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.

Sympathy for the Devil (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968)

As I talked about when writing on Performance (Donald Cammell; Nicholas Roeg, 1970) I am a big fan of the Rolling Stones. So this felt like a bit of a treat, one of my favourite filmmakers covering the making of The Stones classic song Sympathy for the Devil. Other than that I did not know what sort of film this would be, but I expected some sort of documentary. However, what I got was something quite different, something that I think that I and many others who see it will be confused by. However, I will try to discern exactly what I saw.

First off, there is the documentary footage of The Rolling Stones recording their song. What first is puzzling about this is the way it is presented. Every single scene is a long take, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular idea of the presentation. They are very straight forward, long runs of The Stones trying out different stuff to improve and build their song. Recordings start, then stop, and then start again. Usually in conventional filmmaking the director would cut in between these moments, but as we are to expect, Godard is not a conventional filmmaker. This creates a certain feeling of reality; nothing seems to be left out, but for what purpose? I’ve seen quite a few Godard films, but this is on so many levels impenetrable. While a lot of the scenes with The Stones are enjoyable, you are left wondering what it is all in purpose of. I guess we have to look fairly deeply into what Godard is doing, because on the surface nothing seems to be for any purpose, but I know Godard too well, and know that he would rather hide it really well than make his films about nothing. The idea of truth is always prevalent in Godard’s films, so I would say that there certainly is an element of this in these blocks of footage of The Stones. The film in many ways redefines the long take, because they are at times painfully long and would make Tarkovsky shy away. But where Tarkovsky creates meaning within his images, there seems like there is a certain emptiness in these shots, which obviously comes from not being staged. The camera pans and tilts across the different Stones members, observing them with true patience. I really loved the observances of Brian Jones, playing acoustic guitar, but the guitar cannot be heard on the track. Quite a stark foreshadowing, I don’t even think Godard was quite aware of, but he certainly found something interesting in some of these shots. Another great moment is where Mick Jagger and some backup singers sing the vocals, but there is no instrumentation. Again, an interesting way of showing the process, but also building on the themes of sound/visuals that Godard developed in his earlier works.

I’ve talked a lot about the footage of The Stones, but there is also something else in this film. In between the shoots of The Stones, there are scenes that are in fact fiction, or at least set up. The shots of The Stones connect the film together and give it a certain feel of linearity, while these other pieces are observations and ideas presented by Godard. These scenes are like the Rolling Stones shoots shot in one take, and long takes at that. One of the segments shows us a group of black resistance fighters who load up on guns and kill young white women. Another segment depicts a young woman being berated with questions by an interviewer and his camera crew. What all these individual segments have in common is their depiction of the counter-culture movement of the 60’s. Godard himself was very political, and so we can see why he is interested in this movement and the new arising culture. In fact, he wanted to make a film with The Beatles, but for some reason it didn’t come through. With these segments the film does start to take some sort of structure, they are his examples of the new movement that is moving towards social change, while at the same time juxtaposing these with The Stones, who together with the likes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix symbolized these changes. I believe that Godard was commissioned to just make a documentary about The Stones, but then in his usual matter turned this into his own personal agenda. Some of these segments on their own are quite interesting though, particularly one in a fascist magazine shop where two revolutionary students are held and slapped by all the customers. The shop sells sleazy magazines, most of questionable pornography. This reminds me of Godard’s Week End (1967), a similar film where Godard takes these kinds of satirical viewpoints and hammer it over our heads. But like most things Godard do, they are done with glee; there is something indefinable novel about them.

So how does all these elements connect together to create a coherent film? With this kind of film, I think it is important that we drop all previous ideas of what a film should be, and just focus on what this film is in of itself. It is an encapsulation and look at the 60’s counter-culture, as well as prominently voicing Godard’s Marxist opinion of the world. It is fairly known that his later films of the 60’s became increasingly political, and this Stones “documentary” is no exception. But as with most Godard films, it is also a statement about reality and truth in cinema. Although this is not an idea I particularly care for, many connect the long take to reality, claiming editing obscures reality. Interesting that a filmmaker like Godard would go this way, particularly considering he popularized the jump-cut. There is an interesting duality of reality/fiction in this film. On one hand, there is the “real” recording of The Stones, but then there are the “fictitious” staged sequences. Yet these two opposites are filmed in a very similar manner, the same panning long take. Although the scenes with the black resistance fighters is staged, the performer themselves are not actors, but real members of the resistance group depicted. This is one of the films strongest points, creating this duality of fiction and reality, a theme that Godard seems to be constantly concerned with. The idea is prominently brought up in his films, but to a certain level of success in this film. Sometimes the performers or actors are aware of the camera, sometimes not. Some of the staged scenes the actors seem more aware of the camera than The Stones, again in many defying usual convention and playing with the idea of what reality is.

Although I’ve discussed the film to a certain level of depth, I still feel I haven’t unravelled it completely, although I doubt I ever will. Like with most Godard films, it probably rewards repeated viewings. The film is as fascinating as it is frustrating, but there are some themes that come clearly through, particularly Godard’s more satirizing moments. It is a film that I wouldn’t quickly recommend, but it is sure interesting, and if watched with the right mindset can be rewarding. The film feels like a progression of his career, and people who though Godard’s early films are too unconventional will probably be alienated by this. The same could be said for the average Rolling Stones fan, who I would not recommend this to. Essentially, you will know in yourself whether or not you wish to watch this film.

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.

Godard double-bill, Two or Three Things I Know About Her… ( 1967) and Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

Recently I’ve watched two new films by Godard, Two or Three Things I Know About Her… and Pierrot Le Fou. Before I used to look down on Godard’s color films (mostly thanks to Weekend and Une Femme est Une Femme), however, with these two new films seen, this view has changed. While Two or Three Things is appropriately gritty filmed, Pierrot Le Fou I daresay is Godard’s most visually stunning film, at least of his color ones. It really shows Godard coming to an aesthetic conclusion with himself. Narrative-wise these two films are very different, although they do have a lot of similar characteristics that are familiar touches of Godard. Godard has always been very interesting to me since I for the first time saw a film by him, Alphaville, some two years ago. He’s always been such a revolutionist in the film-form, and few recognized directors I’ve seen has done something like he does.

In the Two or Three Things I Know About Her…, we follow Juliette, a house-wife who one day of the week turns to prostitution to feed her family. Although she is presented in the beginning as the ‘protagonist’, the films seem to sway a lot of other areas, and has often been said to be more about Paris than Juliette. It is more an exploration of life in Paris, and Juliette is but one set-piece. I like the word, ‘set-piece’, because that is a lot about what this film is, ‘set-pieces’, and this is where I felt the film excelled. While many of Godard’s earlier films, Breathless in particular, leaned towards more ‘classic’ narrative stories, Two or Three Things I Know About Her… is unhinged and fractured, almost floating aimlessly throughout, and there is little character development or plot. However, this film is more about observations and reflection of both contemporary life then and cinema itself. During the film and in the introduction we hear a narrator, Godard himself, whispering into the microphone. Godard explains to us, here is the actress who is going to be acting in this film, and then later introduces the character. The immediate strength of the film is the way it forces the audience to realize the machinery of it. This makes the set-pieces more effective, as we can focus on what they are actually telling. There is no attempt at trying to create the ‘illusion’ of cinema here, instead the film distances the audience from the fictional world. So far, to me, it seems as Two or Three Things is Godard’s most formative and mature work. Characters and events seem less random, and to some extent, this reminds me of Vivre sa Vie, which is probably his most mature film, although one of his first. However much I admire Godard, his films often feel fragmented, as if things are a bit unrelated. In this, however, through the fragmentation of the narrative itself, the film seems to be more cohesive and takes a stronger form. It’s like an essay, with different points and paragraphs, but comes together through the introduction and conclusion, which makes the film seem much more ‘whole’, one of my new favorites by Godard.

The other film I saw was Pierrot Le Fou, and while showing moments of brilliance, was a bit of a disappointment. Not to say that this isn’t a very good piece of cinema by Godard, but I expected it, unlike One or Two Things, to be one of his best. So what’s the problem? Well, Pierrot Le Fou has a straightforward narrative, which I often don’t think favor Godard’s cause, except for in Le Mepris. The film is excellent for the first hour, but starts to fall apart after that, and I was a bit alienated from the film for some time, until it picked itself up again and came to a glorious conclusion. The problem I had with this film is of the one I discussed when talking about Two or Three Things, that the film itself feels very fragmented, both form and narrative. Here is one of the wonderful ironies of Godard’s films, that a film with a somewhat cohesive narrative feels more fragmented than a film that I built of fragments of story. I’m not telling you though not to watch this, because for all its faults, the film has some excellent moments and is way more interesting than what you usually see in the cinema today. On another note, Pierrot Le Fou is probably the most aesthetic pleasing of Godard’s films that I have seen so far. Unlike a lot of his other films, where he avoids this consciously, the shots are wonderfully composed, and at times look stunning. Anna Karina has rarely looked as beautiful as here. The film is shot in south France I believe, at the coast and in summer. This is used to contrast the characters predicament. Oh, I guess I haven’t mentioned the actual story, well, Ferdinand has escaped from his boring life through murder, together with his girl-friend Marianne, and as they escape from the police attempt to get by on the country side. As usual, with Godard’s films, the story is pretty simple, but obviously it’s not there the strengths of his films lie.

So, I’ve felt a bit more enlightened on Godard after seeing these two, especially Two or Three Things, which really show Godard at his formative height, and few of his films have achieved such a great blend of his different ideas and techniques. While Pierrot Le Fou was a bit of a let-down, it still showed that Godard could, if he wanted, create beautiful shots that challenge any of the great visual directors of our times. Colin MacCabe, who wrote Godard’s biography, wrote at the end that he saw Godard as a poet, and some scenes from Pierrot Le Fou absolutely proves this point, while Two or Three Things makes him more out as an essayist. I believe though that Vivre sa Vie is an amazing blending of these two personalities, and urge everyone to go see this film. Yes, I am a huge fan of Vivre sa Vie. Regardless, Pierrot Le Fou and Two or Three Things are both very good films by Godard, and to people who wish to explore this filmmaker further, I can only heartedly recommend these two as well.