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?

Film Poster

The film begins by introducing us to Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand).  Saint-Denis is an ageing author.  A great man of letters.  His career has won him prizes, critical acclaim and money.  Money he has used to construct a modernist castle for himself in the Lyon suburbs far from the much-despised lights of Paris.  Saint-Denis is lured out of seclusion by his femme fatale agent Capucine (Mathilda May), who convinces the author to allow himself to be interviewed by a local cable station.  A station that also employs the young and seemingly innocent weather-girl Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier).  Deneige and Saint-Denis hit it off immediately.  There is a crackle in the air the second she walks in on him in make-up.  Before long, the mismatched couple are secret lovers.  This annoys one of the local playboys. Heir to a vast chemicals fortune who spends his time drinking and getting into trouble with his valet/carer, Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel) has set his heart on Gabrielle.  However, no matter how hard he tries (at one point he nearly strangles her in frustration), Gaudens cannot lure Deneige away from her aged author.  The difference, we are encouraged to think, is that Gaudens is unstable and unpredictable while Saint-Denis is an obvious but charismatic rogue.  However, if this were the only dichotomy facing Gabrielle, this would not be a Chabrol film.

Note the discrete phallic imagery

Half naked women. No actual sunshine.

It soon emerges that Saint-Denis is not just a simple rogue.  His house is decorated in an entirely masculine style, filled with metals and pictures of naked women.  His agent is a beautiful and flirtatious woman and his wife, he repeatedly insists, is a saint.  Is she a  saint because she forgives his dalliances?  Or is she a saint in the sense that he would not dare do sinful things with her?  Indeed, aside from playing mind games with Deneige, Saint-Denis is also something of a sadist.  He demands that Deneige humiliate herself for him.  So we see her crouching beneath the table in order to suck him off while he works.  Then we see her crawling across the floor to her master’s feet.  Then we see Saint-Denis take her to his club where – we are told but not shown – Deneige was expected to have sex with people in front of Saint-Denis.

At least she seems happy enough.

Together they go upstairs. But we never see what is at the top.

As disturbingly one-sided as this relationship might appear, Deneige falls apart when Saint-Denis loses interest in her.  She takes to her bed and starts to starve herself to death.  Desperate to help her out of her depression, Deneige’s mother contact Gaudens who rides to the rescue and reveals himself to be, despite his psychological fragility, utterly devoted and utterly in love with Deneige.  Desperate for happiness, Deneige marries Gaudens but the marriage does not take.  Deneige cannot get over Saint-Denis and Gaudens cannot get over what Saint-Denis did to Deneige or the fact that he had such power over a woman he is utterly devoted to.  In short, Gaudens cannot live with the fact that the old man got in there first and got in there deeper than he could ever hope to get… And so he decides to murder Saint-Denis.

Paul the ridiculous fop

Gaudens struggles to keep the attentions of Gabrielle

That's that then...

Chabrol relishes in driving home the fact that all of the moral dichotomies facing Gabrielle are ultimately illusory.  If she is asked to choose between roguish stability and devoted instability, the stability will reveal itself to be illusory.  If she then accepts the value of a devoted partner, she learns that the devotion is not necessarily to her but to an idea of her.  An objectification of her.  A desire to possess that object.  Every choice Gabrielle makes is the wrong one.  In fact, it is not at all clear that there ever was a right one for her except possibly to ignore the attentions of both men.  The deck was stacked against her to begin with.

The film makes interesting use of colour and lighting. Here we see the married Paul and Gabrielle spending time with their dull, rich friends and family. Grey is the dominant colour, the lighting seems natural

Conversely, the scenes with Deneige on her own are often saturated with colour and brightly lit. Unnaturally lit.

The dull/bright, natural/unnatural colour schemes are another example of Chabrol's ambivalence and his focus upon false dichotomies. Just because the bourgeois in the film are dull, it does not necessarily follow that Deneige's charms are natural. In fact, they are cinematically enhanced.

This stacking of the deck is a reflection of the class system.  Both Saint-Denis and Gaudens are rich and powerful men.  Men whose desires and whims have long been catered to by a society that happily bends its knee to them.  When they decide to seduce Deneige, they do so not out of any real desire for emotional partnership, but out of a desire to see their desires satisfied.  Whether those needs are purely sexual as in the case of Saint-Denis or emotional as in the case of Gaudens, the dynamic remains the same : Gabrielle exists in order to satisfy those needs and the second she is no longer useful in that regard, she is to be cast aside.  This fact is driven home by the final confrontation between Deneige and her mother in law.  Having given the older woman everything she desired, Deneige is told that she will get nothing for her troubles.  “Dismissed” the mother-in-law sniffs from beneath her sun hat.

"Vous pouvez disposer"

The problem with The Girl Cut In Two is that it is cold.  Chabrol’s greatest films drew much of their power from the icy detachment that fills his vision of society, but they never allowed the audience to forget that his films were ultimately about the lives of human beings.  Films such as Les Noces Rouges (1973) were driven by the passion of the central couple while even more subdued films such as Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) and Les Biches (1968) contained moments of visceral and powerful denouement.  Chabrol’s skill as a director has always been to package the human within the cerebral.  In contrast, The Girl Cut In Two lacks that basic humanity.  Deneige is never sympathetic enough that we become involved in her plight.  Her relationships with Gaudens and Saint-Denis are neatly characterised but we never feel Gaudens’ passion or Saint-Denis’ desire to humiliate.  The decision to deprive the audience of the images of Deneige’s ultimate humiliation is ultimately a fatal one.  Gaudens’ murder of Saint-Denis simply does not pack enough visceral power to anchor the film’s narrative.  The result is a film that is well-written, cleverly conceived and nicely acted.  But it never really has the power to affect.

The film has a rather enigmatic ending. A riot of colour that would make The Archers green with envy but which seems to be quite quietly critical of the character of Deneige.

In another film, this kind of ending might be seen as 'triumphant' but instead we see Gabrielle working as a magician's assistant. Finally happy. As though appearances are all that she has to offer. I suspect this is what has lead many critics to call the film misogynistic. I think that the charge is a bit strong, as is the ending. The film gives no basis for being that critical of its main protagonist.

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.

Film Poster

The film’s opening sequence is simply astonishing.  Helene (Stephane Audran in sensational form) is preparing breakfast for her son.  Suddenly, there is a grunt and a huge bare-chested man appears from out of the bedroom.  He scratches himself obscenely, his greasy black hair falling over his bulging eyes as he suddenly attacks Helene.  Evidently this is her husband Charles (Jean-Claude Druot).  Their terrified child runs between them and Charles picks him up and, with a hideous roar, smashes him brutally against the edge of the table.  Horrified, Helene arms herself with a frying pan and batters her husband into submission.  From there, Chabrol whisks us to the waiting room of the hospital where Helene is interviewed by two unsympathetic policemen who appear convinced that her attack on her husband was unprovoked.  The lack of sympathy continues when Charles’ father Ludovic (Michel Bouquet) arrives.  The old man will not hear a word said against his son.  He announces that the marriage, which he obviously did not approve of, is over and he sweeps out of the room having created the impression that Helene is a violent, deranged woman who lived off of her wealthy husband.  So strong is this impression that I initially thought that Chabrol was planning on revealing that Helene’s vision of nightmarish domestic abuse had been some kind of drug-induced hallucination.  This impression is clearly quite intentional on Chabrol’s part as not only does it establishes the world-view of Charles’ parents, it also fore-shadows the truth that they will attempt to force upon the world.

Reality imposes itself when Helene pays a visit to a kindly lawyer.  In a heartfelt speech, she tells her story.  A story of humble working-class origins.  A foray into nude dancing to pay the bills.  A love story with a man who dreamed of writing but would not work.  An unhappy time spent living with in-laws who spoiled their son and allowed him to become a drug addict and a long period of working nights in order to pay the rent and bring up her son.  Helene is, as the film points out, a saint.  Not only is she blameless for the misery that has befouled her life, she has also repeatedly adapted herself and shouldered the responsibilities that others refused to take on.  However, Charles’ parents refuse to see things this way.  Refusing to accept their responsibility for nurturing the Frankensteinian monstrosity that is their son, they become obsessed with depriving Helene of custody of her son.

Confessions on a Tram

Lacking money, Helene moves into a bed and breakfast near the hospital and discovers this bizarre demimonde of the dispossessed.  A world full of cackling old ladies who are forever playing the kind of strange card games that figure in Tim Powers novels, self-loathing tragedian actors and overworked junior doctors, the B&B is run by a family that is seemingly built out of pure despair.  With the B&B due to be torn down (by one of Ludovic’s companies naturally), the couple have turned on each other.  Saddled with a mentally handicapped daughter, the husband has become a hopeless drunk and the wife a ferociously repressed martinet.  Sensing an understandable degree of kinship with this bizarre cast of characters, Helene relaxes.  That is until Paul Thomas (Jean-Pierre Cassel, father of Vincent Cassel) arrives.

Some residents at breakfast

Some more residents at breakfast

Thomas is a essentially a picaroon.  The son of a wealthy industrialist forced out of his own company by Ludovic, Thomas has experienced poverty and it has sharpened his wits, instead of becoming a mindless addict like Charles, he has adopted a world-weary cynicism which, when combined with his knowledge and access to the world of the bourgeoisie makes him a formidable agent.  One who is hired by Ludovic to gather evidence of Helene’s various misdeeds.  Thomas returns home to his one room apartment (plastered with pornographic images and shared with a nymphomaniac named Sonia (Catherine Rouvel) whom we seldom see clothed and who seldom says anything that is not an attempt to lure her man into bed or a childish expression of pique.

The Picaroon at Rest

The Picaroon at play

The Picaroon at work

Spurred on by the promise of a job in Ludovic’s company, Thomas uses his skills to shut down Helene’s lines of credit but he soon discovers that she does not draw on anyone’s credit.  She is responsible for her actions.  Thomas even starts to fall in love with Helene, gnashing his teeth over the fact that Ludovic would have him kill her despite the fact that she is completely blameless and above any kind of moral reproach.  However, with Ludovic promising the Earth for custody of his grandchild, Thomas’s morals slowly dissolve.  He constructs a frankly ludicrous scheme to frame Helene but the scheme starts to unravel almost as soon as it is underway.  As Thomas surrenders to the moral decision he made, his true face starts to emerge :  a sweaty, bedraggled man who offers a bag of poisoned sweets to the woman he loves in the hope that he’ll get a good job out of the deal.

Would you accept...

... a sweet from this man?

Helene is painted in such glowing terms that it would have been difficult to construct a film around her.  She is so morally upstanding and forgiving that she effectively lacks agency in a universe so acutely moral as Chabrol’s.  Even when she does act, her actions lack any kind of dramatic tension.  We know that she will always do the right thing.  In fact, Helene is almost a plot device, a moral touchstone that reveals the moral character of the people around her.  As a result of this, it is more rewarding to look upon La Rupture as a film about the decline and fall of Paul Thomas.  Indeed, once he appears, it is clear that the film’s narrative is shaped around him and not Helene.

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) - Charting the rise and fall of another picaroon

Thomas is a fascinating character as he is an evolution of Chabrol’s typically tragic bourgeois archetype.  Those characters tend to initially appear monstrous and unsympathetic only to soften as Chabrol shows the extent to which they are victims of the system.  Thomas, in contrast, is initially sympathetic.  He is a handsome rogue armed with a sexy girl and a wilful disrespect for the bourgeoisie.  But Thomas then chooses to surrender that worldliness by attempting to refashion the world according to the desires of the morally corrupt bourgeoisie.  Instead of following the traditional picaresque path of using his wits to expose the hypocrisy and brutality of the system, he willingly submits to it.  He becomes its agent.  The tragedy of Paul Thomas is that his fate might have been so different… He could have had Helene and he could have had revenge upon the man who destroyed his father, but instead he was ground down and destroyed by the system he was seeking to enforce, his clever plotting and scheming reduced to farcical plans and pathetic pleading.  Such is the power of the system and the corrupting allure of money and status.

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.

Film Poster

Nada is a film that can be seen as part of a tradition of critical works about revolutionary groups stretching back through Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) to Fyodor Doestoevsky’s Demons (1871) and Albert Camus’ existentialist dramatisation of the novel in 1959. The original plot of Demons featured a group of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries who come together to form a cell only for the cell to implode long before they get anywhere close to threatening the status quo.  Doestoevsky portrayed the beliefs of the characters as demonic and dangerous, but suggested that the Russian state was poorly equipped for dealing with them.  Camus’ dramatisation was more directly critical, tapping into the idea that if life is absurd then it does not matter which ideology dominates the state while Godard’s near parody presented the characters as romantic and sympathetic soap boxes for the director’s ideals but also bourgeois and faintly comical.  Chabrol’s Nada is itself almost a parody of La Chinoise.  Instead of presenting us with characters embodying different forms of revolutionary politics, it presents us with characters embodying different forms of disaffection from the cause of the revolution.

For example :

Hat, Coat, Scarf on a sunny day

Padding the Crotch of the Revolution with the Blood of the Workers

Buenaventura Diaz (Fabio Testi) is the handsome poser.  Even on warm days he makes sure to leave the house dressed all in black and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a long black scarf and a long leather coat.  His trousers are ball-crushingly tight trousers and makes sure to pad the crotch with a wodge of cash.

Epaulard knocking one back

André Épaulard (Maurice Garrel) is the marginal turned criminal.  No longer believing in the cause, he now makes his money as a con man, posing as a lawyer and selling the fictitious whereabouts of Algerian revolutionary war coffers.

The True Voice of the Revolution?

Marcel Treuffais (Michel Duchaussoy) is the jaded intellectual.  Once a fire-brand now a drunken high school teacher he prefers talk to action and has started to harbour shockingly liberal doubts about the effectiveness of political violence.

D'Arey making a point which is, I'm sure, entirely reasonable

D’Arey (Lou Castel) is the hot-headed bully-boy turned drunk.  During the heist he crows about the fact that he has killed a policeman and vows to drink himself into unconsciousness.  He later stands up, stinking drunk, and shouts revolutionary slogans while the rest of the group avert their embarrassed eyes.  He is mostly used as a prop and is frequently seen passed out in the background.

And by 'planning', they mean drinking

The group come together to plot and execute the kidnapping of the American ambassador.  After researching his habits and patterns they find that he occasionally goes to church and occasionally attends functions but is absolutely religious about attending a local brothel.  This is no Nixonian villain.  He is a hapless boob who says little aside from “Pity!  Pity!” and seems mostly concerned with stuffing his face and shagging prostitutes.  Chabrol wonderfully accompanies all of this plotting and sneaking about with a military drum-beat, like something out of The Great Escape or the A-Team.

Not exactly a future member of the Moral Majority then

Once the kidnapping is pulled off, the group flee to a secluded farmhouse and write their manifesto.  However, with the group’s intellectual having chosen to sit the heist out, they produce a text that is a hilarious collision of self-aggrandising leftist posturing and slang-filled vulgarity.  They talk not of executing their hostage but “simply and modestly” assassinating him.  They claim the kidnapping took place in a “whore-house, where his Excellency was getting laid” before going on to talk about “some dead pigs”.  They predict a long struggle before the authorities have all been “croaked” and so need to constitute a “nest egg” for the group.

See Minister Run...

Run Minister Run

Aaaand relax

The focus of the film then shifts to the authorities.  This section of the film opens brilliantly with the Minister demanding his office send a helicopter to his chateau to pick him up.  He descends the staircase as dramatically as Fred Astair, ready to take personal charge of the matter, but in the next scene we see him asleep in bed while a subordinate wakes him up with a cup of coffee.  So much for working through the night.

Damn Reds get everywhere...

The Minister sets his assistant to solving the problem who passes the buck to a police inspector in a wonderful scene in which the two men pear round Maoist red lampshades as they try to carry on a conversation.  The inspector turns out to be efficient but utterly brutal.  With Treuffais chained to a radiator, one policeman asks “have you tried twisting his balls?” the inspector replies indignantly “that’s torture, we don’t do torture… at least not yet”.  Unsurprisingly, the group is quickly tracked to their farmhouse and the inspector orders a full assault, caring less for the life of the ambassador than the chance to murder some leftists.

Chabrol clearly wanted his money's worth out of the helicopter

The result is an almost cartoonish blood-bath as the despondent revolutionaries realise that while they might no longer believe in the cause, they might as well leave a historically attractive corpse by heroically dying for it.  “Viva Death!” screams Diaz as he runs from the house with a machine gun.

The First and Last Theoretical Contribution by Buenaventura Diaz

Some of the film’s final scenes are quite moving as Diaz comes to terms with what he has lived through.  In between footage of the ‘68 Paris riots and chanted slogans, Diaz (now wearing a white polo-neck instead of a black one) speaks directly to the camera of the mistakes he has made.  No intellectual and still eager to jockey for position, he rips off the remarks made by Treuffais prior to their falling out : That state terrorism and leftist terrorism are the twin jaws of a steel idiot trap.  The state, according to Chabrol, would rather destroy itself than give in to revolutionaries.  It would rather deploy terrorism against its own citizens than surrender even an inch to political malcontents.  As a result, the political revolutionary has become an almost politically acceptable role… a role that malcontents are forced into allowing the state to brutally repress them.  By becoming revolutionaries, the group had fallen into a trap.  They gave the state an excuse for killing them.  Diaz then travels to Paris in the hope of freeing the sequestered Treuffais, but he foolishly dies in the process, leaving the liberal intellectual as the only survivor, free to talk to the press about what really happened and thereby have some genuine political impact.

“Treuffais” is an interesting choice of name as it is very close to Truffaut, the director who famously took charge when the French film-makers decided to shut down the Cannes festival in ‘68.  Chabrol clearly identifies most with the battered, liberalised idealism of Treuffais and by roping Truffaut into it he seems to be suggesting a course of action for his fellow leftist film directors : By taking to the barricades, they would only be making things worse.  They can best serve the ultimate goals of the revolution by doing what they were doing at the time, namely thinking about the political climate and sharing their thoughts with a wider public through their words and films.

Title Shot

While Nada’s political content serves as a handy theoretical staging post in Chabrol’s career, it is mainly the film’s personal elements that make it unique.  Looking back over Chabrol’s previous films it is hard to imagine that such a man would ever return to the barricades.  It is also worth noting that while Nada is seen by many to be an end to Chabrol’s golden period, his next film Une Partie De Plaisir (1975) was just as critical of bourgeois hypocrisy as anything from the early 70s or late 60s.  So rather than seeing Nada as marking a political sea-change, it is probably more useful to see it as an admission of personal growth, a recognition of the embourgeoisement that come with age and success.  Nada does not mark Chabrol’s break with revolutionary politics, that break was obvious in all the works of his golden period, instead it marks the point at which Chabrol had to admit to himself that he was not the same man he thought he was in 1968.

Film Poster

The film opens with man (Michel Bouquet) sitting in a chair while, in the background, a naked woman squats on the bed on all fours.  “Charles, come and play…” she purrs seductively at the visibly anguished man.  “Come and play… or I’ll make you pay!”.  She glares up at him “If you knew what I’ve done…” she shifts to the polite form and repeats herself “If you knew what I’ve done… I deserve the worst”.  She then encourages him to put his hands round her neck.  The next thing we see is Charles letting himself out of the apartment, the body of the woman lying prone on the bed.

Anguish

Despair

Charles Masson is an advertising executive.  He has two children, a loving wife Helene (Stephane Audran) and a devoted best friend François (François Périer) who built his house under the explicit instructions to make it as avant garde as possible in the hope that the modernist architecture would help Charles keep the onset of bourgeoisie at bay.  Everyone loves Charles.  He is a decent man.  When an employee is caught with his hand in the till, he cannot even bring himself to admonish the man.  And because Charles is such a decent man, it simply does not occur to anyone that he might not only carry on a sadomasochistic affair with his best friend’s wife Laura (Anna Douking) but also wind up strangling her.

Not Looking...

...Too Well

Chabrol does not initially show us the murder or explain why it happened.  But he does show us that Charles is slowly falling to pieces.  He cannot concentrate at work, he is snapping at his wife and he has started using laudanum in the hope of getting some sleep.  Eventually, he cracks.  He admits to his wife that he was having an affair with Laura prior to her death.  However, rather than being angry or resentful, Helene absolves him of his guilt.  This does not go down well and Charles continues to go downhill.  Then, he cracks again.  Revealing to his wife that not only did he have an affair with Laura, he also killed her.  He killed her because he could not stand the things that she wanted him to do to her.  Sadistic, humiliating things that gave pleasure to Laura and pain to Charles despite the fact that it was Charles who was having to do these things.  However, yet again, Helene forgives Charles.  She argues that it was not his fault.  Laura had been chasing after him for years and not only did she want Charles to brutalise her but Charles’ decision to push things too far was almost a form of self-defence, a means of freeing himself from an intolerable relationship.  Helene’s seemingly bottomless well of forgiveness tortures Charles even more.  He confesses to his friend but there too he encounters nothing but forgiveness and assurances that sending him to prison would only cause more unhappiness by depriving Helene of a husband and the children of a father.  In fact, François does not even want the murder of his wife to damage their friendship, thereby denying the guilt-ridden Charles of the modicum of comfort that might have come from having his best friend turn his back on him.

Charles and Francois

Suddenly, Charles starts to sound a lot like Laura.  He speaks of the need for punishment and for retribution for his misdeeds.  Having confessed and been absolved by everyone who will listen he starts to talk about the need to give himself in to the police.  After begging with him to rethink his actions, Helene then changes roles.  From a bottomless font of forgiveness to avenging angel, she spikes his water with enough laudanum to kill an elephant.

Till Death us do Part

Months pass and Helene receives a letter from François. It is ambiguously worded and speaks nebulously of Charles as a wonderful man and of the need for God to forgive them.  Charles Mother points out that the children are starting to forget.  Helene simply looks at her, she finds herself in the same position as Charles once did.  She has committed the perfect crime.  Can she live with that guilt in a way that Charles could not?

Helene

Juste Avant La Nuit is part of a series of films made by Chabrol in the late 60s and early 70s about the moral vacuity of the middle classes.  This cycle also includes Les Noces Rouges (1973) and La Femme Infidele (1969).  The thematic unity of these films is reinforced by Chabrol’s tendency to use and re-use the same actors, frequently with the same character names.  Indeed, by casting Michel Bouquet opposite Stephane Audran, Chabrol seems to be presenting us with a film that is the mirror image of La Femme Infidele.  All of these films revolve around the capacity of the bourgeoisie to both commit and forgive murder in order to preserve their lifestyle.  In Les Noces Rouges, the couple fail to run away for fear of losing their position, In La Femme Infidele, the husband kills his wife’s lover but never mentions it for fear of disturbing their relationship.

Film Poster

Chabrol’s bourgeois are people trapped and incapable of accepting their conflicted nature.  On the one hand, they are civilised, urbane and wealthy individuals that are free to live their lives however they see fit.  But on the other, they crave limitations, rules and boundaries.  this conflicted vision of humanity is present not only in the work of Sartre but also of Freud : In Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Sartre speaks of the anguish and despair felt by people who realise that they are free and responsible for their actions.  There is no universal code of ethics, no objective form of human flourishing, only what you can live with.  Many people who experience these feelings of anguish and despair respond by throwing themselves into the arms of a moral system.  As Freud said in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922) that the group : “Wants to be ruled, and oppressed, and to fear its masters”.  Charles, much like Laura before him (and possibly Helene after him) yearns for censure.  He cannot cope with having sole responsibility for his actions and so he tries to submit himself to a series of authority figures… first his wife, then his friend and finally the police.  However, Charles’ refusal to accept responsibility is shared by his friends, all of whom are willing to pass judgement on him.

The Character... Not the Film

If we push the idea further, we can also find an explanation for why it is that Charles kills Laura.  Chabrol never shows us the murder or allow us any first-hand insight into the relationship between Charles and Laura.  All we have to go on is Charles’ admission that Laura forced him into a sadistic role against his will.  What evidence we have certainly supports this contention as Laura seems to ‘top from the bottom’, threatening revenge for failure to comply.  However, Laura is happy in her position.  Her bourgeois conflict between freedom and regimentation has clearly found a balance in her forcing of people to brutalise her.  she is free and sexually independent in her willingness to take a lover whilst married, but she is also willing to face the punishment that comes from transgressing the norms of bourgeois society.  However, Charles is another matter.  his desire to be free asserts itself in his affair, his engagement with kinky sex and his murder of Laura but he refuses to accept these elements of his nature.  His description of Laura is of some kind of Svengali-style rapist who lured him into a psycho-social trap and then forced him to murder her.  but there is a more plausible justification for the murder.

Conflicted Nature

The early British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones once said that we do not want to kill the people we hate most, instead we want to kill the people who evoke in us the most unbearable conflicts.  This is because it is human nature to try to resolve inner conflicts decisively.  To be one thing or another.  Much conciliatory art (such as the films that dominate the Gay Indie film scene), is based upon the idea that conflicts are a result of confusion.  Confusion that can be solved simply by ignoring one part of our nature.  However, the reality is that inner conflicts define us as people and drive us forward.  They are not battles that can be won, they are battles that are forever being fought and the dust cloud that rise from the battlefield is who and what we are.  When Charles met Laura and her need for complex sexual power dynamics, he was reminded of the conflicts that rage within his bourgeois existence : The urge to be free, the urge to be submissive.  By having an affair with Laura, he was forced to confront his own uncertainties and rather than assume the responsibility for ending the relationship, he chose to erase Laura.  To erase the source of his confusion and the reminder of his own conflicted nature.

The Troubles of a Vie De Boheme

When Charles’ friends, co-workers and family speak of his as a good man, they are seeing what Charles wanted to be.  A man who was aware of his bourgeois desires but who kept them in check by working a creative job, living in an avant garde house and engaging in extra-marital affairs.  Charles had the potential to be a great man but he never quite achieved it.  Better then that he be remembered by friends and family alike as the man he wanted to be.

Film Poster

Pierre Maury (Michel Piccoli) is a deputy mayor and a man of the left.  He is elegant, handsome and ambitious, but also married to the sickly and frigid Clotilde (Clotilde Joano).  Lucienne Delamare (Stephane Audran) is a passionate and beautiful woman trapped in a loveless but financially and socially beneficial marriage to the pompous and precious local mayor Paul (Claude Piéplu).  These characters all inhabit a nightmarish vision of provincial France.  A small grey town under huge grey skies and filled with locals who are either mindlessly regurgitating formal greetings at each other or engaging in vile and prurient gossip.  Needless to say, Pierre and Lucienne wind up having an affair.  An affair so passionate and intense that whenever they go near each other they cannot help but paw at each others’ clothes like obsessed teenagers.  This establishes a source of tension.  A tension between the suffocating courtly existence of the rural bourgeoisie and the demented catharsis of the affair.  These tensions are magnificently laid bare by Chabrol throughout the film but two scenes stand out in particular.

Animal Passion

Firstly, when Pierre invites himself round to Lucienne’s house in order to seduce her, the couple see their hands slowly creeping together across the back of a chair while the pair argue over whether or not making a pot of tea would constitute too much trouble.  As a dance of seduction, the formality is comical and completely at odds with the savagery of the couple’s desire (shown to us at the beginning of the film).

Look at the chair

Secondly, having enjoyed a tryst with Lucienne in one of the historical beds of a local tourist attraction, Pierre attends a council meeting at which a local grandee sighs and talks about the youth of today having no respect for anything.  His features framed into a picture of mock outrage and exaggerated innocence.

A Picture of Guilt

A Picture of Innocence

As Lucienne says when she first steps into Pierre’s arms : This is going to be difficult and indeed it is.  Before long, the pair’s desire to be together pushes them to take greater and greater risks.  Risks to their marriages, their freedom and, most importantly, their position.  First, Pierre murders his wife and then the pair laugh conspiratorially while Lucienne’s husband Paul is trying to convince Pierre to come in with him on a shady land deal.  This lapse in decorum tips off Lucienne’s husband who fakes a trip to Paris and surprises Lucienne returning home from a night with Pierre.  However, rather than being outraged or betrayed, Paul seems quite pleased : Not only has he found a way to keep his wife happy, but he has also found a way of assuring Pierre’s loyalty.  But, instead of reassuring the lovers, Paul’s tolerance terrorises them and they decide to murder Paul.

Face in the Car Window

More Animal Passion

Initially, the pair get away with it as the local establishment decides that it would be far too politically damaging for the police to start rooting around in the private lives of its grandees.  Tales of sexual scandal and murder tend to play poorly at the ballot box.  However, this stay of execution does not last long as Lucienne’s ethereal daughter Helene (Eliana De Santis) decides to write a letter to a local politician.  The letter does not reveal any facts, nor does it suggest that Lucienne might be guilty, all it does is suggest that there are rumours circulating about the pair being lovers.  When confronted by the police, Lucienne and Pierre confess.  When asked why they did not elope, they admit that the idea had never crossed their minds.

Hands in Chains

Les Noces Rouges is a film about the burdens placed upon individuals by the expectations that come with social class and status.  As publicly visible members of the bourgeoisie, it was unthinkable for Pierre and Lucienne to surrender their positions in the local community.  It simply had not occurred to them to reject the expectations placed upon them.  To rebel.  To seek out freedom.  They preferred to murder their spouses rather than face any embarrassment that might be caused by their eloping and building a new life together.

Film Poster

This kind of social paralysis caused by status anxiety is also explored in Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962).  In that film, local dignitaries become trapped in a drawing room when nobody wants to be the first person to leave a dinner party.  Where Bunuel’s characters placed politeness and social standing ahead of the demands of survival, Chabrol’s characters place them above morality and friendship.  They would rather be secret murderers than be seen to be unfaithful to their spouses.

Film Poster

Another film that echoes throughout Les Noces Rouges’ 95 minute running time is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943).  Both films share a similar vision of village life.  they present it as a hotbed of rampant and brutal hypocrisy,  filled with people who would never say what they think about you to your face but who would be more than happy to circulate hateful rumours about you behind your back.  Also telling is the fact that Chabrol’s couple (much like those in Le Corbeau) are brought low by a letter, a letter that deals not in facts but in rumour and hearsay.  Helene’s desire to see the case re-opened stems not from any desire to see the killer of her step-father brought to justice, but rather from a concern that her mother may well have picked up a reputation for cheating on her husband.  So, just as the couple were driven to murder out of concern for their social position, they are ultimately brought to book because someone was hoping to protect their social position from toxic rumours.  But of course, it is the rumours that ultimately destroy the couple.  When confronted with the possibility that they might be lovers, the pair confess.  The cat is out of the bag.  If they are publicly known to be unfaithful spouses, they might as well be publicly known to be murderers.

Sharing a Joke at Paul's Expense

Watching TV

One of the more intriguing aspects of the film is the daughter herself.  Beautifully physically cast, De Santis looks enough like Audrian to be either her daughter or her younger self.  Indeed, we are told throughout the film that Lucienne had Helene at a young age and the pair enjoy a very close and conspiratorial relationship.  In fact, they are so close that, at one point, Helene finishes Lucienne’s sentence.  the closeness of the relationship and the fact that it is Helene who expresses concern over Lucienne’s relationship suggests that, in some way, Helene is Lucienne.  In fact, it’s worth noting that when Audrian appeared in Chabrol’s previous films La Femme Infidele (1968), Le Boucher (1970), La Rupture (1970) and Juste Avant La Nuit (1971) it was as a character named Helene.  A name also shared by the characters played by Marlene Jobert in La Decade Prodigieuse (1971) and Caroline Cellier in que La Bete Meure (1969).  Yet here, strangely, the name passes not to Audrian’s character but to the that of her daughter.  She represents a younger and purer version of Lucienne.  A version who has not yet made the mistake of getting knocked up as a teenager.  So when Helene publicly expresses her concern for Lucienne’s reputation it is almost as though the real Lucienne is asserting herself and, freed from the short-sightedness of love, seeks to clear her own name of rumour and calumny.

Hands in Chains

When Pierre and Lucienne are dragged away to prison hand in hand and chained, our mind returns again to Sartre’s Huis Clos.  The couple are in love and yet are destined to be separated by prison.  They could have been happy.  They could have been together.  But instead they were prisoners of their class and of their status.  Prisoners forced to kill by vanity and a lack of imagination.  Hell is made of such things.

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.

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.

The scene opens with a blurry shots that quickly snaps into focus on a young child playing on a rather desolate beach.  The camera zooms out and shows that the child is utterly alone and has been for quite a while.  There are no footprints in the sand.  No parents looking on benignly from a nearby café.  In fact, the parents are conspicuously absent, neatly foreshadowing what will come to pass.

The Opening Blur

Alone on the Beach

Next, we see the car.  A mustang.  Moving fast and accompanied by what can only be described as a funeral dirge.  The piece is Vier Ernste Gesänge by Brahms, sung by the post-War contralto Kathleen Ferrier.  A singer noted for the particularly dark timber of her voice, a timber reportedly due to a birth-defect.

Chabrol cuts back and forth between the child and the car.  We see the child moving up the beach and the car eating up the road and immediately a sense of tension is created.  These two bodies, even though they don’t know it yet, are on a collision course.  As the scene progresses, it becomes more and more tense.  Shots from the inside of the car show the changing countryside and we expect the child to suddenly spring into view but we do not know when.

The view from Inside the Car

The cutting back and forth is accompanied by the music fading in and out, as though it is playing on the car’s radio.  As with the absent parents on the beach, this is another act of foreshadowing that serves to ramp up the tension.  The dirge is not for those already dead, but for those that are about to die.  Chabrol lays down further morbid imagery as the village is filled with old churches, local shops called “The Pope” and a tolling bell.  The absurd Gothicism of it all is almost unbearable but it is precisely the heavy-handedness of the imagery serves to increase the tension.

Death

When the car finally hits the child it is dramatically downplayed.  There is no slow-motion.  No screaming child.  No death-rattle as the child closes its eyes for the last time.  It is impersonal… just another bump in the road.  The only emotional reaction comes from the woman in the car and even then the driver mutters “Ta Gueule!”… “Shut it!”.

We then move into a fixed shot.  It could have been the last thing the child saw.  The camera points up towards the grey sky, the old church peeks into shot on the lower left-hand side.  The camera does not move but people move in and out of shot.  By not moving the camera, Chabrol is making it clear that he does not want us to focus upon the locals’ reaction.  He wants us to focus upon the final thing the child saw.  That is the object of the scene.  That last minute of life.

Eventually, with surprising slowness, the child’s father comes into shot, he picks up the child and howls his anguish and sadness.  Suddenly the emotional impact of what has just happened hits us.  By downplaying the moment of the child’s death and focussing our attention upon what happened immediately after, Chabrol has kept all of that built up tension in a holding pattern.  Suddenly, with the arrival of the father, that tension is released.  The father is a simulacrum of the audience’s sense of tension, his howl of anguish could almost be fuelled by the breath of our collective exhalation.  And because the father is the audience’s simulacrum, he is instantly sympathetic even though we know nothing about him other than the fact that he shares our shock and horror and what has just happened.

Jean Cocteau once said that for some people, style is a way of saying something simple in a very complicated way.  For others, it is a way of saying something very complicated in a simple way.  Given the ease with which Chabrol is capable of making us emotionally invest not only in the child’s death but also the father’s struggle, it strikes me that it is the second of Cocteau’s remarks that is closer to the truth.  Dialogue, character and plot ; in cinematic terms, all of these are just long-winded ways of communicating what a great director can say with visuals alone.