Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1970)

Claude Chabrol is known as the French Hitchcock. In Le Boucher this is probably more apparent than ever. There are many elements at use here that are similar to Hitchcock, but at the same time, Chabrol manages to make the film and style his own, transcending what Hitchcock did. It is difficult to say whether Chabrol is better than Hitchcock or not, I would say that they are both very interesting, and have their different strengths. It is a bit unfair to compare Chabrol to Hitchcock so much, because it never seems like he is plagiarising Hitchcock in any way, and his films are quite unique to him.

The setting is a small town out in the country, a fitting scene for these kinds of film, and indeed, Hitchcock used this himself on occasions. One thing I can now say, after having watched this film, is that Chabrol is a clever director. In good films, it is like having a conversation with the director, discussing, arguing, and so forth. I also felt this in Le Boucher, and my conversation with Chabrol was interesting indeed. Chabrol was good at subverting my expectations, and then making me happy afterwards with some reveal. Actually, this is a film that will make you ask questions in your head, but most importantly, it allows you to delve deeper into the characters, and analyse and question their actions and motives. The atmosphere in this film is probably the most unnerving that I have seen in a Chabrol film. While much of this is due to the great camerawork, I should also mention the absolutely fantastic and chilling score that accompanies the film. The sound design is also impeccable, creating an eerie mood throughout the film. The film also has one of the greatest reveals of a dead body, a moment that truly stands out in all of the great scenes from the film. Something else that Chabrol also does very well is changing the perspectives of the audience. We are never left alone, and the film perks at our suspicions and beliefs. This makes the film far more interesting than most other similar films, but then again, this isn’t like any murder film you’ll usually watch.

At the heart of the film, though, is the relationship developing between the two lead characters. Chabrol uses the same actors as before, but I don’t mind really, and they usually do such a good job that it doesn’t matter anyway. The crime going on in the small town is a good backdrop for the relationship, and it exposes the characters to some degree. Bergman tried something similar with using war and animal slaughter in Skammen and In Passion respectively, and for him it worked better in the later than the former. It works quite well for Chabrol here, and it is a technique that can be effective and hasn’t been utilized by filmmakers enough in modern times. The characters are deep enough to keep one interested, and even in its quiet moments, the film feels very intense, much due to the great sound design. There is always something unnerving about this film, and this is one of its greatest strengths. The plot itself isn’t that interesting, but it’s not supposed to be. Some modern day viewers, who are used to the plot being the most important thing in film, will probably be put back by this, but it is by no means unusual for European films, particularly during this era. I like it when plot becomes just a backdrop, because it is so simple to make up plot. The hard thing for filmmakers is to make their films something beyond plot, and I feel that Chabrol is quite successful in his attempt here.

An excellent film by Chabrol, it is unnerving, has great sub-text and develops its characters well throughout the film. The atmosphere and music is impeccable, and goes a long way to making the film even more interesting. The audience almost feels that it is at no time safe, and credit to Chabrol; he does a good job at achieving this. Chabrol is a very interesting director indeed.

Que la bête meure (Claude Chabrol, 1969)

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.

La Femme infidèle (Claude Chabrol, 1969)

Paranoia is probably one of the funniest and most interesting things you can put into cinema, but it is also great if that paranoia is unjustified. That is why it’s always such a disappointment when some character’s paranoia turns out to be correct. Please tell me if you weren’t disappointed at the end of Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). We like it when the protagonist is wrong, not when he/she is right. We love it even more when we realize the truth before the character. Ambiguity is also great in this kind of context, and is one of the things that made Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) such a great film. Imagine in some film some guy believes someone or something for some reason is stalking him, but it then turns out his suspicion was completely unjustified… for some reason. That would be interesting, I find, in most cases, that paranoia is unjustified; it’s in some ways almost a psychological trauma.

So here we have La Femme infidèle, a film where some guy believes his wife is being unfaithful to him. Michel Bouquet plays this husband, Charles. He was one of the bad guys in La Route de Corinthe, although he played on the good guys’ team. He was one of my favourite characters from that film, and he does a really good job in this more dramatic film. So the plot in many ways leaves a bit to be desired, it’s not really a twist-turner. What it is though is a carefully observed character drama about a couple, and on this level it is a bit more interesting than most similar film. Again, as in Les Biches, one of the underlying strengths of the film is the visual storytelling, something I already can tell Chabrol is very good at. The husband’s paranoia about his wife is perfectly conveyed through visual moments, looks he gives her, the way the camera looks at her. It is very hard to pull off this kind of storytelling, which is why most filmmakers rely on symbolism and dialogue. And it is not just that it is a visual film, but the way Chabrol uses his sparse visuals to tell the story. There are perfectly good visual films, such as Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), but there the visuals are used for a different purpose than in this film. Here I can see why people compare Chabrol to Hitchcock, we can see similar techniques using the eye line of the characters in films such as Notorious (1946) and Vertigo (1958). Although Hitchcock in many more ways used it to build up tension, here it is more used to explain the psychology of the characters.

It is interesting to see with these Claude Chabrol films how he is really starting to create a language of his own. The films are quite unique to those of other filmmakers, but these two more serious films that I’ve seen by Chabrol are quite similar in their language. He uses a lot of techniques and storytelling devices that surely will be familiar to filmgoers, but what is interesting is how he turns these familiarities into his own, and uses them for his own purpose, like the Hitchcock example I mentioned. And while the two films are similar in many ways, they still aren’t too similar, that they lead to the feeling of watching something in repeat, a trap several directors fall into. His style perseveres, but the content and context of the films are quite different, and for this they work very well being seen right after each other. That said, I thought this was a slightly weaker and less memorable film than Les Biches, maybe that’s because I saw Les Biches first, but I still felt there was something missing in this compared to the former. While there is a lot of quality in this film, I throughout watching it felt there was a bit left to be desired, something that could punctuate the film and make it much better, but it never came. It is still a very interesting piece, there’s enough depth to keep you interested to the end, and themes are explored in a nice but not expositional way, which is always good. There is a lot of underlying themes in this, the characters twist and turn like in few other films, and on the whole the experience of the film left me feeling slightly richer, which I always believe is one of the best and most profound things about films, or art in general.

I still haven’t watched that many Chabrol film, but I believe I can say with sufficient accuracy that this is an archetypal film by him, and thus if you are interested in his cinema I highly recommend this. I still prefer Les Biches, but the film still stands on its own, and is a really good and interesting psychological drama.

Les Biches (Claude Chabrol, 1968)

My previous run in with Chabrol left me a bit clueless as to what kind of director he is. La Route de Corinthe didn’t leave me particularly impressed, but then I was reminded that it was far from any of Chabrol’s better films, and considering I still had 15 unwatched films by him, I continued my chronological journey through his canon. The next film in line is Les Biches, which actually means The Doves, but I immediately thought it meant The Bitches, and after watching the film that would actually have been a more appropriate title. Anyway…

Chabrol is known as the French equivalent of Hitchcock, although in this film that is not too apparent. This is a character drama, and one of the better I’ve seen. One of the strongest points about the film is that it is a very visual film, there is not much dialogue, but the characters are still well rounded and the narrative seems quite clear. Their psychological state is almost effortlessly conveyed, and this is the thing that makes the film superb in my opinion. The drama is centred on two women who are in a relationship, although their sexuality remains fairly ambiguous. The slightly older woman, Frédérique, picks up a young woman, Why (yes, her name is Why) from the streets who is poor and makes a living by drawing on the streets. Frédérique is wealthy and brings her to a house she owns in the country, with servants and two gentlemen who I was never sure what exactly were there for, but for the purpose of the film itself served as comic relief. Actually, they work quite well as comic relief, and have a couple of funny scenes. Not stupid funny, like in La Route de Corinthe, but small touches, nice little visual moments, and at the same time never really takes away focus from the core of the film. The tension and core of the film is built up when the two women start to despise each other, and leads into a strong love and hate relationship where they attempt to hurt each other. The foil for this is Paul, a charming architect, who engages with both women.

I’ve read several people describing this as a love triangle, but I don’t agree with this position. The story is about the two women, the guy is simply a tool for them to spite each other. He is a shallow character, and has throughout the film no idea what he is actually part of. He happily goes on in the narrative, naïve of the battle of mind between the two women. But the film in its wonderful way never spell anything out, and it is open to interpretation whether they love each other or they love him, or one loves the other but the other loves the guy. Another reason why I DON’T believe this is a love triangle, is because the film spends so much time exploring the two female leads, but spends so very little time with Paul, it feels at times as if he is a prop, and I feel this is a fairly accurate description of his character. He might not be very interesting, but surely evokes something interesting in the two women. This whole conflict is portrayed through nice little visual moments. There is a scene where Frédérique has some guests over for poker. This is the start of the tension between the characters, but nothing is ever said, only subtle little touches and following the eyes of the characters. There are several such scenes, and they work really well, and one scene in particular sticks with me, but its not interesting discussing it here.

Now we come to the part of the review (or whatever this is) where we make formulaic comments on cinematography, acting and so forth, so let’s just get it over with. The cinematography is beautiful and simple, is accompanied by similarly beautiful music. The acting on the two leads is superb, the rest of the cast remains a bit anonymous, but that’s okay, considering they’re not that interesting. The directing has flair, is precise and visual, in other words, brilliant. Actually, this film seem much more formative than most Nouvelle Vague films I’ve seen, but I think this might have something to do with it being released fairly late in the 60’s. The editing works, the films pace really lends to the whole feel, its fairly slow but lends a hypnotic sense to the film.

Les Biches was a nice watch, foremost, visual storytelling, which is always nice. I’ve got a feeling this is a stronger hint to what Claude Chabrol has to offer compared to La Route de Corinthe. I don’t quite see why people compare him to Hitchcock, but I guess that will come when I see more of his films, I’ve still got 14 more on my shelf. Anyway, great film, really recommend it, at times incredible.

La Route de Corinthe (Claude Chabrol, 1967)

So now two box sets containing Claude Chabrol are available, one with eight films, the other with six. I wanted to watch these in chronological order, so I started with his earliest in the collection, La Route de Corinthe from the second box set. I have never seen a film by Chabrol before, but I am aware that he was a part of the Nouvelle Vague movement, and I am fairly knowledgeable about the movement. So I was excited about this film, but as with Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le metro (1960), I was left a bit baffled.

The film sort of resembles A bout de soufflé (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), in that it is a play on a familiar Hollywood genre, here the spy thriller. But this film is quite unconventionally silly, showing us several quirky and almost cartoonist character and situations. For example the assassin, who always smirks, wears all-white clothes and reads magazines while waiting for his victims. Then there’s that cliché where the bad guys tie the heroine to some contraption that will kill her, but ultimately creates a stalling for her to take advantage of. The plot concerns a bunch of small black boxes that somehow disable US satellite systems, and they are being transported into Greece. The opening starts with a magician who is in possession of some of these little black boxes, and immediately gives us a hint that this film is going to be silly. The plot is contrived and makes little sense, but as said, this is a play in genre, and it is exactly this type of film where it feels adequate. It is in many ways a 60’s version of Austin Powers. Chabrol uses exaggerated techniques, such as zooming and vivid colours to create a particular atmosphere.

The film is an interesting little piece, but at times I did feel a bit disappointed by it, particularly because Chabrol is such a highly recommended director. However, I’ve rarely seen any reference to this film, and I don’t believe it is very highly regarded among his other works, so I guess I should just take it for what it is. There are a couple of moments that point towards true brilliance, such as the scene where the female protagonist is introduced, but these moments are sparse and don’t really highlight the film as a whole. It is in many ways hard to criticize the film for anything, as it is quite aware of its own existence, and doesn’t claim to be anything else than what it is, and on this level it works quite well. It’s a nice little jab at the spy genre, and at Hollywood itself, but still manages to stay distanced from its inspirations. There are numerous moments that are recognisable to other Nouvelle Vague films, such as Godard’s films, and they work nicely, but doesn’t give you the same feeling of impact that say Une Femme est Une Femme (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961) had.

I wouldn’t recommend La Route de Corinthe, but I wouldn’t say you shouldn’t watch it. If you are really interested in the Nouvelle Vague or Chabrol, then this might widen your horizon regarding these, but as it stands it is a unique little piece, but doesn’t create any particular impact or lasting impressions.