MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

Le Beau Serge

(Die Enttäuschten [de])

France 1958
d: Claude Chabrol
TV5 TV (Region 0 fr)

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Les Biches

(Zwei Freundinnen [de])

France / Italy 1968
d: Claude Chabrol
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)

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The film with which Chabrol returned to 'serious' film-making after his series of delightful thriller/espionage spoofs, this was also the film in which he began transferring his allegiance from baroque Hitchcockery to the bleak geometry of Lang. A calm, exquisite study, set in an autumnal Riviera, of the permutational affairs of one man and two women which lead to obsession, madness and despair. Each sequence is like a question-mark adding new doubts and hypotheses to the circular (as opposed to triangular) relationship as a rich lady of lesbian leanings (Audran) picks up an impoverished girl (Sassard), and whisks her off to her St Tropez villa. There, much to the distress of her benefactress, the girl embarks on an affair with a handsome young architect (Trintignant), only to find in her turn that architect and lesbian lady are in the throes of a mutual passion. Impeccably performed, often bizarrely funny, the film winds, with brilliant clarity, through a maze of shadowy emotions to a splendidly Grand-Guignolesque ending.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"An exquisite, unhysterical study of obsession and the struggle for dominance" (Georges Sadoul), Les Biches is perhaps the first and best example of the fearful symmetry out of which Chabrol creates his architecture of emotions. Les Biches' triangle involves lesbian lovers, the independently wealthy Frédèrique (Stéphane Audran) and Why (Jaqueline Sassard), who ekes out a living painting does on the sidewalks of Paris until Frédèrique takes her to her mansion by the sea, a dolce vita affair in Saint Tropez. Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is the man whom Why inadvertently lures into Frédèrique's life. The arcs and sides keep changing-Why loves Paul first, but when the possessive Frédèrique moves in, Why is in the doubly hapless position of living with two people who have jilted her-shedding more ambiguity than light on the characters. For the light, we must look to mise-en-scène, finding, as Andrew Sarris wrote, "Chabrol's personal obsessions: Confusion of Identity, Poetry of Stupidity and Mediocrity...An appreciation of Les Biches depends on an appreciation of the director's attitude toward his characters...It is not Sassard looking yearningly at Trintignant and Audran that is at issue here, but rather Chabrol gazing compassionately at the entire spectacle."
— PFA

La Femme infidèle

(Die untreue Frau [de] )

France / Italy 1969
d: Claude Chabrol
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)

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One of Chabrol's mid-period masterpieces, a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder that juggles compassion and cynicism in a way that makes Hitchcock look obvious. The obligatory cross-references are still there (blood in the sink; the exactly appropriate final use of simultaneous backtrack and forward zoom adapted from Vertigo), but they're no longer there to legitimise a vision now mature. Audran and Bouquet, as the first of Chabrol's recurring Charles/Hélène couples, are superb in discovering 'secret' parts of each other denied as much by complacency as convention.
— PT, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"A prosperous insurance broker finds out that his wife has a secret lover and goes to confront the man in his Paris apartment. An extraordinary conversation follows in which the husband displays a remarkable openness and seemingly liberated attitude, until...La femme infidèle turns from a suspense melodrama into a psychological study of the Faithful Husband and a coolly satiric examination of the details of ritualized married life, and then back into a suspense melodrama" (M.S., PFA). Hitchcock, along with Lang, was a paragon for Chabrol, who, unlike his nouvelle vague colleagues, concentrated within one genre, that of the film policier, the film noir-in-color. Like Hitchcock, Chabrol finds the mundane the most useful source of suspense and irony, and never imagines that murder is a simple task. Like Lang, he knows that everyone is guilty.
When a well-off wife interrupts her ennui to thank her husband for everything, be suspicious. In this brilliant portrait of marriage interruptus, a successful insurance broker, Charles (Michel Bouquet), suspects that his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) has a lover, and she does. Charles and Hélène have filled their lives with beautiful objects, including Hélène. But Chabrol, like Hitchcock, imbues all objects with tension-again, including Hélène. Charles is a latter-day Charles Bovary, the arriviste, settled in; useless in his caring, he becomes a sort of housecat to the mouse in the intrigue that ensues. When he pounces, he's more surprised than we are. This is a tale built from details and small movements, still-life and silence, habitual expressions and sidelong glances, all played out under Chabrol's cold eye and godlike pans. We follow, riveted and repelled, until the surprise ending makes us rethink the whole Charles and Hélène thing, an eternal return. (JB)
— PFA

Que la bête meure

(Das Biest muß sterben [de])

France / Italy 1969
d: Claude Chabrol
Arrow Film Distributors (Region 0 uk)

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Le Boucher

(Der Schlachter [de])

France / Italy 1970
d: Claude Chabrol
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)

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Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of guilt' as Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact, for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of society's dead and maimed. With this film Chabrol came full circle back to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her. -- TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Claude Chabrol crafts a taut and poignant tale of emotional damage in Le Boucher. Symbolically, the relational distance between Helene and Popaul is suggested through windows (as in Kieslowski's Red): Helene looks out from her studio above the school after their first encounter, Popaul looks into Helene's classroom, delivering a fresh cut of veal from the butcher shop, Popaul peers through the window of an unlit room in search of Helene. Furthermore, Popaul's preference for a lowered, student's chair in the studio also reflects Helene's unattainability for him, as he shyly looks up to see her face, trying to find connection in her polite countenance. Le Boucher is a subtly haunting portrait of people who are incapable of exorcising their own private demons - inflicting emotional violence behind a facade of civility - and, in the process, destroy themselves.
— Acquarello
•••••
In Périgord, in the Dordogne, two misfits-Hélène (Stephane Audran), a Parisian schoolteacher, and Popaul (Jean Yanne), a shy butcher recently returned from the Indochina war-find each other by stages. The slow pace of provincial life (inherently suspenseful in Chabrol's lens) suits Mademoiselle Hélène, or suits her repression, just fine. But this town located above the area's famous cave paintings is also sitting on a well of stifled primordial hunter-gatherer instincts. (Don't be fooled that Stéphane Audran looks more I. Magnin than Cro-Magnon in her sixties chic.) "Is being a butcher something you learn?" the teacher asks her new friend, before the first corpse turns up. With rare compassion for his two leads, Chabrol elegantly dissects provincial life, using local inhabitants as incidental characters-in the busy butcher shop, and of course, at funerals. He creates the picture of a village stripped of the small kindnesses and jostling humor of Pagnol's Provence, where everyone knows everyone. Here, everyone only knows about everyone. (JB)
— PFA

Juste avant la nuit

(Vor Einbruch der Nacht [de])

France / Italy 1971
d: Claude Chabrol
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)

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Nada

(Claude Chabrol: Nada [de])

France / Italy 1974
d: Claude Chabrol
Arrow Film Distributors (Region 0 uk)

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A chillingly cool political thriller, all the better for its non-partisan stance. No attempt is made to whitewash the activist group in Paris, calling themselves Nada in memory of the Spanish anarchists, who kidnap the American ambassador (at an exclusive brothel) in a welter of functional violence. A motley collection of malcontents and seasoned professionals, driven by absurd ideological confusions, they are for that reason a doubly dangerous time bomb likely to explode at any random moment. But against them Chabrol sets the cold calculation of the forces of order, wheeling, dealing, finally engineering a politic holocaust, and emerging as even less concerned with human life than the terrorists they are hunting down as a threat to society. Right is on their side, but it is the members of Nada, groping desperately to build little burrows of viable living in a world of expediency and corruption, who become the heroes in spite of everything. Powerful, pure film noir in mood, it's one of Chabrol's best films.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
NADA is a bracingly satirical and razor-sharp political thriller about terrorism from director Claude Chabrol, working at the top of his cool, calculated, and ultra-cynical form. ... Beginning with farcical parade-style music, an opening disclaimer that reads: "This is a work of pure fiction, therefore it is not unimaginable," and a title that literally means "nothing" in Spanish, NADA is a uniquely Chabrolian mixture of absurdist humor, nihilistic satire, pitiless character study, and riveting thriller. Directed with customary cold-blooded expertise, it's superbly acted and boasts expertly filmed suspense scenes, as well as moments of wry, low-key observation and black comedy which are punctuated by sudden bursts of shocking violence (the philosophy teacher attacking a German in a traffic jam and pulling a switchblade on him; the waiter killing a policeman with a slingshot; the ambassador calling a prostitute "Salome" as she does a veil dance before he's kidnapped; the depiction of Goemond as a bumbling sycophant who takes out his sadistic frustrations on suspects).
While sympathizing with the goals of the terrorists, Chabrol doesn't take sides with one group or the other, treating both the anarchists and the government as two sides of the same coin, and condemning both left-wing and state-run terrorism as accomplishing nothing more than maintaining the status quo ("the state prefers terrorism to true revolution" as Diaz eventually realizes). While Diaz, the son of a Communist leader who was killed in the Spanish Civil War, genuinely believes in revolution, the other terrorists are simply bored, or drunk, or jaded, funneling their despair into something that will allow them to control their own fates in a repressive and mechanized universe, screaming "Merde...Vive la mort" as they're being gunned down. The government, meanwhile, is simply a bourgeois, backstabbing bureaucracy in which its members are callously, but politely, betrayed and sacrificed by superiors for the ultimate "good of the state." Chabrol's treatment is dispassionate, but it has a distinctive point of view, unlike Bruno Baretto's similarly themed, but blandly neutral FOUR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER (1997), based on the real-life kidnapping of the American Ambassador to Brazil. NADA may be a cynical portrait of a society gone mad, but it's a highly entertaining portrait, and not, as the disclaimer suggests, "unimaginable."
— Michael Scheinfeld, TV MovieGuide

Merci pour le chocolat

(Süßes Gift [de])

France / Switzerland 2000
d: Claude Chabrol
mk2 / Warner Home Vidéo France (Region 0 fr)

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A dark, velvety film which masks the rough with the smooth and coats a bitter pill in a veneer of decadent French polish. This has been Chabrol's way as often as not over the course of more than 50 films, and he's long since got it down to a fine art. Too fine, one suspects, for an audience accustomed to Hollywood overkill. Dutronc stars as the famous pianist André Polonski. Recently remarried to his first wife, Mika (Huppert), Polonski lives in Lausanne, along with Guillaume, a son by his second wife. Enter Jeanne Pollet (Mouglalis), born on the very same day and in the very same hospital as Guillaume, and a prodigy on the piano. Could it be there was some terrible mix-up 18 years ago? Plenty of material there, you'd have thought, for crazy farce or anguished melodrama. But Chabrol prefers a drily understated comedy of manners. These members of the haute bourgeoisie remain serenely implacable - intent on maintaining their own charades even as their dearest relationships unravel. You could call them sophisticated, or emotionally comatose. Either way, it takes a more macabre twist to shock them to their senses. Visually restrained and aurally elaborate, it's an old-fashioned, subtly deceptive film, the sort of thing Chabrol can turn out in his sleep.
— TCh, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Claude Chabrol is seldom more elegant as a stylist than when he's working with familiar elements, and this 2000 movie has a slew of them: dysfunctional families (this one has two); Isabelle Huppert as a perverse individual smoldering under an appearance of placid normality; scenic settings (in this case Lausanne, in the French part of Switzerland); and the plot of an American thriller transposed to the French bourgeoisie (adapted from Charlotte Armstrong's novel The Chocolate Cobweb by Chabrol and Caroline Eliacheff, a child psychiatrist who also helped write The Ceremony). New elements include actor Jacques Dutronc, a fair amount of classical music (two of the main characters are pianists), and, unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader