding, beguiling and deeply personal films, a morally engaged and somehow almost spiritual study of guilt, blame, and what it means to be "a decent guy." The film's opening dedication is to the "memory of the two Georges," meaning the mystery writer Georges Simenon, whose novels Chabrol has adapted before and whose famous Commissaire Maigret is one obvious inspiration for this film's title character, and Georges Brassens, the singer/songwriter whose music and gravesite haunt this film. The quote at the end is even more telling, a terse sign-off provided by W.H. Auden — "there is always another story, there is more than meets the eye" — that serves as a goodbye and a final statement of purpose from Chabrol himself.

The film is an ambling, lazily paced, darkly comic anti-thriller in which the vacationing famous detective Paul Bellamy (Gérard Depardieu), in the country with his wife Françoise (Marie Bunel), stumbles into a strange mystery. A former insurance agent, Leullet (Jacques Gamblin), contacts Bellamy, eager to confess that he killed a man — actually, that he wanted to kill a man, but it turned out that the man (a bum also played by Gamblin) wanted to die, so he simply allowed the bum to commit suicide. Now it's a high profile case, all over the news, but while the police (including a bumbling inspector who's much discussed but never seen) are busily hunting down Leullet, Bellamy quietly, casually investigates on his own, in his free time, between dinners with his wife and their gay friends and arguments with his resentful, no-good drunkard of a half-brother, Jacques (Clovis Cornillac).


The Leullet case is full of twists and turns and red herrings, and there's a mostly unspoken suggestion, buttressed by that Auden quote, that there's one more devilishly clever twist hidden within the film, eluding even the dogged Inspector Bellamy. Despite this, the film is not really a mystery or a thriller but a character study, using the Leullet case and Bellamy's deceptively casual pursuit of the facts to probe the character of this seemingly likable bear of a man. Depardieu, always something of a big lug, has aged into a veritable mountain, lumbering across the screen, out of breath after ascending a flight of stairs — at times he seems to be collaborating in Chabrol's gentle mockery of the actor's bulk, though he also has a sense of dignity and self-assurance that prevents the film from ever seeming mean-spirited at his expense.

Bellamy, the character, is also dignified and self-assured, or at least he seems to be, though there are periodic cracks in his friendly surface façade. He's haunted by something, some mystery hidden behind his broad, amiable face and his charmingly dogged investigative methods. There are intimations that he has at times been a drunk like his brother, and Jacques' presence causes him to reach for the bottle more frequently again. He's constantly battling with Jacques, although moments later the two very different men — bulky, aging Paul and squat, muscular young Jacques — will laugh, with only traces of bitterness, over some shared and unspoken inside joke. There's also tremendous tension with Françoise, who's sending very mixed signals: she's openly contemptuous of Jacques while urging her husband to be nicer to his brother, and in private moments there's a taut sexual chemistry between Jacques and Françoise that may or may not be a sign of an actual affair. Certainly, the lithe, maturely sexy Françoise is an awkward match for her husband, and his constant affectionate pawing of her body is deliberately silly-looking, though she mostly doesn't seem to mind.


Much as Bellamy hides darker emotions behind a benign exterior, Chabrol's film is about anything but what it seems to be about on its surface. The inspector's involvement in the Leullet case stirs up something in Bellamy regarding his fractious relationship with his self-destructive brother. It's no mistake that the film's first shot and its last shot are mirror images of one another, linking Bellamy's policework with his private, personal traumas. The film is packed with doubles and mirrors, and Bellamy begins seeing himself in his suspect. At one point, the inspector wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, yelling out, "I'm a bastard." Moments later, Chabrol cuts to the inspector (initially blurry, until the image snaps into focus) listening to Leullet say the same thing, but it doesn't seem to be a flashback — the possible murderer is echoing the cop, rather than the other way around, suggesting that Bellamy's not just haunted by his case, but has some guilt of his own weighing on him. Later, that formulation is reversed when Leullet's insistence that he wants to be "a decent guy" prompts Bellamy to ask his wife if he's a decent guy, his uncertainty very obvious. Of course, he's looking in a mirror as he asks the question.

Bellamy is a sharp detective, but not necessarily in his private life. In one great scene, right as he says, "because I happen to face reality from time to time," he stumbles unseeingly towards an open manhole cover and nearly falls in, a strikingly obvious authorial intrusion that contradicts Bellamy's self-assurance, his conviction in his own decency. He's not facing reality; he doesn't even see what's right in front of him, and only his wife stops him from falling into the hole. The symbolism is crushingly obvious, and would seem heavy-handed if not for the dark humor with which Chabrol skewers this big lug's obliviousness.


Implicit in the film is the weight of guilt, and the difficulty of facing death, whether one's own or a loved one's. Death threads through the film right from the opening credits sequence, which weaves through a graveyard — with someone whistling a Brassens tune, off-camera, another clue to unraveling the Laullet mystery — before nudging off a nearby cliffside to take in a car wreck and the grisly, burnt body next to it. The film's final shot mirrors this one with another car wreck before panning up and away to gaze wistfully at the horizon instead, a simple final shot that takes on special significance as the last image of Chabrol's career.

All of this adds up to a typically dense and complex film that might just be the best film of the director's final decade. Witty, twisty, and deceptively casual in its plotting, beneath its surface, Inspector Bellamy is emotionally bracing and morally inquisitive, as surprisingly layered at its protagonist. "There is more than meets the eye," indeed.

Comedy of Power

Claude Chabrol's Comedy of Power is somewhat ironically titled, and knowingly so, because there's little that's funny about this deadpan chronicle of an investigation into the abuses of various politically connected businessmen and corrupt politicians. The film opens, disingenuously, with the usual disclaimer about the film's fictional nature, any resemblance to real people being a coincidence, and so on, when of course this film is thoroughly grounded in real world analogues. These corrupt businessmen are extremely recognizable from any number of real scandals, these men (always men, of course) who line their pockets, lavish company funds on their mistresses, funnel money off into foreign bank accounts, dodge taxes and bribe anyone who could potentially stand in their way.

Investigating one of these scandals is Jeanne Charmant-Killman (Isabelle Huppert), a powerful judge who deposes various high-ranking corporate officers and political functionaries in an effort to trace a web of corruption and graft through the chambers of power, as high and as far as it goes. She starts with Humeau (François Berléand), the former chairman of a politically connected organization that operates in foreign countries, and she begins working up from him to more important figures in what seems to be a tremendous network of rich, powerful men. The film is very simple in form, consisting mostly of a series of conversations between Jeanne and her subjects, shot in intimate closeups that capture her brisk efficiency and their nervous, almost self-consciously boyish embarrassment at getting caught. Humeau is a mess, constantly scratching at his nervous skin condition, leaving splotchy red marks on his face as he withers under Jeanne's relentless questioning. Later, the smoother Boldi (Jean-François Balmer) confesses, chuckling shyly, that he's not used to squealing.


All these good old boys, these powerful men with their expensive lifestyles and mistresses and palatial homes, are being brought down and humbled by a petite, unassuming woman. As in many of Chabrol's late films, he's dealing with female archetypes and clichés: the victim (A Girl Cut In Two), the femme fatale (The Bridesmaid) and, here, the frigid career woman. Jeanne is a wiry bundle of nervous energy, seldom sleeping through the night, always getting up to check on some facts or think about her work. Her husband (Robin Renucci) is quietly detached from her, their marriage passionless. During interviews at work, she projects smug professionalism, asking sarcastically loaded questions and flashing quick, strained smiles that convey anything but mirth.

Jeanne is a bit of a stereotype, the cooly ambitious ladder-climbing bitch, but then the men she's opposing are every bit as stereotyped, because Chabrol is deconstructing this familiar male/female power dynamic, examining the ways in which male power is assumed and engrained in the very structure of society, while female power like Jeanne's is more ephemeral, requiring constant hard work to maintain, demanding every moment of her attention, and even then it can be taken away without warning at any time because she's not truly in power. The real power brokers meet in office suites with majestic views, smoking huge cigars, discussing their next move while Chabrol playfully accompanies their chats with outrageously sinister music, telegraphing their status as stereotypical big business movie villains.


Throughout the film, no matter how far Jeanne digs into these conspiracies and scandals, the business goes on as usual, the real powers untouched as the underlings and public figures take the fall and are seamlessly replaced by new, equally malleable figureheads. Towards the end of the film, these fat cats meet to analyze the damage done to their work by Jeanne's investigation and arrests, and they merely conclude, "the system held up well," that the overall structure remains intact no matter how many pawns are taken. Chabrol is powerfully conveying a sense of the fruitlessness of fighting against this kind of power from within: Jeanne dedicates her life to her work, to her sense of justice and her pride in her own competence, sacrificing private and familial happiness in the process, but what she ultimately accomplishes is a flashy show that does nothing to get to the core of the problem.

The real issue is international, and involves Western governments and businesses meddling in the Third World, as hinted at in the scene where several of these men meet with an African leader. Considering the real global stakes and the governmentally sanctioned exploitation of, as Jeanne says, countries where people routinely die of curable diseases, Jeanne's exposé of businessmen with mistresses and personal extravagances charged to corporate credit cards begins to seem petty and beside the point. If this is a "comedy of power," then the joke is on Jeanne, and it's probably being told in a smoke-filled private club by one of these untouchably powerful men.

The Bridesmaid

The Bridesmaid is a somewhat typical film for Claude Chabrol, a chilly, unsettling, at times darkly humorous movie that's nominally a thriller but doesn't put much emphasis at all on plot or mystery or even suspense. Philippe (Benoît Magimel) is a serious young man who falls in love with Senta (Laura Smet), a bridesmaid at his sister's wedding, a cousin of the groom. Senta, unfortunately, turns out to be utterly crazy, a lunatic femme fatale who says that the couple are fated to be together, and whose declarations of love are from the very beginning tinged with more than a hint of obsession. Philippe, who must be somewhat crazy himself, just can't stay away, even when she demands that he kill for her, and he keeps convincing himself that her crazier moments are playful performances — she's an actress, she says, who's had roles with Woody Allen and John Malkovich — rather than genuine expressions of the deeper malaise lurking behind her placid face.

Smet gives a fine, subtly creepy performance here, projecting a mild, blank exterior with an occasional slyly upturned smile, her very tranquility what makes her so unnerving. Magimel is playing a role very similar to his part in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher: a handsome, ambitious, slightly smug young man who gets way over his head in a relationship with stakes he doesn't fully understand. Not that Philippe is entirely normal, and there's an aura of sexual dysfunction throughout the film that feeds into the passionate affair between Philippe and Senta.

There's some awkward sexual tension between Philippe and his mother, Christine (Aurore Clément), in the opening scenes, some ambiguity in their relationship which is then transmuted into the stone carving of a woman's head that the family has dubbed Flora. Christine's boyfriend says that the statue looks like her, and when Philippe first sees Senta, he says that she looks like Flora, whereupon the camera pans over to the now-empty pedestal where the head had once sat, since they'd given it as a gift to Christine's boyfriend. Philippe steals it back and keeps it illicitly in his room, taking it out to admire when no one is around, as though it's a pornographic secret that he can only appreciate in private. This stone head is a locus of complex, unstated feelings, a surrogate for Senta with her blank, unreadable expressions, and Philippe frequently sleeps with the stone head curled up in his arms as though he's embracing a lover with an invisible body. At one point, he even holds the head tenderly and kisses Flora on the lips, kissing both his mom and his lover through this unfeeling stone, an uncomplicated stand-in for the flesh-and-blood women in his life.


Chabrol was, of course, always a big admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose thrillers provided something of a structuring principle for Chabrol's entire career, a central influence that he was continually mining and circling around. This is especially true here, and The Bridesmaid is built around a warped version of the murder-exchange deal from Strangers on a Train, with Senta asking Philippe to commit a murder for him, and she'll do the same for him, as a way of proving their love for one another. Chabrol doesn't delve into the suspense of the situation, since it's obvious from almost the moment she's introduced that Senta is disturbed, so the only real questions in the film arise from various misunderstandings and coincidences, with the "wrong" men being murdered. Chabrol then ends the film with a not-so-shocking but still satisfying revelation, unveiling a dessicated corpse with all the flair of Hitchcock's shot of Norman Bates' mother in Psycho — though of course Chabrol, never terribly interested in pat psychology or definitive explanations, ends the film there rather than dealing with the psychoanalytical aftermath.

There's some chilling material here, hinted at by the opening scenes in which Philippe and his family watch a TV report about a missing girl, which Chabrol uses as an opportunity to mock the exploitative, grisly sensationalism of TV news reports of violence, projecting these spectacles of suffering into meticulously decorated suburban living rooms. But the film is also darkly funny, with a subtle undercurrent of humor that tweaks the thriller and murder mystery conventions of the story; this is best seen in the moment when a police detective, tailing Philippe through a park, walks across the frame and steps in a big pile of dog shit, wiping his heel on the ground as he continues to follow his target. It's this kind of deadpan humor that cleverly shows Chabrol's slightly tongue-in-cheek perspective on this otherwise serious psychosexual thriller.

There's also a rich vein of sexual humor, since it's sex that blinds Philippe to the danger of his lover; he's having so much fun in bed that he manages to overlook the girl's obsession with murder and her strange, contradictory stories about a globe-trotting past of acting and prostitution. At one point, Philippe is talking on the phone about his home decoration job, discussing "pipework" with an elderly woman while Senta puts her hand between his legs and lowers herself to her knees in front of him. Everything becomes sexual, charged with eroticism, with passion in the bedroom tangled up with the violent passions broadcast over the TV and published in newspapers.

Merci pour le chocolat

Claude Chabrol's Merci pour le chocolat cleverly wreaks havoc with the underpinnings of the bourgeois family, disrupting its stability at every turn, eating away at its foundations until the family seems to be propped up only by lies, jealousy, suspicion and violence. The film opens with a wedding, as the chocolate heiress Marie-Clarie (Isabelle Huppert) and the virtuoso pianist André (Jacques Dutronc) get married — though they've actually been married before, and are now getting remarried after the death of André's second wife. During the ceremony, Marie-Claire even quips that they're using the same rings as they had the first time around. The gossipy chatter of the guests — with Chabrol's camera, predatory as ever, endlessly circling around them — only further undercuts this institution, this ceremony, that is ordinarily seen as the bedrock of bourgeois respectability. The rest of the film will further disrupt family structures, calling into question the foundations of paternity and inheritance: in this film, parentage is always vague and uncertain, shrouded in multiple deceits.

The plot is built around a long-ago confusion regarding André's child with his second wife, Lisbeth: there had been a momentary switch when André had been shown a baby girl as his own, rather than the son who was, apparently, actually his. Now the girl, Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), is grown up and coincidentally also training as a pianist, and when she finally hears the story, she decides to visit André. As she ingratiates herself into André's home and begins taking piano lessons from him, she gets tangled up in a strange chamber mystery as she witnesses the odd behavior of Marie-Claire, who's outwardly solicitous and pleasant but seems to be masking a deeper chilliness and some odd behavior involving the hot chocolate she makes every day. Multiple suspicions arise, mostly revolving around the death of André's second wife, who'd died in a car crash, her system full of alcohol and sleeping pills.


It's obvious, of course, what happened, though Chabrol is typically indirect. Even when Marie-Claire thinks back to the night Lisbeth (Lydia Andrei) died — the flashback is triggered by Marie-Claire's expressionless face dissolving into a scene of the family clustered around André's piano — there's no decisive indication of foul play. Instead, Chabrol's camera subtly insinuates by showing Lisbeth by the piano, walking away to go out, passing Marie-Claire, who watches the car pull away out the window and then walks over to the piano, the camera drifting over with her to watch her take the place previously occupied by André's wife.

It's that stalking, insistent camera that makes all of Chabrol's thrillers so distinctive. The camera circles around the characters, probing their relationships with its ever-so-slow turns, its persistent and incremental process of tracking around them, getting closer and closer without quite ever penetrating the surface. At one point, Marie-Claire enters a room in which Lisbeth's photographs are displayed. The camera lags behind her as she walks past it into the room, staring at a point offscreen, and then the camera tracks through the empty space, finding her face again in the blurry blankness, and continues past her to reveal the photo she's staring at, a head-on self-portrait of Lisbeth resting her face in her hands. Downstairs, Chabrol's camera begins circling again, as André and Jeanne listen to a piano recording together, Jeanne resting her face in her hands exactly as Lisbeth had — the girl has seen the photo, and is obviously evoking the dead woman's pose, which suggests that in a way Jeanne is as calculating, as manipulative, as Marie-Claire herself.


But they both hide it so well. Huppert and Mouglalis deliver subtle, subdued performances, each of them presenting a lovely, friendly exterior that perhaps masks something more calculating: in Marie-Claire's case, a truly sociopathic indifference that reveals itself, chillingly, in the final scenes, and in Jeanne's case a perhaps more benign penchant for selfish scheming. After all, as soon as she hears of the mix-up with André, knowing that he's a famous pianist, she seizes the opportunity to sneak into his life, to earn his help. Chabrol, by linking these women, seems to be suggesting that the sinister evil of Marie-Claire is only the most blatant manifestation of this kind of bourgeois self-interest. At root, it's about an insistence that surfaces are all that's important: "keeping up appearances is all that counts," Marie-Claire tells the board of the chocolate company she's inherited. She's talking about chocolate packaging, but she could just as well be talking about a broader bourgeois philosophy of life, a deep-seated belief that appearance is all that matters, even if the truth has little relation to the appearance.

That ties back into all the confusion over parentage: even beyond the baby mix-up, Jeanne eventually learns that she was conceived through a sperm donation from an anonymous man, while Marie-Claire reveals that she was adopted, which means that the chocolate fortune she's inherited is not her biological right after all. Considering how important biology generally is in the ancient roots of inheritance, these biological disconnects muddy the waters, slyly chipping away at the ways in which wealth and prestige are passed down through bourgeois families. Marie-Claire, especially, is an infiltrator, an adoptee who's taken on a bourgeois mantle but is essentially in disguise, a pretender. At the end of the film, she has a startling scene — remarkably honest and direct after all this shiftiness — in which she confesses that the happy homemaker guise she presents to the world is just that, a mask, a façade. "I have a knack for doing wrong," she says mildly, her face blank, when she's finally been caught in her deceits and schemes. "Instead of loving, I say 'I love you,' and people believe me."

This is a sharp, smart, low-key thriller that revolves around all these mostly unstated tensions about family. It has a typically chilly Chabrolian tone that is periodically broken by bursts of genuine emotion, like the lengthy final shot of a wet-eyed Marie-Claire, or the scene in which André's son Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) remembers his mother's death in a sloppy outburst of raw feeling. As usual for Chabrol, the biggest secret here is not anything to do with the plot, but rather a bigger secret, maybe even the biggest secret, which is the essential flimsiness and silliness of bourgeois conventions, which can hide so much.

The Eye of Vichy

Claude Chabrol's The Eye of Vichy is a fascinating documentary that collages together newsreel footage and propaganda films from the Vichy era in France. This compilation of materials shown in French theaters between 1940 and 1944 is presented almost without comment. A narrator introduces the film with a condensed history of World War II leading up to the invasion of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime, and thereafter the narrator mostly falls silent except for providing occasional snippets of historical context. The film is thus constructed primarily from Vichy's own transmissions, the propaganda and slanted news shown to French citizens during the war. As the text at the beginning of the film says, this is France not as it actually was during this period, but as the government wished people to think it was. This is a montage of primary sources that lays bare the lies and distortions that served as a cloak for the Vichy government's sinister collaboration with the Nazis.

Much of Chabrol's fictional oeuvre is concerned with probing the pathetic absurdity and ugliness of the surface presented by bourgeois culture; his films simultaneously document the appearance and the filthy reality underneath. This documentary, otherwise so different in form and content from the rest of Chabrol's work, actually has a similar thematic focus, using the Vichy regime's self-presentation to pick at the ugly truths that are never quite obscured by the gloss of propaganda. One of Chabrol's guiding principles in his films has always been that one can tell a lot about a culture by the lies it tells (about) itself, which is why he has always been so successful in deconstructing and ridiculing bourgeois culture. Here, he turns that same incisive eye for the significance of lies on an entire government founded on lies. This seemingly straightforward presentation of those lies, with only limited overt commentary, reveals a great deal about the workings of Vichy France.

Much of the propaganda collected here is of the usual sort, idealizing and idolizing the new rulers of France — even if sometimes they're replaced, without ceremony, weeks later — and presenting rosy depictions of Franco-German harmony. One particularly twisted piece, intended to discourage French dreams of liberation, is a cartoon in which the Allies are depicted as Mickey Mouse, Popeye and Donald Duck, planning to bomb France while the British broadcast duplicitous messages of peace. Chabrol mostly lets the material stand on its own, only occasionally correcting the particularly subtle lies. The propaganda is so crude and obvious that, for the most part, no comment is needed.

At times, the propagandists can even be startlingly open about the horrors of the situation. One newsreel speaks of Resistance fighters killing two French officers, and says that 50 men have been killed in reprisal, and that 50 more will be killed tomorrow if the culprits aren't caught. It's so offhanded, so casual in the way this propaganda piece admits to mass killings — and who did they kill, exactly? Obviously, in the name of inspiring fear, the regime sometimes admitted to its own violence and repression.


Indeed, one striking feature of this footage is how often the propaganda echoes, almost subconsciously, the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies. The newsreels repeatedly show trains running between France and Nazi Germany, but of course these are not the trains loaded with Jewish prisoners, destined for the concentration camps. Instead, the films show trains leaving for Germany full of French unemployed people, supposedly going to Germany to work, waving goodbye with a smile as the train rolls out of the station towards the east. The trains also bring back French prisoners of war from Germany, with sentimental scenes of returning soldiers embracing their wives, childrens and dogs. In another sequence, made shortly after Germany's invasion of Russia, the French propaganda abruptly turns on the Bolsheviks with an exposé of a Soviet embassy in Paris, revealing the hidden passages and peepholes and, chillingly, some seemingly innocuous stoves that the news announcer compares, apparently without shame or irony, to crematorium ovens.

Later in the film, in one of the few overt examples of Chabrol's editorial commentary, Chabrol juxtaposes images of happy French children heading to the countryside on vacation with a dry recounting of the numbers of Jewish men, women and children arrested and shipped to camps during the same summer. The sequence continues with a documentary on the wartime gas industry in France, and another on the recycling of hair from barbershops into raw material for clothes. The narration continues to explain what the films, of course, do not, that during this period Jews were being sent en masse to Auschwitz for "immediate extermination," their bodies burnt up in ovens, their heads shaved, their possessions stripped and stolen from them before their deaths. The sequence is chilling, with the dispassionate voiceover probing the unspoken truth that Vichy hid in favor of these dry industrial documentaries, the imagery of which is nevertheless eerily resonant with the real state of things.

Another informational piece collected here celebrates the destruction of old, pre-war films to make shoe polish and nail polish, showing images of pre-war film stars melting down, piles of film stock being thrown into processing machines that turn them to muck. That disregard for celluloid must have especially galled the cinephile Chabrol, but more than that it represents an antagonistic perspective towards history and culture, a wish to erase the truths of the past and replace them with the new, manufactured history of the Nazis and Vichy. The new authoritarian regimes of the fascist block exerted complete control over the image, and any images that could not be controlled were simply destroyed. Chabrol's film is a potent and informative rejection of that ethos: rather than destroying the images of this hateful past, he assembles them into a historical record of repression and denial, incontrovertible evidence that some might like to see burnt up, recycled for consumer products. If Vichy tried to erase the past and lie about the present, this film presents these images for all to see, preserving rather than destroying the past.

Betty

Claude Chabrol's Betty is a devastating, moving, extraordinarily acted portrait of a lost soul whose drinking and sexual promiscuity isolate her from the bourgeois family she's married into, and from which she's eventually ejected entirely. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, the film is a deeply affecting study of addiction and disconnection. Marie Trintignant delivers an astonishing performance as the title character, exploring the confusion, depression, and fragility of this aimless young woman — as well as the undercurrent of emotional coldness and cruelty that perhaps lies beneath her surface frailty.

The film opens with a sequence that suggests a familiar Chabrol thriller in the offing. Betty is picked up by a twitchy, increasingly creepy man who claims he's a doctor, and goes with him to a club called Le Trou, a reference perhaps to the Jacques Becker classic as well as an indication that the people inhabiting this bar have reached the bottom, that they've sunk so low they're underground and desperately trying to tunnel out. As Betty swigs glass after glass of whiskey, the doctor begins exhibiting increasingly disturbing signs that he's no more stable than the woman he picked up. His patter becomes chilling, even vaguely threatening, as he talks about dead animals and gets noticeably sweaty, not that Betty, immersed in her drinks, seems to care about her companion's unhinged demeanor. The scene seems to be building to an apex of sinister violence, particularly when the doctor, his sweaty visage framed in profile against the cool blue of a fish tank in the background, tells Betty that she has worms underneath her skin, and that he'll dig them out for her with a needle he keeps handy.

Chabrol is offering up a red herring here, setting up what seems to be a thriller of predation and violence, when in fact this is a very different kind of movie, and the encounter with the doctor is soon defused by the arrival of the kindly bar owner Mario (Jean-François Garreaud) and his lover, Laure (Stéphane Audran), who explains that the doctor is a drug addict. Far from being a violent thriller, this is a quietly intense character study, an intimate portrait of a woman who, like everyone else in Le Trou, has sunk to her seeming low point, fallen as far as she can.


Betty is taken in by Laure, a woman of the upper-class who's rejected society after the death of her husband, retreating to a nice but isolated hotel and making nightly visits to Le Trou. As Laure helps Betty to recover from her desolation, Betty's story is doled out in fits and starts via flashbacks. She'd been married to Guy (Yves Lambrecht), the youngest son of a wealthy and prestigious bourgeois family, until Guy and his domineering mother (Christiane Minazzoli) had walked in on Betty having sex with one of the many lovers she'd taken to distract herself from a numbing, alienating existence. Betty was sleepwalking through life, and Chabrol, of course, is excellent at portraying the deadening effect of bourgeois home life. Betty felt detached even from her two daughters, who were so well-cared-for by a hired nurse that Betty was superfluous, a stranger to her own children, basically only interacting with them to give them a good-night kiss. She had a seemingly ideal life, on paper at least, but it never truly felt like her life, which is why she secretly drinks and arranges her constant affairs. When she gets caught, it seems like she wants to get caught, that she's secretly setting herself up for a confrontation, for something to shake her out of this dreadful nothingness.

Trintignant is exceptional here, plumbing the depths of this woman's misery and seemingly irresistible urge towards self-destruction. One of her lovers, a medical student (Thomas Chabrol) who loves to psychoanalyze her, asks her, "you know your problem?" Betty abruptly becomes serious, intent, flatly answering, "no, tell me," her desperate need to understand herself showing through what had otherwise been a somewhat casual conversation. The way she says it, it's obvious that she really wants to understand herself and her "problem," to pick apart why she is the way she is, even if this pretentious young man with his rote recitations of Freudian subtext doesn't actually have any of the answers. It's a small moment, the nuances of Trintignant's performance embodied in every little line like this, always communicating the submerged intensity of this sad woman.

Audran, in her last role in a Chabrol film, is equally remarkable, as a woman who is in her way every bit as damaged as Betty is, but has managed to recover, to carve out a small and comfortable life for herself as a balm for her loss and sadness. She is a glimpse of a possible future for Betty, and perhaps Betty herself also sees it, because in the film's devastating and unexpected finale, Betty, selfishly rejecting the possibility of growth or true healing, simply grasps for what her friend has and takes it. Betty, beneath her hurt and her victimhood, has a cold and calculating side to her as well, a darkness that prevents her from seeing a less destructive route out of her rut. The coda, which chronicles the minimal effect of all this emotion and self-destructiveness on the chilly, perpetually polite world of the bourgeois — the world that both Laure and Betty had fled for different reasons — adds a final ironic twist to the film's bleak picture. It's a powerful and intense film that is unsparing in its depiction of the central character's weaknesses, as well as her surprising and cruel strengths.

Madame Bovary

Claude Chabrol is so thoroughly associated with the genre of the thriller that it's always a surprise when he ventures outside its confines. Certainly, Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary is not what one expects of Chabrol; a period piece literary adaptation is very far from the director's familiar territory, even if this novel of a bourgeois woman's boredom and rebellion resonates thematically with Chabrol's usual topics. Chabrol plays it mostly straight, sticking faithfully to the source novel and delivering a dry, somewhat cool costume drama that doesn't really play to the director's strengths.

It's the story of Emma Bovary (Isabelle Huppert), married to the doctor Charles (Jean-François Balmer), who she soon realizes is a total bore, unable to provide her with the glamorous, exciting life that she dreams about. Dissatisfied with this dull marriage and her stultifying life as a homemaker, Emma alternates between periods of passionate affairs and wild spending, and periods of recommitment to the virtues of family and home. She has two torrid affairs, first with the sly playboy Rodolphe (Christophe Malavoy) and then with the sensitive young Leon (Lucas Belvaux), but neither of these loves can ultimately save her from the self-destructive streak that leads her closer and closer to oblivion.

Emma is a romantic who's filled with dreams by the novels she reads as an escape from her dull, passionless husband, whose intellect she finds so wanting. Under the influence of her desire for Leon, she walks around her garden, practicing swooning declarations of love with a theatricality that obviously indicates she's acting out scenes, imagining her own life as a novel, playing herself as a character in a romantic book. She's filled with grand dreams that are very distinct from the unfulfilling life she actually leads. In one of her happiest moments, she and her husband are invited to a fancy ball by a local dignitary, and Emma is so overwhelmed by the glamour and finery on display that she nearly swoons with pleasure, drifting around the hall listening to the stimulating conversations that she'll never have at home with her husband.


Chabrol wittily stages the big seduction scene between Emma and Rodolphe by cutting back and forth between the couple and the agricultural fair going on outside. He alternates between Rodolphe's passionate come-ons to Emma and the awarding of prizes for best manure and best pigs and so on, cleverly subverting the romance of the scene with these earthy rural details. After all, for Rodolphe this is just a game, a conquest, while for Emma it's like a scene out of one of her beloved novels, the fulfillment of her dreams and secret desires — the romance is a sham, stained by baseness. When Emma rides with Rodolphe into the woods and finally gives in to her passions, it's obvious that she's acting, performing a role. She's more excited by the idea of this secret affair than she is by its reality, which is perhaps why Chabrol discreetly cuts away from the actual lovemaking. The real pleasure for Emma is not the actual sex but the romance and melodrama of it; she gets shivers of pleasure by looking in the mirror and saying, "I have a lover," pronouncing it with the wonder of a woman living out her literary fantasy.

Emma is constantly searching for something, though she's not sure what it is, and one institution that the film repeatedly holds up as inconsequential is religion and the church, which offer scant comfort. She goes to see the village priest, but he just talks past her without really hearing her; submerged in the physical problems and poverty of his flock, he's unable, or unwilling, to appreciate the more metaphysical, less tangible problems that Emma wants to tell him about. The frustration of the shot is sublimely realized: while Emma stares straight ahead, her eyes wet, struggling to express her thoughts, the priest prattles on about the problems of his parishioners, oblivious to Emma's troubles — or, perhaps, deliberately stomping over them, trying to shame her out of her misery by pointing out how many worse problems are experienced by people of lower social classes.

The film is generally well-realized and well-acted, and moments like this are staged by Chabrol to maximize the emotional and thematic subtext of Emma's various encounters. The film as a whole, however, doesn't quite connect: it lacks the satirical bite of Chabrol's best work, despite the thematic continuity with his more personal works, and too much of it feels like a scrupulously faithful condensation of the source novel rather than the work of a director applying his own voice to this material.

Story of Women

Claude Chabrol's Story of Women is an excellent satirical drama that explores life under the German occupation of France and the Vichy government that served as puppets for the Nazis. Like Chabrol's Violette, made a decade earlier, this film is based on a true story of an infamous woman, in this case Marie Latour, who performed abortions and rented rooms to prostitutes in order to support herself and her family during the Vichy era. As in Violette, Isabelle Huppert again plays a woman whose amorality and self-interest come into conflict with a hypocritical morality that's especially difficult for women to navigate successfully.

Marie starts the film as a typical housewife of the era, scrounging and struggling to provide for her two children while her husband Paul (François Cluzet) is a prisoner of war in Germany. Paul's return doesn't change things much for Marie, since he can't hold down a job and is, understandably, interested in reuniting carnally with his wife after his time in the camps. Marie isn't interested, though, and seems to resent Paul for returning while others, like her Jewish friend Rachel and the men sent to Germany to work as an exchange for the returning prisoners, were sent away. While Paul wastes away at home, unable to work, making cutout pictures to pass the time, Marie gradually begins earning money by performing abortions — for prostitutes, women who have slept with German soldiers, and women already overburdened with children — and renting her room out during the day to her prostitute friend Lulu (Marie Trintignant).

Marie is doing what she can to make her way through a difficult and desperate time. Food is scarce, and before Marie begins bringing in a real income, the family lives in a cramped apartment and subsists on thin soup that Paul says is as bad as the food he got in the camps. Marie seems to have nothing but contempt for men, except perhaps for Lucien (Nils Tavernier), who she eventually takes as a lover, presumably because he's as much of a self-interested opportunist as she is, since he openly collaborates with the occupying Nazis. Otherwise, Marie knows, men don't understand, especially not her ineffectual husband. She justifies her actions with the rationalization that she's feeding her family and doing valuable work to help struggling women, and when she's faced with the consequences of her actions — in a powerful scene where a woman confronts Marie about the death of her sister from a botched abortion procedure — Marie is only briefly affected before she's able to move on cheerfully and blithely with her life.


The film is very much about the moral cost of surviving in a time when morality has been twisted and corrupted, and especially about the specific dilemma of women in this situation. One of the film's most emotionally intense scenes is a prolonged closeup on the face of a woman who explains to Marie why she wants an abortion: she's been pregnant six times in seven years, and resents her children, hates the way her body has been changed by these constant pregnancies, hates how she's been made to feel like an animal whose only role is bearing children and producing milk. It's an astonishing moment, and though Marie doesn't seem to have any feminist motives for her actions, there's no mistaking that her work is an expression of the helplessness of women in this time, in this system. Other women come to see Marie after sleeping with German soldiers, refusing to have children resulting from the occupation of their country — and the occupation of their bodies.

The real stakes here become especially clear in the film's powerful final act, in which Marie is arrested for her crimes and tried by a hypocritical Vichy court that's eager to make an example of her, to reassert French morality and regain some of the national self-respect lost by the country's military defeat and occupation. The judge tells Marie, with a self-satisfied smirk, that her actions reveal "a certain cynicism, a certain debasement" that is, of course, the debasement of France itself beneath the Vichy regime. The judges speak of morality while shipping out Jewish prisoners to Germany to be killed, while engaging in cowardly trades by which French prisoners of war are returned to France but other French citizens are sent to work in Germany, effectively trading one set of prisoners for another. The male tribunal that sits in judgment over Marie is eager to condemn her, eager for some sense of morality and justice, and she's an easy target: an uneducated woman who acted in self-interest to provide for herself and her family, to elevate herself above the generally miserable conditions afflicting the country.

This is a specifically Christian hypocrisy, too, and the Vichy court is intimately linked to Christianity. In the women's prison, nuns preside over the prisoners, and some of the women prisoners condemn Marie for her sins while others seem more understanding. There's cruel irony in Vichy swathing itself in Christian morality, speaking of the souls of the unborn while shipping thousands of living souls off to the death camps. In one fantastic scene, Marie spits out a bile-encrusted prayer that expresses her contempt for this religious sham: "Hail Mary, full of shit. Rotten is the fruit of your womb." Huppert delivers a fantastic performance throughout, but especially in the harrowing final act, as all the luxuries and fineries she'd accumulated throughout the film are stripped away, leaving behind a vulnerable, confused woman who doesn't entirely understand why she's being punished in this way. Marie isn't always an especially likable character, but Huppert perfectly captures the complicated psychological makeup of this woman, while Chabrol contextualizes her as a product of her times, a reflection of the warped morality instituted by the very people who ultimately punish her.

Inspector Lavardin

In 1985, Claude Chabrol's Cop au vin reinvigorated his career at a time when he'd been struggling and floundering. A darkly comic murder mystery set in a small town where everyone had secrets to hide, it was especially notable for the twinkly-eyed presence of the comic actor Jean Poiret, playing the cheerfully brutal and unethical Inspector Jean Lavardin, investigating a murder with wit and excessive methods. The film was such a success that Chabrol immediately followed it up with Inspector Lavardin, which as the title indicated shifted the inspector to the center of the story. There's some continuity with the first film, in that Lavardin's excessive brutality in dunking a suspect's head underwater had got him transferred even further into the country, but otherwise he seems none the worse for wear, every bit the same mischievous, wickedly clever bloodhound from the first film, digging up trouble and mystery that stretches well beyond the murder mystery that he's ostensibly solving.

Like the first Lavardin film, this one is all about ferreting out the weirdness and wickedness of the supposedly respectable, and in this it's a specifically Christian, Catholic form of hypocrisy that Lavardin's investigation is uncovering. The opening scenes, before Lavardin's arrival, introduce the respected Catholic writer and moralist Raoul Mons (Jacques Dacqmine), having a joyless lunch with his family. Mons hilariously tells his maid/cook that they're just "simple folk," that she can place the food on the table rather than serving them, which already marks him as one of Chabrol's typical comically clueless bourgeois figures. His family — wife Hélène (Bernadette Lafont), stepdaughter Véronique (Hermine Clair) and his wife's brother Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy) — doesn't seem to have any more respect for him than Chabrol does, and they take any opportunity to have some fun when he's out of the room. While Raoul's not around, Claude entertains the women with Chaplin's famous dance of the dinner rolls, and then Raoul heads off to lead a movement to ban a blasphemous play called Our Father Who Farts in Heaven.

Needless to say, this is a richly, darkly funny film, and once Lavardin arrives on the scene, his deceptively casual form of investigation only adds to the fun. He's not quite as charmingly fascistic as he was in Cop au vin, but he's still a little light on ethics, especially when it's revealed that Raoul's wife is Lavardin's former lover, and the detective promptly moves into the dead man's home. The more he investigates, the more he finds out about Raoul's hypocritical life. Chabrol really pours on the outrage: this supposed Christian is a drug dealer and user, a philanderer, and eventually it turns out, a blackmailer and rapist.


Lavardin, who's long been nursing some pain over Hélène leaving him long ago, seems less interested in the mystery, more interested in protecting Hélène and her daughter, who's named Véronique just as Lavardin had once wanted to name his own daughter, if he'd had one. He quickly becomes paternal and protecting towards the girl — who even shares the inspector's piercing blue eyes, though there's no indication she's actually his daughter — and there's a sense of yearning for family in the dogged inspector, who towards the end of the film suddenly claims that he has a family, then admits with a shrug that the photo in his wallet was not of his family but of a woman who'd killed her kids.

Chabrol brings a typically sharp visual style to this farcical murder mystery. There are numerous shots that highlight the theme of surveillance and witnessing running through the film: shots through binoculars, through the viewfinder of a camera, from a high vantage point where a hidden recording device sits, and through a magnifying glass that expands the inspector's eye to massive size, because of course he takes in everything. (That last shot is referenced in Chabrol's final film Inspector Bellamy, whose titular cop is a descendant of Lavardin.) Claude has a bizarre hobby that also relates to seeing, painting glass eyes that copy the eyes of famous people (Salvador Dali, complete with a set of eyebrows) and people he knows, like his sister. In Claude's room, surrounded with shelves on which pairs of eyeballs sit staring, raised on stalks or hidden behind masquerade masks, one can't help but feel that one is being constantly watched, but the same impression dogs the inspector and the other characters throughout the film. A pair of tabloid photographers prowl around everywhere, snapping pictures and mirroring the sneakiness of the inspector himself, who also watches from in hiding, seeing things he's not supposed to see. And in the film's final twist the mystery is solved through a surveillance video tape, a hidden eye looking down on the action and revealing the truth.

Not that Lavardin is especially interested in the truth, because as soon as he learns it, his efforts shift to covering it up, which makes the film's ending strangely hilarious and ironic. Chabrol is clearly having fun here, and though the film is concerned with the usual Chabrol theme of digging into the seedy underbelly of things, it's obviously in a much lighter context. Part of the fun is reuniting Brialy and Lafont, who'd appeared, together and separately, in some of Chabrol's earliest features, and here provide some continuity with the director's past. There's also continuity with the previous Lavardin film, especially in the inspector's obsessive breakfast habits, here indicated with his scolding of the cook for her overdone eggs. Chabrol's second outing with the clever, amoral inspector is as delightful, and as delightfully perverse, as the first.

Violette

Claude Chabrol's Violette is a fascinating, ambiguous study of a young woman who might be a sociopath, a victim, or both. Based on the real case of Violette Nozière (Isabelle Huppert), who poisoned her parents in 1930s Paris, the film is curiously ambivalent about its titular anti-heroine. Huppert's Violette is impenetrable and deliberately contradictory. Sexy, desperate for attention and affection, disturbingly cool about her crimes and her violence, she's an intriguing character who's all but unknowable in the end. Violette is a willful girl who presents a charming, innocuous demeanor to her rather gullible parents, who buy her repeated and flimsy lies without much debate, while outside of the home she prostitutes herself — while vociferously resisting the label of a "whore" — and steals and lies habitually.

Violette switches between two very different looks throughout the film, embodying her contradictions in her appearance. At home with her parents, she wears no makeup and dresses in demure, youthful clothing. But once out of the view of her parents, she immediately puts on heavy makeup, coating her lips with bright red lipstick and painting her nails red as well. Her age is ambiguous, just like everything about her, since her childish clothes sometimes make her look like a little girl — albeit one with Huppert's already-world-weary face — while when she's made up she looks like she could be anywhere between twenty or thirty years old. The effect is especially disorienting when Chabrol cuts in flashbacks to Violette's childhood in which Huppert is made to look even younger, the effect somewhat disturbing and disorienting, a grown woman playing a child, as though even as a girl she was older than her age.

Outside the house, Violette dresses all in black, with a very distinctive look, a hat perched at an angle atop her curls, often all but obscuring her eyes so that only the red smirk of her mouth peeks out from beneath the shadowy brim. With her black furs wrapped tightly around her, her collar high around her face, she's often reduced to a few cartoonish features: the black-rimmed eyes, the bright lips, the rouged cheeks, a caricature of threatening beauty, the ultimate femme fatale, her sexiness infused with a sense of danger and darkness.


She's like a black widow, but there's also a sense of vulnerability in her, a closely guarded secret hurt. She accuses her father (Jean Carmet) of abusing her, but Chabrol makes it very ambiguous whether Violette was lying or not. In Violette's flashbacks, she remembers strange scenes from her youth that suggest her disconnection from her parents, and in one of these flashbacks her father is bouncing her on his knee, an innocent fatherly gesture made sinister by Violette's accusations. There does seem to be more than a hint of inappropriate desire between father and daughter, especially when he watches her bathing herself topless in the bathroom, just a thin, gauzy curtain separating them and failing to obscure her body from the eyes of her father. This incestual subtext is counterbalanced by some seemingly idyllic flashbacks to Violette's childhood, in which she fondly remembers her father as a shouting, waving figure flying by on the locomotive he drives, yelling out her name as he passes, his face stained with grease. At what point did Violette's life go wrong, at what point did this sweet girl, so excited to see her father, become the chilly, money-obsessed monster she is when she's older? By having Huppert play Violette even in these childhood flashbacks, rather than substituting a child actress, Chabrol adds a weird, unsettling vibe to the girl's memories that suggests something dark lurking unseen in her past.

Other than these hints and insinuations, however, Violette mostly just seems like an ordinary young girl with an ordinarily overbearing family. Her father is clueless and dotes on her, while her mother (Stéphane Audran) snoops through Violette's things and treats her with cynical suspicion. Violette is also involved with the handsome young Jean (Jean-François Garreaud), who she clings to desperately as her ideal man for undefined reasons, even though all he does is pump her for money and skips out on her at any opportunity. Violette seems desperate for affection, desperate for some kind of life outside her home and her family, and despite her superficially cool demeanor she's very clingy with the distant, obviously manipulative Jean.

Chabrol is gradually building towards the especially unsettling conclusion, which does little to clear up Violette's character, while setting her alongside a prison cell mate played by Bernadette Lafont, who'd been the sexy bad girl at the center of some of Chabrol's earliest films. The film's final narration, recounting Violette's eventual redemption, accompanies a shot of the girl staring blankly back at the camera, as though daring the viewers to judge her, to try to understand her, to probe the darkness and strangeness lurking behind those glassy, black-rimmed eyes.

La femme infidèle

It is already apparent from the first few moments of Claude Chabrol's La femme infidèle that this film will be concerned with domesticity and the illusion of the happy home. The film opens at the lavish country estate of the Desvallées family, Charles (Michel Bouquet), his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), and their son Michel (Stéphane di Napoli). They're enjoying an idyllic, relaxing day at home, sitting on the sunny lawn, enjoying one another's company. They come together around a table in an almost parodic, self-conscious tableau of domestic tranquility and shared love, and then Chabrol blurs the image, erasing this happy family into an indistinct smear as the credits roll and the suggestive title appears, announcing right up front that this seeming peace and perfection is all a lie.

Chabrol is, in his usual stoical, subtle way, examining the fault lines and secrets of this ideal family. Even if the title didn't telegraph much of the film's plot up front, it would be obvious early on that something is amiss here: the family seems somehow too happy, everything too smooth and frictionless, their smiles too sweet and their chatter too banal. A bedroom scene reveals the sexless detachment between the couple, a disjunction between the smoldering sensuality of Hélène and the staid, lazy comfort of Charles, who seems to be taking his wife for granted, slipping easily into middle-aged boredom. As he himself admits, he's set in his ways, unwilling to change, not interested in exercising to get rid of his middle-aged paunch, a sign of his complacency. Chabrol pans from Charles lying in bed in pajamas, the covers pulled up over him, across the room to Hélène, framed by a doorway, doing her nails in a very short nightie, her long legs curled up and extended sensually, a very provocative and sexy image. Back across the room, Charles gets out of bed and turns on a record of pleasant classical music, then gets back under the covers. When Hélène joins him, she doesn't get under the sheets but stretches her body out on the bed, in a pose that all too obviously offers sex, though Charles, tightly repressed beneath the covers, barely seems interested. In this rigorously composed sequence, Chabrol has laid out, through body language and his clinically precise camera movements, the essential dysfunction of this marriage, which is superficially happy, all smiles and sunny days, but totally devoid of passion.

It's no surprise, then, that Hélène is spending many of her days in Paris with a lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet). While it's always sunny and edenic at her home with Charles, she goes to see her lover in the rainy city, walking through a downpour, then reclining in a postcoital bed with an unreadable expression on her face. The film's title would suggest that this is going to be a study of an adulterous woman, but Chabrol doesn't explore Hélène's reasons for her affair, doesn't delve into what she feels for this man she visits during the week. There's obviously passion between them, in a way that there just isn't with Charles, and that's it. More than her adultery and her psychology, the film is about the nature of marriage and the nuclear family, the nature of happiness, even. Because a pivotal event over halfway through the film disrupts the family's happiness and reveals just how illusory their contentment and stability are; on the surface, nothing happens, but the familial interplay has been unbalanced, its illusion of perfection fading away into affectless going-through-the-motions and awkwardness.


Chabrol makes this discomfort felt especially in a strange evening where tensions arise over Michel's jigsaw puzzle, which is missing a piece. The boy's constant complaining about the puzzle irritates his parents, and they all begin sniping at each other, letting all their long-suppressed feelings come to the surface. In one telling moment, the boy accuses his father of hiding the puzzle piece, which is a nonsensical accusation that points to something else entirely: Charles has not hidden the puzzle piece, but he has hidden something else, a body, and in doing so he's also undone the secret foundation that this happy home had been built upon. The missing puzzle piece is both a corpse and the family's very happiness.

Interestingly, the way the family falls apart like this after Hélène's affair ends suggests that what was holding this family together all along was the wife and mother's ability to find pleasure outside the home; without Victor, she just lounges around the house, her face blank, not even bothering to get dressed. Everyone else has a reason to go out — Michel to school and Charles to work — but she had only her affair, because otherwise she's just a housewife in a sumptuous bourgeois house where all the work is done by maids and servants, her very comfort and her security leading to her boredom and disaffection.

The film's ending is perhaps its most interesting part, so rich in subtext that it elevates the film to a whole other level. Hélène finally discovers a shocking truth about her husband, but rather than confront him or get angry with him, she burns the evidence of what he did, and then walks towards him in a remarkable shot, Chabrol's camera tracking with her, observing the strange, secret smile that keeps threatening to flicker across her lips, her love for her husband reignited in the most surprising way. The film's final shot is even better, and even more mysterious: what might be a point-of-view shot from Charles' perspective of his wife and son, until the camera begins gliding and tracking to the side, nudging in closer towards the mother and son standing together in their garden, the camera gradually passing behind some bushes so that the family is obscured by the branches, glimpsed through the latticework of foliage. The shot's meaning is ambiguous and complex, loaded with emotional intensity and narrative suggestion, making it a perfect ending to a very thought-provoking film.

Les bonnes femmes

Les Bonnes Femmes was Claude Chabrol's fourth feature, but in many ways it feels like his true debut, the first of his films in which his style is fully developed. Here, Chabrol largely forgoes the melodramatic and narrative elements of his first two films, as well as the brief detour into lurid Hitchcockian bombast that was À double tour. After that bigger-budget production, he returned to the street-level realism of his first two features, adopting an even rougher and looser style than even those films, while also sharpening his razor-sharp, unpredictable wit. The film follows a group of four young women who all work as salesgirls in an appliance store that never seems to get any customers. They stand around all day, bored and chatting, fending off the lecherous advances of their elderly boss, gossiping and talking about love. The four women are very different. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is a wild party girl who loves to drink and laugh; she's dating a soldier but won't pass up dalliances with other men whenever he's not around. Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is happily engaged, though her fiancé Henri (Sacha Briquet) is something of a snob who obviously thinks she's uneducated and is afraid of what his cultured parents will think of her. Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) is the romantic of the group, a serious young woman who is breathlessly waiting for a true love to come along and sweep her off her feet. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) is more mysterious and independent; she's the only one of the group who doesn't define herself in terms of men, instead sneaking off every night to sing in a variety show, simply because she loves to perform. Out of all the women, she's the only one who's doing something for herself, not seeming to think about men or romance, only doing what she wants to do because she enjoys it — even though she's also strangely embarrassed of her late-night theatrics.

Through his observation of the other three women, Chabrol is exploring the nature of relationships between men and women, and the portrait he paints is not a pretty one. The film is often pitched as a comedy, sometimes even a broadly hilarious one, but percolating underneath its surface humor are some very bitter, cynical conclusions about the nature of romantic love. There are three different templates for love on display here. The most traditional is the relationship between Rita and Henri. They love each other, and she seems happy — she sighs just thinking that he loves her — but the scene where he takes her to meet his parents over lunch reveals the cracks in their seemingly perfect romance. Before his parents show up, he barrages Rita with a series of admonitions and warnings, telling her what she should and shouldn't say, what she should order, and trying to hurriedly catch her up on some details about Michelangelo so she'll appear to know something about art. He's condescending towards her, and in the process reveals some of the uglier undercurrents of this relationship.


A different template for male behavior is provided by the duo of boisterous ladies' man Marcel (Jean-Louis Maury) and his older, out-of-shape friend Albert (Albert Dinan). These two pick up Jane and Jacqueline at the beginning of the film, loudly and laughingly hitting on the girls until finally the more flirtatious Jane gives in and agrees to go out with them that night. They take the girls out for dinner and to a strip club, then, after Jacqueline breaks away from them, they both bring Jane back to Albert's apartment. They're boorish and loutish, putting their hands all over her, clumsily trying to get her to agree to a ménage à trois before she finally just goes off with Marcel alone. Later, the girls run into Marcel and Albert again, at a swimming pool, but this time, they've already gotten what they want from these particular girls, so they just act like even more overt assholes, dunking the girls underwater and chasing them around the pool. Chabrol is obviously dealing with male archetypes here, and while Henri represents the spoiled mama's boy who seems nice enough except for his condescension and pretensions, Marcel and Albert are the perpetually single jerks who are only interested in women for sex, for a night of fun and no more.

Jacqueline stays away from men like this, even politely rejecting the advances of the boyish young guy who sweetly asks her out at her job. She's possessed by the romantic notion of true love, and she thinks she's found it in the form of a mysterious man with a motorcycle, André (Mario David), who's been following her around constantly, stalking her while she's out with friends or at work, but never approaching her directly. She builds up this mystery man into her ideal, and believes that she's in love with him even though she's never met him. When she finally does meet him and begins dating him at the end of the film, Chabrol presents their relationship as exactly the kind of idyllic love that she had imagined it to be, briefly allowing the film to get swept up in Jacqueline's romantic reveries. And then, chillingly, a love scene in a deserted forest area seamlessly transitions into a murder, as André strangles his new lover to death and leaves her limp body in the dirt. Chabrol shoots the scene in such a way that it's ambiguous where lovemaking ends and murder begins: a wide shot shows the two lovers lowering themselves to the ground, André climbing on top of Jacqueline, and then Chabrol cuts to a closer perspective that partially obscures the view of what's going on, as André begins strangling her. One doesn't even notice the moment at which her moans of passion become anguished bird calls of terror and pain.


This turn of events is foreshadowed by the scene where a middle-aged co-worker shows Jacqueline a grisly souvenir, a handkerchief soaked in the blood of a man who'd been publicly executed for killing women. She'd romanticized this man, this killer, referring to him as "so pale and handsome" that all the girls who saw his death were swooning and overwhelmed. Jacqueline looks at the handkerchief with wide eyes and quietly listens to this story, and it's hard to know what she's thinking. This woman may be older than the young women in the film, but it seems that she has not learned any lessons by growing older, she has not rid herself of the naïve romanticism that leads these women to allow themselves to be won over, repeatedly, by cruel, brutish men who don't respect them.

The twist, in the film's final minutes, may seem abrupt, but it's all part of Chabrol's deliberate rejection and subversion of the conventions of romanticism, particularly the kind of goopy Hollywood romanticism offered up by the movies. Chabrol opts instead for gritty, near-documentary realism in many scenes, and the sudden intrusion of narrative at the end of the film only serves to shatter these women's remaining illusions about love and men. Chabrol is rejecting the narrative of romantic love in the most jarring way possible, briefly hinting that everything's going to work out wonderfully for this couple, before abrasively tearing apart the Hollywood happy ending. The formation of the couple, the goal and raison d'etre of so much romantic cinema, is here tragic and deadly rather than cheery. This should have been the obvious destination, though: not only does Chabrol offer several visual clues in which André looks sinister and unsettling even before his true nature is revealed, but the film is scored to a driving thriller soundtrack that seems incongruously creepy and foreboding for much of the movie, until the ending makes sense of it.

Chabrol then drives the point home with a brilliant coda in which a new, anonymous young woman, shy and reserved like Jacqueline was, sits at a table in a club until a man (whose face is never shown) comes up to her and asks her to dance. As they dance, the woman staring pointedly into the camera, while romantic music plays and a disco ball glistens overhead, but the previous scene with André and Jacqueline makes the scene foreboding and sinister. What kind of man is this? What fate awaits this trusting young woman who just wants to find love? Will she be killed — or will she just get her heart broken?

À double tour

À double tour, Claude Chabrol's third film and his first shot in color, is a boldly stylized Hitchcockian thriller that prefigures the director's later preoccupation with tearing apart the pretensions of the bourgeois family unit through murder and melodrama. It's a lurid and bizarre film, all cocked angles and garish colors, its structure occasionally darting off for serpentine, complicated flashbacks in which events are always filtered through the skewed sensibility of the one doing the remembering. Chabrol is viciously, hilariously sending up the bourgeois family, tearing it apart from the inside, ridiculing the stiffness and ostentatious formality that disguise so many sordid truths. The wealthy Marcoux family is a hot bed of dysfunction. Father Henri (Jacques Dacqmine) is openly having an affair with Léda (Antonella Lualdi), a glamorous young Italian woman who lives immediately adjacent to the Marcouxs' rural estate. His wife Thérèse (Madeleine Robinson) knows about the affair, and the couple has an antagonistic relationship based around fierce exchanges of barbed insults, constantly trying to wound one another with words. It's no surprise that their children are damaged by this tense marriage: Richard (André Jocelyn) is a clinging mama's boy, and Elisabeth (Jeanne Valérie) lashes out by dating the most inappropriate guy she can find, the relentlessly rude townie Laszlo (Jean-Paul Belmondo).

Belmondo's riotous, crude performance as Laszlo is a highlight of the film, particularly in the early scenes. He's a sloppy and free-spirited disturber of bourgeois respectability, an unpredictable presence, tearing things apart just because he can: he unfurls Thérèse's knitting, parades around naked in front of the chaste Elisabeth, tries to convince Henri to leave the family for Léda, and in a hilarious scene, voraciously downs a tremendous breakfast, slurping down drinks first thing in the morning and talking to Thérèse through a mouth crammed with food. Laszlo is everything the Marcoux family is not, untamed and unconstrained in every way, especially sexually: he's engaged to Elisabeth, but this doesn't stop him from ogling every pretty girl he sees walk by (accompanied by swirling, playful music) and, as he gets drunker, even making appreciative noises at passing grandmothers.

The Marcouxs' maid, Julie (Bernadette Lafont), is a similarly disturbing presence, which is perhaps why Chabrol opens the film with a provocative sequence in which Julie hangs out the window of her room in nothing but her underwear, taunting the gardener and the milk man — not to mention the prudish lady of the house, not to mention the audience — with her casual sexiness. Like Laszlo, Julie represents the freedom and playfulness of the lower class, totally unfettered by manners or good taste. She bathes in the voyeurism of men, and Chabrol even has Richard leer at her curvy body through a keyhole. Julie always seems to be walking around the house with a little smirk, as though she knows something that no one else does, and she's comfortable in her own skin in a way that eludes the tradition-bound upper-class characters, who have nothing but rules and obligations and codes of behavior hemming them in.


And they're anything but comfortable in their skin, particularly Thérèse, an aging woman who's continually told by her openly straying husband that she's ugly and undesirable. In one harrowing scene, he grabs her hair and holds her up to a segmented mirror, chopping her face up into jagged geometric fragments, while Chabrol playfully cuts away to a peacock strutting by on the grounds outside, a symbol of the beauty this woman feels she's lacking. Chabrol's always shooting into mirrors or through various screens, propping his camera up high for jaunty angles, shooting one pivotal scene through a greening, algae-crusted fish tank, the fish floating across the frame as a murder plays out in the background.

That's right, this is, at least sort of, a murder mystery, though it takes over half the film for the murder to occur, it's announced in the most offhanded way — by Julie, of course, who seems slightly bemused even here — and there's never really any mystery about the killer's identity. In fact, the film's structure is downright bizarre, as the murderer is identified almost as soon as the murder happens, and Chabrol then launches into a lengthy flashback in which the murder plays out, and then everything can be wrapped up. He's entirely uninterested in treating this like a conventional thriller or mystery, instead just using the murder as a focal point for all the repressed emotions and dysfunctions of this stuffy upper-class family.

The murder scene is the film's second flashback, with the first being an even longer and stranger flashback in which Henri describes his day with Léda to Thérèse. This flashback is such an idealized, romanticized vision of a Hollywood-style love affair that Chabrol seems to be mocking it, suggesting that this is simply the all-too-perfect way that the pathetic Henri imagines his affair to be. Léda, with the possible exception of a brief early scene where the milk man delivers her daily bottle, is only seen in flashbacks from the point of view of the men in her life, never in the present and never unfiltered by someone else's memory of her. She's an artificial construct, the ideal mistress, sexy and adoring and totally devoid of any personality traits beyond her vivacious manner and her slightly puzzling affection for mustachioed middle-aged men. In Henri's memory of the afternoon, the lovers' afternoon walk climaxes in a field of red flowers, where the couple smears each other's faces with awkward kisses, missing each other's mouths, while Chabrol pans up from the lovers falling into the grass to that field of red buds, bloody and foreboding.

The flashback then seems to end when the lovers part, and Léda is shown laying around in her house, dreamily mooning over Henri. But this too turns out to be part of the same intricate flashback structure, which suggests that this is how Henri imagines his mistress when he's not around her, that she simply sits around sadly thinking about his absence. He can't imagine her having any agency or existence outside of their affair.


In that sense, the film's strange, unbalanced structure — which can be offputting with its elongated detours into flashback and its purposefully blunted suspense — is just one more way in which Chabrol is undermining and satirizing this family. They feign respectability and morality, but it's a thin layer over the ugly truth: that's why Thérèse doesn't really care about her husband's blatant affair as long as there's no "scandal," but she practically cackles with spite when imagining how much suffering she'd put him through if he ever broke up the appearance of their happy home by trying to get a divorce. Richard, meanwhile, is more than a little too close with mommy, and more than a little too grabby with sis, mocking her relationship with Laszlo while groping her in a very unbrotherly fashion.

Richard's so obviously broken that it's not even remotely a shock when he is revealed as the killer, because Chabrol isn't trying to generate any mystery here, he's simply examining the ways in which bourgeois repression eventually accumulates into outrageous outbursts of violence and hysteria. The murder sequence slowly builds from the creepy, tense dialogue between Richard and Léda to the moment when Chabrol's camera does a graceful arcing turn around Richard to locate his face reflected in a mirror, which he then speaks to as his breakdown becomes more and more imminent. Notably, a fly crawls across the glass, an obvious metaphor — for feelings of insignificance and self-disgust — in a film full of obvious metaphors, and soon Chabrol captures Richard in a horribly comical closeup, briefly making a hideously distorted face for the camera before smashing the mirror. As the rest of the scene plays out, Richard's face is reflected in the now shattered glass, his eyes multiplied like an insect's in the splintered shards.

À double tour is often forgotten in discussions of Chabrol's early career, perhaps because it's so distinct from the rough, shot-on-the-streets feel of his first two features and the equally lo-fi aesthetic of his masterful fourth picture, Les bonnes femmes. This film was Chabrol's first big-budget production, a bright and stylish Hitchcock tribute that, tonally and stylistically, feels much more like the films he'd go on to make in the late 60s and 70s than the rest of his early efforts. Its status as an outlier aside, À double tour is a rich, engrossing and darkly funny film that, like much of Chabrol's best work, is downright savage in its satire.

Les Cousins

Claude Chabrol's second feature, Les Cousins, is, like his first film Le beau Serge, a study of opposites and dichotomies: urban/rural, innocent/worldly, intellectual/physical, sheltered/experienced. In Chabrol's first film, a bookish young man returns home to the small town where he grew up and finds that his childhood friends have grown hard and mean in the years he's been gone. In this second film, the roles are reversed: Jean-Claude Brialy, who played the naïve intellectual of Chabrol's first film, now plays the decadent Paul, whose country cousin Charles (Gérard Blain, who played the tough, drunken Serge in the earlier film) is coming to visit. Charles' arrival in Paris, to go to school in preparation for a big exam, introduces him into Paul's wild, extravagant lifestyle. Paul first appears in a long dressing gown, gesturing boldly with a cane, delivering grand orations, with his older friend Clovis (Claude Cerval) hanging around nearby, seeming equally decadent and strange. The relationship between these two men initially seems homoerotic, and that doesn't entirely change when the orgiastic atmosphere of Paul's lifestyle becomes fully apparent. The unworldly Charles seems to have landed in the company of people whose pleasure-seeking approach to life is very different from his own stolid work ethic and dependability.

The true nature of Paul and Clovis is quickly revealed in an early scene in which one of Paul's former conquests shows up at the apartment, tearfully telling Paul that she's pregnant and has just confronted her parents with the revelation. Paul and Clovis cluster around the girl, one leering over each of her shoulders, and Chabrol's tight compositions position them as opposite voices perched like an angel and a devil on each shoulder. In fact, they're two devils, both of them pressuring her to get an abortion, with the confused girl looking back and forth between them, helpless, unable to resist their insistence. Paul, with his satanic beard and cool, suave manner, seems especially like a vision of the devil as a perpetual seducer, a conscience-negating voice whispering in one's ear, luring the unsuspecting into his lair. He's not content living a life of dionysiac excess himself; he's a kind of recruiter for the cause, and he's not satisfied unless everyone around him seems to be having as much fun as he is.

Maybe that's why Paul's parties seem so loud and desperate. Everyone's always shouting and screaming and laughing too loudly, there's always some grandiose entertainment (like a bare-chested escape artist who sings operatically throughout his act), and Paul himself struts around putting on Mozart and Wagner records or declaiming theatrically in German. Indeed, there's something Germanically shrill about Paul and his scene, and Paul's games of dress-up also flirt with fascism and militarism, which seem to fascinate him, as does the unloaded revolver that he likes to aim at people, clicking the trigger on its empty chambers. It's as though, if there isn't a constant din, if everyone isn't making noise at the tops of their lungs, then no one's having any fun. That's a problem for Charles, who just wants to be left alone to study in quiet. Charles has his own insecurities, and he doesn't seem to realize that Paul's flashy exterior hides the hollow emptiness that might be glaringly obvious at these parties if anyone would ever shut up for even a second.


At one of these parties, Charles meets his cousin's friend Florence (Juliette Mayniel) and falls immediately, passionately in love with her in his naïve way. She seems touched and charmed by his earnestness, his complete honesty and openness. When they walk outside, leaving behind one of Paul's frenetic parties, Charles spills his guts to her soon after their first meeting, telling her about his love for her, about his sheltered country life, about his insecurity and feelings of inferiority in comparison to his more outwardly confident, social cousin. Florence is obviously drawn to Charles, though, despite his clear difference from her own social scene. Chabrol captures her talking to him with shining eyes, smiling and reassuring him, both of them bathed in shadows in the night. It's a very romantic image, which is why it's so startling when, in the film's second half, Chabrol cruelly subverts and undermines this moody romanticism.

When Paul finds out how seriously his cousin has fallen for Florence, and how seriously she's taking this blossoming affair, he sets out to push them apart, apparently merely because this kind of seriousness has no place in his life of parties and casual dalliances and drink-fueled orgies. In one scene, Clovis uses his persuasive, insistent voice to push Florence and Paul towards one another, standing between them as they move closer and closer together, his words urging them towards one another, urging Florence to abandon her brief dream of forming a more stable romantic relationship with the kind, innocent Charles. Instead, she reaffirms her commitment to Paul's promiscuous lifestyle, briefly settling into an affair with Paul and then discarding him to move on to someone new. Lounging around the apartment with Paul, sunbathing in just her panties, Chabrol traps her between the metal bars of a railing that makes it look as though she's in prison. She's a vision of languid sexuality and sensuality, but she's in a cage.

All of these characters are. Chabrol's aesthetic is already developing into the subtly stylish, clinically observational style that characterizes his mature work, in which he examines the pretensions and follies of the bourgeoisie. His camera glides in slow, creeping circles around these characters, a predatory crawl that makes them seem hemmed in on all sides. At a key moment late in the film, when Charles is nearly overwhelmed by the conflicting pressures weighing down on him, the camera spins in a dizzy circle around his room, reflecting the ways in which his whole value system has been utterly disorientated. Despite the thematic continuity and casting overlap of Les Cousins with Chabrol's first film Le beau Serge, Les Cousins already feels like more of a proper Chabrol film. It's an unsentimental film that dissects both the freewheeling amorality of people like Paul and the working class optimism of Charles. The former squanders his bourgeoisie privilege and intelligence (he aces his exams without studying, while the harried and distracted Charles fails even after all his hard work) and the latter is unprepared for the cruel truths of a world that doesn't conform to his idealistic hopes.