With a great deal of unwatched DVD’s on my shelf it becomes harder and harder to choose what I want to watch. It feels great to have so much opportunity right in front of me, while at the same time it gets harder every time to choose what to watch, almost to the point where I don’t watch anything at all. The Chabrol collection I have seems like a mountain impossible to climb, still after watching this I’ve got 10 more films by him. It’s exiting though, and a great treat to be able to be emerged so deep into a director’s canon.
Visual storytelling has so far been Chabrol’s greatest strength, but with Que la bête meure we see a different side of Chabrol. While he had an interesting take on the world and a bit morbid fascination with relationships. Here though he leans less on the visuals, and the centre of the film becomes the mind of the protagonist, who goes through some radical changes and can be questioned by his motives. A car accident kills a young boy, the owner of the car drives away and the father seeks his revenge. It’s a simple revenge premise where he searches for the man who killed his son. As the narrative develops, though, it gets more complicated. There is also a lot we could ask the protagonist, he constantly writes in his diary with a red pen about how he is going to find and kill the person responsible, but in a lot of ways he is quite hesitant to do anything. When he finally discovers the person who did it, he takes an awfully long time to do what he meant to do. One could say he is bidding his time, but I find it more interesting to think that he actually is not able to do it, despite all the hate he has conjured in his mind. I don’t want to go too deep into the story, but safe to say there is a lot to pick up, lots of ways to analyze the protagonist and his actions.
While the film starts off as a mystery, it soon fades into a psychological drama and romance. But that’s okay, I see now why Chabrol is compared to Hitchcock, he implements a lot of the same narrative ideas as Hitchcock. Chabrol is still unique though, he uses his own brand of directing and pacing, and at times the characters in his films are a bit more dark and morbid than those in Hitchcock films. Chabrol seems to be fascinated with the slightly offbeat characters or situations, and through this creates a marvellous tension within the film. While I do like Que la bête meure a lot, I feel that compared to the two previous films I’ve seen by Chabrol it doesn’t hold up as well. What made those two films so great for me was the visual depiction in the film. While there certainly is something of that in here, it’s not as strong or prominent, rather leaning on a fairly simple narrative structure and not strengthening the film with visuals like the two previous films. What the film does do very well though is create tension. Not just thriller tension, but also social tension, some scenes where a family is gathered is wonderful and observational. While the protagonist lets us pose many interesting questions, a couple of the other characters are not as interesting, and at times feel too one-dimensional. I do think though in the case of the antagonist, this was Chabrol’s intension, but I’m not sure exactly why.
Que la bête meure is vintage Chabrol, and although it is lesser of the last films I’ve seen by him, it still holds up as a unique and rich experience. It’s amazing to think of how many good films Chabrol made in such a short period of time, and I’m quite looking forward to digging deeper.
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