Claude Chabrol, film criticism, La Fille Coupee en Deux, The Girl Cut In Two
In Chabrol, Film, French Film on January 26, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Morality takes as many forms as there are cultures to manifest it. For some people, it is a question of commandments. For others it is a question of ideals. For other groups it is a question of economics, minutely calibrated cost-benefit analyses. But for all of these systems and all of these cultures, morality always boils down to a series of dichotomies : Should I do X or should I do Y? Simple binaries that make the world. Works such as Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) encourage us to see our relationships in similar terms. Do we want a love filled with the peaks and valleys of passion, or do we want a pleasingly mild existence, an emotional even keel?
Claude Chabrol’s 2007 film La Fille Coupee En Deux seems to attack this vision of human relations. We expect to have to make a trade-off in our personal lives, but what happens if both of our options are bad ones? Chabrol hints at an answer. An answer which, like Chabrol’s great films of the late 60s and early 70s, depends upon a viciously cynical vision of the class system that continues to corrupt French life. But is this vision perhaps too cynical for its own good?
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Claude Chabrol, film criticism, French New Wave, La Rupture, Nouvelle Vague, Picaresque
In Chabrol, Film, French Film on October 8, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Chabrol is a director whose best work is done in the margins of broad moral argument. The films of his so-called ‘Golden Period’ from the late 60s to the early 70s are a series of incendiary attacks upon an upper middle class morally corrupt enough to murder for the sake of social standing. In films such as Les Noces Rouges (1973), La Femme Infidele (1969), Que La Bete Meure (1969) and Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) wealthy people murder their way out of bad relationships and awkward situations. They do this, more often than not, because they simply lack the imagination to solve their problems any other way. And therein lies the strength of Chabrol’s vision.
Chabrol presents the bourgeoisie as morally corrupt but also deeply tragic figures. For all of their wealth and privilege, they are trapped inside a system that forces them to care about the wrong things. For example, in Les Noces Rouges, a couple find illicit love but when they are uncovered by the woman’s husband, they are shocked to discover that he does not mind their affair. If anything, he sees it as a positive development as it will keep his wife happy and ensure her lover’s loyalty to him. Incapable of understanding his cunning rejection and manipulation of bourgeois moral codes, the lovers murder him thereby sealing their fates. Similarly, in Que La Bete Meure, a man tracks down the killer of his child only to discover that the man’s entire family want him dead. They want him dead but they lack the courage to simply leave him or to denounce his many cruelties. As cowardly and morally corrupt these characters might appear, they are also the tragic victims of a twisted social order. An order that uses money and privilege to trap them in a situation whereby the characters are forced to deny their own feelings of unhappiness and claustrophobia.
La Rupture (a.k.a. the Break-up, based upon Charlotte Armstrong’s 1968 novel The Balloon Man) is, at first glance, not Chabrol’s most subtle film. It summons up Chabrol’s typically louche and corrupt bourgeoisie but makes it appear all the more monstrous and deranged for the fact that it is attacking an almost saintly working class woman. As horrors and injustices are melodramatically heaped upon her, it seems as though there can be no excusing or forgiving such behaviour. But, once the film ends, you realise that the character responsible for all of these terrible crimes might have been different. He might have been free. La Rupture is a film about the breaking of a picaroon upon the wheel of modern capitalism.
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Claude Chabrol, film criticism, Francois Truffaut, Maoism, Nada, Revolution
In Chabrol, Crime, Film, French Film, Politics on September 22, 2009 at 4:37 pm
It was never going to be easy for Claude Chabrol to move on from his most productive period. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Chabrol produced a series of films that would not only secure his reputation to the present day, but also leave an indelible mark upon what comes to mind when one thinks of French cinema. Les Biches (1968), La Femme Infidele (1969), Que La Bete Meure (1969), Le Boucher (1970), Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) and Les Noces Rouges (1973) were shot almost on top of each other with a similar cast of actors who almost came to resemble a repertory company performing only the works of Claude Chabrol. A company of actors who knew exactly what was expected of them in a series of films that positively simmered with anger and resentment at the provincial bourgeoisie who ran the country and defended the status quo while angry young men such as Chabrol climbed the barricades in the hope of creating a better world.
However, watching the films of this period, it strikes me that Chabrol and revolutionary politics were never going to be a perfect fit. Chabrol’s vision of the world is deeply morally complex. When he looks out the window he sees shades of grey rather than the stark black and white demanded by revolutionaries willing to use force to change the world. In fact, while films such as La Femme Infidele, Que La Bete Meure and Les Noces Rouges did a brilliant job of critiquing the middle classes by suggesting a world of sex, passion, drink and self-destruction beneath the mannered politeness and brass-buttons, these criticisms also humanised them. There is something almost comical and easy to empathise with about the husband in La Femme Infidele who kills his wife’s lover but never mentions it to her or the man in Que La Bete Meure who tracks down his son’s killer only to discover that the man’s entire family are hoping that someone will kill him for them. These are not the kinds of people you simply put up against a wall… these are weak, pitiful and ultimately on some level sympathetic creatures. They are victims of the system just like everyone else. Given the general timbre of Chabrol’s work during the late 60s and early 70s, Chabrol’s political history and the political climate of the French cinema scene at the time (Cahiers du Cinema was run by a Maoist collective during the mid-70s) it was clear that something had to give and the result was Nada, a satirical comedy-thriller based upon a noir novel by the influential French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, that sees Chabrol turning his ire from the bourgeoisie to the functionaries of the state and the radical Leftists who would overthrow them.
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Claude Chabrol, film criticism, Freedom, Freud, Juste Avant La Nuit, La Femme Infidele, Sartre, Submission
In Chabrol, Crime, Film, French Film on September 10, 2009 at 5:34 pm
When Hamlet says “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” he is not pre-empting the modern shift towards moral relativism. Instead he is reflecting on the capacity for human thought to render moral judgement almost completely inert. He is begging for ignorance. Cursing his intellectual nature. Wishing for simplicity. This anguished reaction against an intellectual temperament is central to Claude Chabrol’s Just Before Nightfall, a film that strives to answer the question ‘When is a murder not a murder?’.
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Claude Chabrol, film criticism, Les Noces Rouges
In Chabrol, Crime, Film, French Film on September 9, 2009 at 5:07 pm
It is surprising how much contemporary French cinema owes to Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (1944). One of Sartre’s more accessible pieces, No Exit is set in hell and features three utterly hateful and narcissistic characters slowly coming to realise that the ultimate torment is not only to be stuck in an unhappy relationship but to be stuck in that relationship because one lacks the ability to either leave it or change it for the better. The worst hells imaginable, suggests Sartre, are the ones that we create for ourselves out of our failings and cowardice. Since the New Wave, French cinema has been dominated by what is sometimes called the “film d’appartement”, a film that is character driven and relationship-focused and which draws its drama from putting a bunch of people into a closed space and allowing them to work out their problems. Claude Chabrol is no enemy to the ‘Film d’Appartement’ sub-genre. In fact, you could say that he is one of the masters of the form. His mastery comes from his willingness to not only put incredibly strange characters into his apartment, but also to allow his relationships to work themselves out naturally, regardless of how bizarre or brutal the eventual denouement. Wedding in Blood is an excellent example of Chabrol’s approach to script-writing as it is not only funny and fascinating, but also merciless in its desire to turn a cinematic social experiment into a work of satire.
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Claude Chabrol, film criticism, Maurice Pialat, Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble, review, Videovista
In Chabrol, Film, French Film, Pialat on September 2, 2009 at 11:47 am
Videovista has my review of Maurice Pialat’s splendid We Won’t Grow Old Together.
I absolutely adored this film, so much so that I went out and purchased the rest of the Pialat films that Masters of Cinema/Eureka have released. Aside from the fantastic performances and the brutality of the relationship dynamic on display, I was also struck by how much Pialat’s style is reminiscent of that of Claude Chabrol. Keep an eye out for more Pialat pieces in the near future.
Cinematography, Claude Chabrol, film criticism, Jean Cocteau, Que La Bete Meure
In Chabrol, Cinematic Vocabulary, Crime, Film, French Film on June 26, 2009 at 11:40 am
As with most of the big names of the New Wave, Claude Chabrol began his cinematic career as a critic for the Cahiers du Cinema. This critical career culminated with the release in 1957 of a book about the films of Alfred Hitchcock. This attraction to Hitchcock’s style and subject matter followed Chabrol when he ‘crossed the aisle’ from criticism to film-making and his early output quickly earned him a reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’ and the influences can also be seen in the film I am going to be writing about today.
Que La Bete Meure (1969) was adapted by a novel by the British poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. It is the story of a man who tries to avenge the death of his son by tracking down the man who ran him over. After seducing the man’s sister-in-law and infiltrating himself into the killer’s family, the grieving father discovers that the family have no more love for the thuggish monster than he does. The scene I want to talk about is the extraordinary opening sequence leading up to the death of the child and the father’s discovery of the body.
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