The Late Films of Claude Chabrol: Genre, Visual Expressionism and Narrational Ambiguity 9781501312496, 9781501312526, 9781501312502

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The Late Films of Claude Chabrol

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The Late Films of Claude Chabrol Genre, Visual Expressionism and Narrational Ambiguity Jacob Leigh

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2017 Paperback edition published 2019 Copyright © Jacob Leigh, 2017 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Film A Girl Cut in Two (2007), Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. SBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1249-6 PB: 978-1-5013-5197-6 ePub: 978-1-5013-1251-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1250-2 Names: Leigh, Jacob author. Title: The late films of Claude Chabrol: genre, visual expressionism and narrational ambiguity / Jacob Leigh. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014777 (print) | LCCN 2017028365 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501312502 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501312519 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501312496 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Chabrol, Claude, 1930–2010–Criticism and interpretation Classification: LCC PN1998.3.C6 (ebook) | LCC PN1998.3.C6 L45 2017 (print) | DDC 791.4302/33092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014777 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction 1 La Cérémonie (1995): Diary of a Chambermaid 2 Rien ne va plus (1997): Preparation Meets Opportunity 3 Au Cœur du mensonge (1999): The Fabric of Vision 4 Merci pour le chocolat (2000): Cause and Effect 5 La Fleur du mal (2003): Keeping it in the Family 6 La Demoiselle d’honneur (2004): Criss-Cross, Motives and Murder 7 L’Ivresse du pouvoir (2006): Not Following the Rules of the Game 8 La Fille coupée en deux (2007): Killing the Beast 9 Bellamy (2009): More than Meets the Eye Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

33 53 69 87 103 119 135 151 167 181 185 197

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to Royal Holloway College, University of London, for two terms of sabbatical leave, which enabled me to write this book. My colleagues John Hill, Steven Marchant and Mandy Merck offered helpful suggestions for this project. Screening the Past published an earlier version of the chapter on Merci pour le chocolat. I thank the editors of that journal for permission to reuse some of the material. I am also grateful to Bloomsbury and Katie Gallof for publishing this book. Some years ago, Stella Bruzzi and Mandy Merck gave me the freedom to design a second-year undergraduate course on the French New Wave. That freedom has been productive and I am grateful to them for their assistance during the early part of my professional life. I am also indebted to Michael Walker. He gave me invaluable encouragement while designing that course and did me the great service of introducing me to Le Boucher. Lastly, I should like to thank my family for their ongoing support during the writing process.

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Introduction

The aim of this book is to promote Chabrol’s creative achievement and consolidate thinking about Chabrol’s aesthetics. Using Chabrol’s last nine films as case studies, the book focuses on Chabrol’s style and related critical issues. It presents detailed discussions of examples of the dominant stylistic and thematic characteristics of his work. Each case study focuses on different parts of the films’ rhetoric, highlighting the ways in which Chabrol’s films broaden their themes and expand linear narratives or singular explanations of causality into something more ambiguous and complex. In English, two books precede this one: the first is by Robin Wood and Michael Walker (1970) and the other by Guy Austin (1999). Both are excellent, yet their publication dates limit their coverage. In French, Joël Magny offers the most comprehensive overview of Chabrol’s films up to 1986, analysing recurrent themes, narrative structures, characters, techniques and styles. In addition, Christian Blanchet (1989) and Wilfrid Alexandre (2003) offer useful insights, as do French film journals and two book-length interviews with the director (Guérif 1999 and Chabrol 2011). Dividing an artist’s career into periods is an artificial exercise; with Chabrol, however, the division gives an overview of a large body of work. The following periods are approximate: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

1958–1962 Nouvelle vague period 1962–1967 Commercial spy caper period 1967–1974 Hélène or pompidolien cycle 1974–1984 Middle period, with a range of films of varying quality 1984–1995 Marin Karmitz period, beginning with Poulet au vinaigre 1995–2009 Late period, beginning with La Cérémonie.

This book focuses on the sixth period, on the last nine films of Chabrol’s career. Little is written about these films; most work on Chabrol responds to his nouvelle vague period or his ‘Hélène’ cycle (Austin has a chapter on La Cérémonie

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and a short afterword on Rien ne va plus). Yet Chabrol’s last nine films are excellent examples of his best work, as if the director had a late blossoming after La Cérémonie’s success reignited interest in his work. With the release of his next film, Rien ne va plus, in October 1997, Cahiers du cinéma devoted a hundredpage special issue to Chabrol. This was after the journal had ignored Chabrol for most of the 1970s, reviewing none of his films between La Rupture (1970) and Les Liens du sang (1977). By 1995, as Austin notes, Cahiers du cinéma was asking whether Chabrol was ‘the greatest French filmmaker’ (Editorial 1995: 22; in Austin 1999: 2). In the Cahiers du cinéma review of La Cérémonie in September 1995, Frédéric Strauss concludes that ‘it is one of the greatest French films for a long time’ (1995: 26). Frédéric Bonnaud (1997) likewise calls La Cérémonie ‘his masterpiece of the period’, which achieves ‘quasi-perfection’. The following chapters discuss examples of Chabrol’s aesthetics. The remainder of this introduction situates those discussions within broader debates in film aesthetics. It discusses conventions that Chabrol’s films use and artistic categories within which his films fit. Austin proposes three ways of categorizing Chabrol’s style: as expressionism (1999: 159), as melodrama (1999: 72) and as art cinema (1999:  167). This book adds crime fiction and the grotesque. The introduction also provides background material on stylistic excess, assertion, aesthetic distance and narrational ambiguity.

Expressionism John D.  Barlow suggests that ‘expressionism’ makes sense when discussing German films of the 1920s (1982: 204). The term ‘expressionist’, however, refers to styles that share the original ‘movement’s notion that only distortion can reveal the true essence that hides behind everyday reality’ (1982: 205). Barlow describes expressionist techniques as those which externalize ‘intense moods and feelings’ (1982: 70). Expressionist art involved ‘a rejection not only of everything that seemed impressionistic or mimetic, but even of refined tones and strokes, of delicate execution in general’ (1982: 19). In expressionist drama, ‘Causal thinking and psychology were often condemned and ridiculed by expressionist writers. The idea was that psychology could not possibly penetrate to the essence of humanity’ (1982: 41). R. S. Furness describes expressionism as a ‘tendency towards the inflated and the grotesque’ (1973: 21).

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Chabrol’s films have expressionist features: sharp contrasts, quasi-caricatures, unexpected narrative developments, ambiguous causality and multiple explanations. Austin writes: Chabrol’s expressionism also owes a particular debt to Fritz Lang, who used it not only in his films noirs but also in westerns and fantasy films. If Hitchcock’s influence on Chabrol is most evident in terms of voyeurism and point of view, Lang’s legacy is clearest in terms of décor. (1999: 159)

When Blanchet discusses l’expressionnism echabrolien (1989: 142–6), he refers to distortions, exaggerated symbolism, odd camera angles, flaunted camera movements, multiple ellipses, masks, mirrors and doubles. Chabrol repeats the doppelganger motif in his recurrent male antagonists, Paul and Charles, first seen in Les Cousins and last in La Fille coupée en deux. These Jekyll and Hyde doubles represent the return of what civilization fails to repress.1 Chabrol fictionalizes his friend and co-writer Paul Gégauff to explore the attractiveness and danger of what Wood and Walker call ‘Id-figures’ (1970:  54 and 133). On Pierre-Henri Gibert’s 2011 documentary about the nouvelle vague, Chabrol’s friends and colleagues describe Gégauff as passionate, cultured and clever, but also as a self-destructive playboy and provocateur. Agnès Goute, Chabrol’s first wife, says of Gégauff: ‘My father said he was Claude’s evil twin’. Claude de Givray, assistant director on Chabrol’s first film, Le Beau Serge (1958), says: ‘I’m not saying that he [Chabrol] was Christ and Gégauff was the Anti-Christ, but there was an element of that’.2

Crime Fiction Chabrol’s films are a form of crime fiction. As Austin notes, the genre ‘allows him to engage the spectator via the plot, and then explore the complexities of character, morality, society and politics within an accessible and satisfying framework’ (1999:  4). Taking advantage of the commercial potential of crime fiction, Chabrol’s films use the genre’s familiar yet flexible conventions as the basis for his distinctive experiments with tone and viewpoint. A strong narrative momentum drives most crime fiction, but Chabrol’s films dissipate that narrative drive. Chabrol also brings to his films an element of what Austin, writing of La Rupture, calls ‘class war’ (1999: 83). Austin refers to Chabrol’s ‘sly critique of the bourgeoisie’ (1999: 43) and his ‘questioning of bourgeois values’ (1999: 79).

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Charles Derry writes: ‘while murder is always a violent act for Chabrol, it is rarely an act associated with thugs, but with the bourgeoisie’ (1988: 84–5). Jacobowitz speaks of ‘a social world which unfairly suffocates’ in Chabrol’s films (1995: 43), while Gergely argues that Chabrol’s films expose ‘the unbearable hypocrisy of a bourgeois existence’ (2012: 49). Lee Horsley, in a chapter titled ‘Crime Fiction as Socio-Political Critique’ (2005: 158–95), lists issues prominent in crime fiction since the 1920s: ‘class prejudice and exploitation, commercial greed and the plundering of the environment, consumerism and the politics of economic self-interest’ (159). She notes that crime fiction often censures the conditions that breed criminality and the forces that prevent relief of those conditions. Following this tradition, Chabrol directs attention to the social causes of criminals’ behaviour as much as the psychological. In this, Chabrol’s films are forms of psychological noir, what Robert Porfirio describes as the ‘psychological thriller’ or ‘psychological melodrama’, with an ‘underlying mood of pessimism’ (1996: 80). The protagonists are transgressive, investigations are limited or non-existent and the films have ambiguous resolutions that break down binaries of guilt and innocence, with the people who commit violence themselves often victims. Horsley’s summary of noir fiction applies to Chabrol: (i)The subjective point of view; (ii) the shifting roles of the protagonist; (iii) the ill-fated relationship between the protagonist and society (generating the themes of alienation and entrapment); and (iv) the ways in which noir functions as a socio-political critique. (Horsley 2001: 8)

Horsley adds, ‘a sceptical attitude towards received opinions and established institutions, and a strong satiric edge are all characteristic features’ (2001: 13). Horsley’s description of noir fiction encompasses Chabrol’s films. However, what Walker (1992: 17) says about Hitchcock’s films is true of Chabrol’s films: they relate to film noir, without being examples of film noir; they are hybrid forms dominated by their director’s distinctive style. James Naremore (1998:  48)  argues that film noir combines elements of modernism and melodrama, a formulation that well applies to Chabrol’s films. Naremore writes:  ‘the line between “sympathetic” and “unsympathetic” characters is blurred, and criminals often seem more appealing, or at least more authentic, than representatives of law and order’ (1998: 97–8). Janey Place’s summary also fits Chabrol’s work: The dominant world view expressed in film noir is paranoid, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by the past, without clear moral or personal

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identity. Man has been inexplicably uprooted from those values, beliefs and endeavours that offer him meaning and stability. (1998: 51)

Chabrol’s films hint at various possible explanations but refrain from confirming one explanation over another. Potential psychological explanations coexist with social and historical explanations. In his survey of film noir, Walker (1992: 9) describes two broad categories of crime fiction. Referring to John Cawelti’s distinction in Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976), Walker distinguishes between the classic version of crime fiction, which features a ‘refined, ratiocinative detective in a frequently upper middle-class milieu’ (1992:  9), and the hard-boiled hero tradition, in which the hero is independent of corrupt institutions and societies. Walker outlines another tradition (1992: 15) which focuses on unstable or disturbed characters:  ‘In these films, the psychologically disturbed character is more often female than male, and there is an explicit concern, usually channelled through a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist, with the aetiology of the disturbance’ (1992: 15). Chabrol’s films belong to the tradition of crime fiction that explores the causes of the murderers’ mental disorders and their alienation from society, fiction which, as Horsley notes, provides ‘insights into the ordinary society that their killers mimic’ (2005:  128). As Richard Neupert quips:  ‘If Chabrol had made Rear Window he would have been tempted to place the camera in criminal Lars Thorwald’s apartment, instead, to show how and why he killed his wife’ (2006:  135). Explicating this strand of crime fiction that uncovers ‘the aetiology of the disturbance’, Walker quotes Foster Hirsch: ‘The psychopath is the dark underside of the noir victim – far gone before the film opens, he remains trapped in an ongoing nightmare’ (Hirsch 1980:  167; in Walker 1992:  15). Walker argues that ‘where the films invite our sympathy for the psychotic character . . . I would see him more as an extreme version of the noir victim’ (1992: 15–16). The tradition of crime fiction that focuses on the killer’s point of view includes such novelists as James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson. One example of a novel exploring what Thompson, in The Killer Inside Me (1952), describes as ‘the sickness’, is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), with its focus on the psychology of the murderer, Raskolnikov. Hitchcock and Lang’s films add to this tradition, as in Rope (1948) and Scarlet Street (1945). Chabrol inherits techniques from both, but his films’ focus on the ‘aetiology of the disturbance’ also resembles the novels of Ruth Rendell whose A Judgement in Stone (1977) and The Bridesmaid (1989) he adapted. Like Rendell, Chabrol focuses

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on a murderer’s obsessions and psychological breakdown and, like Rendell, explores the social conditions in which these things have developed. In words that evoke Chabrol’s films, Horsley praises Rendell’s complicating of the killer’s motives: ‘her aim seems always to work towards a more complex understanding of the nature of disorder itself––of its dangers and its attractions’ (2005:  62); ‘coercive class structures, social pressures, prejudice, and deprivation are themselves her subject’ (2005: 62). Susan Rowland agrees that Rendell’s novels expose the pernicious pressure of traditional class structures and associate crime with social oppression (2001:  48). Beginning with the novels and films that depict social conditions breeding gangsters, sociopolitical critique often appears in crime fiction that incorporates the killer’s point of view.3 As Horsley notes, the tradition of crime writing that explores the psychology of the criminal concentrates on ‘transgression and pathology’ (2005: 112–57). Horsley describes how writers like Thompson and Highsmith ‘make us complicit, forcing us to attend to their protagonists’ cynically detached commentaries on the societies through which they move, and perhaps bringing us to see our own suppressed violence reflected in their states of mind’ (Horsley 2005: 129). As Robin Buss writes of Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1969): ‘Popaul suggests an answer, of a kind, to some premises of film noir: the ambivalence of our perception of evil, the savagery that lurks (in perhaps more concentrated form) at the heart of urban or “civilized” living’ (Buss 1994: 84). Four of the Chabrol films studied here represent the female killer’s point of view with sympathy:  La Cérémonie, Merci pour le chocolat, La Fleur du mal and La Demoiselle d’honneur. The style of film noir also has parallels with Chabrol’s style. On film noir, Mary Ann Doane quotes Christine Gledhill: ‘certain highly formalized inflections of plot, character and visual style dominate at the expense of narrative coherence and comprehensible solution of crime’ (Gledhill 1978: 13 in Doane 1983: 10). Doane writes: ‘Film noir, instead [of narrative coherence], constitutes itself as a detour, a bending of the hermeneutic code from the questions connected with a crime to the difficulty posed by the woman as enigma (or crime)’ (1983: 10). Film noir, Doane argues, destabilizes classical cinema conventions. J. P. Telotte also argues that film noir often violates classical cinema’s norms (1989: 2). He points to the stylistic influence of German expressionism on film noir: During the expressionist period, filmmakers like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and G.W. Pabst had sought a language of heightened expression, one that would let them give external shape and substance to inner, subjective experiences, feelings, and attitudes, in effect turning the psyche inside out. (1989: 17–18)

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Also relevant are Sanders comments on the absurd in film noir: What emerges from even a remote acquaintance with film noir is a depiction of the human condition in which scenes may begin realistically but quickly veer into surrealism or the absurd, especially when people are shown at the edge of their own desperation. (2006: 96)

Chabrol’s films contain few organized criminals, private investigators or corrupt police, but they nonetheless evoke the film noir world as described by Alan Woolfolk:  ‘a societal backdrop of dead and corrupt purposes, ranging from middle-class conformity and faceless bureaucracies to corruption at the top among social and political elites’ (2006: 107).

Melodrama Renowned as a director of crime fiction, Chabrol also uses conventions from expressionistic melodramas; for example, the style of a film like Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945) is close to Chabrol’s style. Of Chabrol’s relationship with melodrama, Austin writes: Chabrol uses mise en scène extremely effectively to externalise the characterisation. This is not just typical of Chabrol but also of melodrama, which relies on the ‘externalisation of internal emotions and their embodiment within the mise en scène or décor’. (Doane 1987: 72; in Austin 1999: 72)4

The 1950s Hollywood melodrama often combines emotional scenes with stylistic excess and distancing strategies. Thomas Elsaesser’s article (1987) on the ‘sound and fury’ of melodrama describes the genre’s stylistic excess. Stephen Heath connects discussions of stylistic excess with a psychoanalytic theory of the construction of a subject in ideology: In fact, film is potentially a veritable flux of effects, a plurality of intensities, and narrative functions to contain that affectivity which is thus ‘released’ as ‘excess’, ‘disturbance’, ‘figure’ – symptomatic demonstrations of the work of containment. (1976: 27)

Heath argues that a film takes hold of the spectator through ‘narrativisation’ but this ‘suturing’ is always liable to break in moments of excess; this happens, for example, ‘as soon as the time of the shot hesitates beyond the time of its narrative specifications’ (1981: 109). Heath’s description of stylistic excess breaking a film’s hold on an audience is a useful one. Telotte also interprets stylistic excess as a

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symptom of repression inherent in classical narrative cinema (1989: 58). Roland Barthes’ idea of a ‘third meaning’ (1977) has also been used in discussions of cinematic excess, as has Kristin Thompson’s work on the topic (1986). Another way of considering stylistic excess is as ‘the figural’, outlined by JeanFrançois Lyotard in the pair discours and figure. Francesco Casetti summarizes the opposition’s relevance to film theory: On the one hand, we have the discursive or that which presents itself as logical, ordered, meaningful; on the other hand, we have the figural or something that is felt before being understood, which expresses a force, rather than meaning, which has an existence before having a function. (1999: 209)

As a way of understanding Chabrol’s stylistic excesses, this distinction lacks appeal because Chabrol’s assertions and exaggerations have a purpose. More useful for this study is Douglas Pye’s suggestion that melodrama combines presentational and representational forms:  ‘The intensity of fifties melodrama comes from a constant play between powerful emotional involvement with the protagonists and varied forms of distance – cognitive, analytical, moral and so on’ (2000: 13). Pye’s comments on Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952) apply to Chabrol’s films because his films often prompt intellectual distance from the emotional situation in which the characters are involved.

Art Cinema Austin argues that the lack of closure in Chabrol’s films is ‘the key deviation in his work from the conventions of genre cinema, and the major link with art cinema’ (1999: 167). Narrational ambiguity and asserted stylistic flourishes are often found in films categorized as art cinema. Chabrol’s films often produce the sensation that one is watching a controlled presentation, as opposed to a transparent representation of a fictional world. Chabrol’s presentational mode generates tension and his style is a form of ‘art-cinema narration’, as explained by David Bordwell: Realistic motivation corroborates the compositional motivation achieved through cause and effect. But art-cinema narration, taking its cue from literary modernism, questions such a definition of the real: the world’s laws may not be knowable, personal psychology may be indeterminate. (1985: 206)

In Bordwell’s explication of art-cinema narration, cause and effect relations are loosened. Citing Bazin’s commentary on the ellipses in Paisà (Roberto Rossellini,

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1946), Bordwell writes:  ‘The viewer must therefore tolerate more permanent causal gaps than would be normal in a classical film’ (Bazin 1971: 35; Bordwell 1985: 206). He goes on to state: ‘Concerned less with action than reaction, the art cinema presents psychological effects in search of their causes’ (1985: 208). Expounding on the style of art cinema Bordwell has this to say: Stylistic devices that gain prominence with respect to classical norms  – an unusual angle, a stressed bit of cutting, a striking camera movement, an unrealistic shift in lighting or setting, a disjunction on the sound track, or any other breakdown of objective realism which is not motivated as subjectivity – can be taken as the narration’s commentary. (1985: 209)

Bordwell’s description of art cinema’s flaunting of stylistic devices is accurate and, as Austin notes, applies to Chabrol’s films too. His use of asserted symbols exemplifies what Bordwell describes as ‘marked self-consciousness’ (1985: 209). However, as with many of the best films, Chabrol’s films incorporate traits from both classical and art cinema traditions. Bordwell also writes of ‘the general tendency of the art film to flaunt narrational procedures. When these flauntings are repeated systematically, convention asks us to unify them as proceeding from an “author” ’ (1985: 211). That is, we assign asserted symbols or flaunted stylistic devices to an author figure or a stand-in for such a figure. George Wilson reminds us that because the camera does not exist in a film’s fictional world, it is not logical to refer to ‘the camera’ or ‘the film’. Nevertheless, phrases like these occur in ordinary usage as references to perceptions of an active agent. Therefore, this book refers to ‘the film’, ‘the camera’ and, occasionally, ‘Chabrol’, to describe what George Wilson describes as the ‘modestly robust internal narrator’ (2011:137).5

The Grotesque John R. Clark writes: ‘The literature of the modern era immerses us again and again in disillusionment, anomie, alienation and wretchedness’ (1991:  1). He later adds: Horror and grotesquerie are especially suited to the modern era, in which the self has been recognised as being irrational and unstable, and a traumatic parade of dreadful current events has helped topple conventional idols of Renaissance humanitas and idealism. (1991: 5)

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Clark describes ‘dark comedy’ as ‘modern tragic-comedy, particularly that kind of drama whose unpleasant setting and Brechtian “alienation-effects” in some sense contribute to the audience’s discomfort’ (1991:  168, n.21). As Clark explains, the origins of the term lie in the exotic wall paintings found in Nero’s grotto, but the term also refers to art and drama which celebrates irrationality and uses exaggeration to stress ambivalence:  ‘the grotesque was always understood to be excessive’ (1991: 18). The grotesque includes elements that are macabre, fearful and disorderly (1991:  21). A  recurrent feature of much twentieth-century art and literature, the grotesque mixes the comic and the horrific in a blend that seems an appropriate reaction to what Tennessee Williams calls the ‘underlying dreadfulness of modern experience’ (Williams 1950: xii; in Clark 1991: 20–1). Bernard McElroy cites examples of the grotesque in twentieth-century fiction by Kafka, Joyce, Günter Grass, Nabokov, Beckett, Flannery O’Connor, Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon, writing: Grotesque art presents us not with the world as we know it to be, but with the world as we fear it might be. The artist of the grotesque does not merely combine surfaces; he creates a context in which such distortion is possible. (1989: 11)

Citing Ruskin’s definition, McElroy notes that ‘one of the oldest and most frequently encountered remarks about the grotesque in art is that it combines the fearsome with the ludicrous’ (McElroy 1989:  12).6 Philip Thomson also notes that the grotesque is most often used to describe ‘the co-presence of the laughable and something which is incompatible with the laughable’ (1972:  3). The ordinary sense we have of the grotesque is that it is ‘simultaneously funny and repulsive’ (Thomson 1972: 50). McElroy (1989: 11) lists characteristics of the grotesque: disharmony, extravagance, exaggeration, distortion, the macabre and bizarre. For Thomson, ‘the grotesque is essentially disharmonious’ (1972:  18):  ‘the unresolved clash of incompatibilities in work and response’ (1972: 27). Unlike caricature, which has a discernible intention, our reaction to the grotesque will be ‘divided and problematic’ (Thomson 1972: 264). McElroy also observes that satire is the simplest form of grotesque (1989:  17). Most subjects can be rendered grotesque; what matters is a work’s point of view or tone, which suggests ‘a certain wry playfulness, whimsicality, or perverse glee’ (McElroy 1989: 183). In Chabrol’s films, fearful or monstrous elements combine with the ludicrous. As Joël Magny writes, ‘the distinction between the grotesque, the tragic and the

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everyday is obviously never fully resolved and each film can alternate between different modes’ (1987: 37): The Chabrolian world evolves between two dramatic extremes. The comical takes on the form of fierce caricature, so that perception distorts appearances, which veer towards grimaces and the grotesque. So it is with some of his early films, with the [André] Jocelyn of A Double Tour and Ophelia, or the baroque world of Les Godelureaux, but also later works, such as Nada or Docteur Popaul. (Magny 1987: 36)7

Relevant to Chabrol is McElroy’s comment that the grotesque is often the antithesis of classical aesthetics of harmony, order and coherence (McElroy 1989: 16). He also identifies schadenfreude as a component:  ‘the grim joke in the modern grotesque is often a way of jarring sensibilities into grasping the terrible or the pathetic by excluding the commonplace sentiments of revulsion and pity’ (1989: 20). As actor Michel Bouquet says: ‘In his films, Chabrol treats the world with a certain sarcasm’ (De Baecque 1997: 61). Another Chabrol actor, Philippe Duclos, says: ‘It’s hard to know how to react to Claude’s films. They go back and forth between scary and funny. There is something very singular about his filmmaking’ (Gibert 2007). The tension between the comical and the revolting is a deliberate effect, as Chabrol comments: Very often in a drama, there are funny elements, funny bits. I  don’t like this much. What I like is in a scene which could be serious, even dramatic, there’s suddenly a detail which makes the audience wonder whether it’s funny or not. (Gibert 2006)

Chabrol’s films use grotesque elements in a manner that McElroy describes as ‘heightening devices’ (1989: 17). They feature grotesque elements within a semi-realist framework. Sudden exaggerations or violations of expectations result in spectatorial tension, uneasiness and disorientation. Grotesque elements function as distancing devices. For example, in Au cœur du mensonge, Thomas Chabrol’s pathologist is both comical and creepy. In Rien ne va plus, the Guadeloupe scenes with the chief gangster combine violence and humour in an unsettling mixture. In L’Ivresse du pouvoir, the corrupt politicians and businessmen are plausible, though they hover on the edge of caricature; it is both amusing and disturbing to watch them scheming. The incongruous combination of humour and revulsion provoked by L’Ivresse du pouvoir is less extreme than that provoked by Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)’s close-up of

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a murder victim with her tongue poking out or the murderer wrestling with a naked corpse in a potato lorry, but it is in the same mode.

Stylistic Excess In Chabrol’s films, stylistic devices such as camera movements are often eyecatching. Nothing is represented directly. When his films show passers-by on a street, a camera movement, a performance or the music makes the presentation noticeable. As Wood and Walker write of Les Bonnes Femmes: The film is one of the most striking and successful manifestations of a central unifying feature of the early New Wave, shared by such disparate directors as Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Demy and Rozier: the tension between the stylised and the naturalistic, the formal and the documentary. In the course of the film Chabrol gives us an extraordinarily detailed portrait of the urban environment: we are repeatedly returned to the external realities of the city, its buildings, its traffic, its crowds, its manifold pressures. At the same time, one’s overall impression is of a highly stylised work . . . a rigorously formalised construction underlies the film’s apparent spontaneity. (1970: 39)

Film criticism often praises a film’s subtle expressive qualities or its bold use of form. Chabrol’s style falls between these two positions; too startling and blatant for the former, too normative for the latter, his stylistic excesses appear to some as elementary formal failures. As a result, less sympathetic critics have interpreted Chabrol’s highly stylized films as pretentious and overblown, failures of taste and judgement. In Sight and Sound, Jonathan Romney writes of Rien ne va plus:  ‘there’s little mystery, and surprisingly little humanity either, in a film that’s finally as dead and dated as the wretched pop chanson that ends it’ (1998: 61). Sight and Sound ’s editor, Nick James, criticizes La Fleur du mal: Beneath the clockwork of these formalised lives and of a plot that bears down on its finale by slow and tedious degrees are the usual creakily ‘atmospheric’ and near-pointless venalities we expect from Chabrol protagonists. At one point the wise old vixen Aunt Line says ‘There’s no such thing as time because in reality it is always the present’. To which one could add: except when you’re watching Chabrol. (2003: 17)

By contrast, Positif gave La Fleur du mal a positive two-page review and ran a detailed five-page interview with Chabrol. Cahiers du cinéma also gave it a

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long, two-page review while French Première published interviews with the three main actresses: Suzanne Flon, Nathalie Baye and Mélanie Doutey. At one point, the interviewer says to them: ‘Chabrol is a very popular filmmaker, his films are often shown on television and his fictional universe is very well defined’ (Narbonne 2003: 75).8 Such a comment would be unthinkable in a British film magazine. The problem for Chabrol’s films in the United Kingdom is that they deal with French society, but without conforming to the conventions of French art cinema in the mode of Claire Denis or of French crime fiction in the mode of Olivier Marchal or Jacques Audiard. Chabrol’s films are hybrids, nether pure art cinema nor pure genre cinema. That hybridity thwarts instant acclaim. Rare is the critic like Andréa Picard who understands that Chabrol is ‘always one to both employ and mock the techniques of suspense’ (2003: 71). As she writes of La Fleur du mal: No surprises here, nor are there many to be found in the script, which borders on the wan and predictable. Perversely, this has become the (al)lure of Chabrol, now 50-something works into a ripe, juicy career. Chabrol’s viewers pine for the decadent French perversions, the incest and betrayal, the preposterous poisonings and the haunting, disillusional memories, not to mention the sun-soaked Provençal landscapes. Watching a Chabrol film is a license to voyeurism, and, for the most part, the images are deliciously consumable. (Picard 2003: 71)

Picard appreciates Chabrol’s style:  ‘We want to watch even though we know how the narrative will unfold, with every turning point made obvious by a wink from the auteur’ (2003:  71). Her summary of La Fleur du mal ’s pleasures is uncommon in English-language reviewing, but the more one studies Chabrol’s films the more one appreciates the control and precision. L’Ivresse du pouvoir looks at first glance like a standard political thriller with an investigative narrative similar to countless others in the genre. However, closer inspection reveals that ambiguities and ellipses derail the narrative, while its visual style is far more nuanced than most mainstream films and television programmes in the genre. Chabrol’s expressionist or grotesque elements inject intensity without sacrificing plausibility. For example, the gossiping trio at the wedding in Merci pour le chocolat conjure up social types, but they remain plausible; the monstrous mother and son in La Fille coupée en deux come close to caricature but remain believable. Chabrol’s exaggerations and assertions sit uneasily with the notions of synthesis, integration and coherence between style and meaning which are central to V. F. Perkins’s arguments about the value of certain popular Hollywood films.

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In Film as Film, Perkins discusses filmic devices that he considers to be examples of ‘asserted meaning’ (1978: 118) and other devices that he suggests have ‘dramatic relevance’ (Perkins 1978: 116). Thus, for example, ‘[i]n River of No Return the symbolism is so completely absorbed into the action that it may easily pass unnoticed’ (Perkins 1978: 128). On the other hand, Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964) fails to integrate its stylistic devices: Red is used to represent the threat which the neurotic heroine hears from an alienated, hostile and disintegrating world . . . We observe that colour is being used to create an effect. Intellectually we can identify the effect required. But of the effect itself we feel no symptom. We are so busy noticing that we respond rather to our awareness of the device than to the state of mind it sets out to evoke. (Perkins 1978: 85)

Robin Wood responds that the stylistic effect in Il deserto rosso works for him ‘precisely in the way Perkins says it does not’ (2006: 34). Wood wonders whether Perkins’s comparison of Antonioni’s film with Bigger than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956) is unjust: ‘lurking behind the specific differences described there are differences between the kinds of art involved so basic as to make Perkins’s deductions untenable’ (2006: 33). Aiming to complement rather than rebut Perkins’s argument, Wood proposes that it is unrealistic to compare films from two different traditions or categories of art. Wood suggests that Perkins misclassifies the European art film when he judges it by the criteria used to judge the classical Hollywood film.9 Of the more general principles, Perkins writes: If we agree in making qualities of organization and coherence a primary issue in critical judgement, complexity and subtlety are vindicated as highly relevant criteria. But they are so for aesthetic reasons, and not because complex views or statements are generally preferable to simple ones. Complexity of viewpoint requires and justifies elaborated expression. But the simpler statements underemploy a complex medium. They need only the diagrammatic relationship of a few givens to yield significance at a level we could call that of asserted meaning. At this level coherence exists but lacks density. In bald oppositions like those between palaces and slums, battlefields and stock-markets, we find generalized images joined to create approximations to verbal messages. Film becomes a substitute for speech, a translation of verbal statements, rather than an alternative, independent mode of communication. (Perkins 1978: 118)

Chabrol’s films make bald oppositions and assert meanings, but they achieve complexity of viewpoint by combining these with narrational ambiguity and

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spectatorial detachment. The diagrammatic relationships in Chabrol’s films are the bold contrasts they make, but the presentation of these diagrammatic contrasts introduces complexity. Alex Clayton develops an insight of Perkins concerning stylistic excess, which he identifies as ‘aesthetic suspense’ (Perkins 1996: 226), a concept that allows for assertion, exaggeration and disharmony, something that goes beyond the coherent reconciliation of photographic recording and expressive relevance. Clayton quotes Perkins’s essay on Johnny Guitar: The hyperbolic quality of Young’s score is appreciated even as it contributes to the urgency of conflict and the vividness of emotional depiction. Intensification is calculated to arrive at, but not to pass, the edge of absurdity. The daring in this process constructs an aesthetic suspense that defines the film’s special thrill. (Perkins 1996: 226; in Clayton 2016: 209)

For some, Chabrol’s aesthetics pass beyond the edge of absurdity to arrive at its centre. However, in the nine films discussed here Chabrol achieves a type of aesthetic suspense in which the films’ stylistic excesses fascinate rather than fail. Perkins identifies another type of aesthetic thrill, one that derives from ‘the unpolished’, examples of which he defends in La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939): There are wonders of technique, and passages whose wit and delicacy would be hard to miss, but they come in collision with baldly contrived moments that could be taken for blunders if they were not – being readily avoidable – so clearly meant. (Perkins 2012: 84)

For example, ‘The danse macabre is saved from the banality or bombast of paraded symbolism by Renoir’s love of the unpolished’ (Perkins 2012: 101). In Chabrol’s case, excessive polish saves his ‘paraded symbolism’ from ‘banality or bombast’, rather than ‘love of the unpolished’. His films assert their symbolism so obviously that it must be understood as part of an overall aesthetic strategy.

Assertion, Exaggeration and Obviousness In the history of cinema, there are many precedents for Chabrol’s use of assertion, exaggeration and obviousness. Some are meant to be amusing; some are meant to provide additional meanings; some are meant to be distancing; and some are unintended, but are examples of poor judgement or symptoms of failed repression. Obviousness in comedy is no surprise. Bringing Up Baby (Howard

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Hawks, 1938) opens with Cary Grant holding a dinosaur bone, the film’s first example of what Stanley Cavell describes as ‘a species of more or less blatant and continuous double entendre’ (1981:  116). The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) contains several comparable examples of comic obviousness. Soon after the film opens, Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) drops an apple on Hopsy’s (Henry Fonda) head and, at one point near the start of their adventures, she sees a snake emerging from Hopsy’s pyjamas. Cavell notes that ‘we are being clunked on the head with an invitation to read this through Freud. But the very psychological obviousness of it serves the narrative as an equivalent, or avatar, of the issue of innocence’ (Cavell 1981: 54). In the Hollywood adventure film, asserted symbolism sits less comfortably. At the end of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), after Bogart’s hero has shot the villain, Captain Renault (Claude Rains) drops a bottle labelled Vichy water into a rubbish bin. In case we miss it, Curtiz provides a close-up of the bottle. As Perkins says: ‘it is probably fair to claim that Curtiz’s best films achieve a dramatically effective manner, rather than a style’ (1981: 1145). A similar example of asserted symbolism resembling poor judgement comes near the end of Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015). As Tom Hanks travels on a suburban New York train, he sees some boys jumping fences which, we surmise, reminds him of the people he saw being shot as they tried to climb the Berlin Wall. As a Variety critic writes: A scene in which Donovan watches East German escapees gunned down while trying to scale the wall, later echoed by fence-climbing children back home in New York, goes a touch too far, the sentimental girl-in-red indulgence the director allows himself here. (Debruge 2015)

Debruge evokes another example of Spielberg’s indulgence, his ‘going too far’, the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List (1993). One film noir director who incorporated striking symbolism with considerable flair was the German exile working in Hollywood, Robert Siodmak. In The Killers (1946), the investigating insurance agent questions two of the dead Swede’s (Burt Lancaster’s) friends, a policeman, Sam, and his wife, Lily, who had been in love with the Swede. Prominent next to the married couple is a birdcage housing two small birds. As Jack Shadoian writes: There is no element of a grand passion, and a certain regret mixes with the predominant tone that these ancient matters have been laid to rest. Siodmak makes the most of a lovebird in a birdcage dangling conspicuously in the frame. The

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device comments on Sam and Lily’s domesticity; it is a trap, after all, and it may be a lesser existence to live on as they do than to die as Swede. (2003: 87)

Although conspicuous, Siodmak’s use of the birdcage is an effective symbolic device, an example of the tendency associated with 1940s film noir’s inheritance of expressionist devices. Two other exiled directors associated with the transposition of German expressionism into Hollywood melodrama and film noir are Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk. Sometimes, if a film’s symbolism is obvious we react as Lang’s American producer reacted to the combination of clucking hens and gossiping women in Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936): ‘Fritz, American people don’t like symbols. They’re not so dumb that they don’t understand without them’. And he is right [continues Lang]. I don’t know if I cut it out or not [he didn’t] – but he’s absolutely correct. Everyone knows what the gossiping women are doing. (Bogdanovich1967: 28)

Lang never abandoned his use of forceful symbolism. As Tom Gunning writes: Lang insisted on ‘the constructedness and artificiality of his archetypal fantasy worlds, and did not try to endow them either with emotional immediacy or even believability’ (2000: 392). The Chuck-a-Luck wheel in Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952) is a primary asserted symbol that is close to Chabrol’s usage. Sirk’s films contain many examples of asserted symbolism. In Imitation of Life (1959), there are objects like the black doll or framings like the view of the funeral from inside a costume rental shop. In All that Heaven Allows (1955), there are several examples:  the smashed teapot, the television set, the father’s trophy missing from the mantelpiece. Paul Willemen writes of ‘the most striking feature of these symbols being their total unequivocalness’ (1971: 65), while Laura Mulvey writes: ‘the formal devices of Hollywood melodrama, as analysed by Thomas Elsaesser (in Monogram 4), contribute a transcendent, wordless commentary giving abstract emotion spectacular form’ (1977: 54–5). As Mulvey notes, the form Sirk adopts is spectacular; Chabrol’s unequivocal symbols work in the same highly stylized mode as Sirk’s. In Film as Film, Perkins cites Hitchcock as a director who is prepared ‘to indicate areas of concentration very forcibly’ (1978: 129). Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), for instance, contains several examples of asserted symbolism. When the central character spills red ink on her shirt, she panics and the film screen is flooded with the colour red. Wood writes that Marnie ‘obviously flaunts rather than seeks to disguise’ its ‘glaring antirealist devices’ and he relates these to

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Hitchcock’s absorption of the influence of German expressionism (2002: 389). Another Hitchcock example is the cross-cutting between Bruno and Guy in Strangers on a Train (1950), which, as Pye notes, has a strong sense of display and assertion:  ‘This is a highly self-conscious deployment of film techniques that wants to declare itself as such, while carrying the spectator along in pleasurable anticipation of narrative developments’ (2007: 41). Pye’s methods and conclusions are useful for studying Chabrol’s films. He writes: ‘Hitchcock teases us and makes it clear by the striking nature of his stylistic and narrative choices that that is what he is doing’ (41). Pye’s terminology works well when applied to Chabrol’s films: the film ‘flaunts its ability to restrict what we see and know’ (41); there is a sense of the director ‘teasing’ us’ (40); there is an ‘insistence on the formal pattern’ (40); ‘directorial control’ is a ‘blatant feature of this opening’ (41); ‘these are very emphatic patterns of narration strikingly shaping the story material and the spectator’s relationship to it’ (41). The style’s obviousness is one way that Hitchcock’s films challenge the spectator: ‘This opening declares its director’s power and control and requires our acknowledgement of this as part of the contract for our participation’ ( 41). All this applies to Chabrol.10 Two final examples highlight the critical issues concerning stylistic assertions and obviousness. In the schoolroom sequence in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962), Pompey stands in front of a picture of Lincoln as he recites the declaration of independence. Andrew Sarris writes of this scene: ‘Ford’s obviousness transcends the obvious in the context of his career’ (1976: 180). The overt artifice that permeates this late Ford film has proved one of its defining and valuable features. A  less successful example occurs in Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960). When widow Lee Remick shows Montgomery Clift around the semiabandoned house, she brushes dead leaves from her former marital bed. Robin Wood judges the point overdone, in the Curtiz or Spielberg manner, and complains of Kazan’s tendency to nudge ‘the audience into awareness of a point already all too obvious’ (1971–72: 29). As Wood remarks, the problem with Kazan’s symbolism is how to distinguish between ‘effects one would call “strong, forceful, direct” and effects one would call “crude, vulgar, obvious” ’ (1971–72: 29).

Previous Discussions of Chabrol Several previous critics have described Chabrol’s strong, forceful and direct effects, though as Neupert observes, ‘one of the least-studied dimensions of

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Chabrol’s cinema is his use of excessive narrative strategies’ (2007: 130). As early as 1961, Eric Rohmer writes of Les Godelureaux , ‘Chabrol does not hide the fact that there is symbolism’ (1989: 75). Part of his defence of Chabrol’s film, Rohmer’s comment pinpoints Chabrol’s asserted symbolism. By far the most obvious of Chabrol’s aesthetic strategies is his use of a primary asserted symbol, that is, a symbol asserted so overtly that it challenges conventional evaluative responses. The assertion and the over-emphasis put us on guard; the symbolism is so obvious that we are unsure whether to take it at face value. In the nine films studied here, Chabrol’s primary asserted symbols are the opera Don Giovanni in La Cérémonie, roulette in Rien ne va plus, the trompe-l’œil in Au Cœur du mensonge, the ‘chocolate cobweb’ in Merci pour le chocolat, the birdcage and stairs in La Fleur du mal , both entrapment images, the statue in La Demoiselle d’honneur, the red gloves in L’Ivresse du pouvoir, the magic trick in La Fille coupée en deux and the two car crashes in Bellamy. Some earlier Chabrol critics judge Chabrol’s effects to be crude, vulgar and obvious. Ian Cameron, for example, argues that Chabrol’s foregrounded formal patterning is overdone. Cameron notes ‘the strained symmetry of his first two films. This symmetry was most troublesome in the ending of Les Cousins, where the desire to make a formal point overcame Chabrol’s better judgement’ (1963:  7). Comparing Truffaut and Chabrol, Wood argues that Chabrol’s interest in form has the potential to distort his films: ‘There is sometimes the problem of whether the characters determine the pattern or the pattern the characters, of whether the geometry grows naturally out of the human interchange or is externally imposed’ (1969:  20). Chabrol’s obvious assertions challenge criticism intent on valuing meanings expressed by elements inherent in a film’s drama rather than ‘externally imposed’. As Wood and Walker write: They show a continual tendency towards the enclosed, insulated kuntswerk, the art-object. The tendency is evident in Chabrol’s formal preoccupations, his obsession with a symmetry that is usually inseparable from the thematic and expressive content of his films but could, one feels, at any moment harden into symmetry-for-symmetry’s sake. (1970: 58)

John Belton writes:  ‘If Chabrol’s films have had any flaw in the past, it has been their overly schematic formalism’ (1972:  46).11 These issues concerning Chabrol’s stylistic excesses were given clearest articulation in a debate published in Monogram and Movie in 1975.

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In Monogram, Thomas Elsaesser describes Le Boucher’s combination of ‘its strongly linear, suspense-orientated plot’ and ‘so many carefully composed symmetrical patterns overlaying and deflecting the momentum of the story-line that one is tempted to talk about a counter-structure of visual and verbal motifs superimposing itself on the movements of the intrigue’ (1975:  1). Elsaesser writes of ‘Chabrol’s cinema, where the plot foregrounds itself into almost operatic theatricality’ (1975: 1), while Mark LeFanu, in the same issue of Monogram, uses the term ‘overdetermined’ (1975: 5).12 LeFanu argues that Chabrol’s films invite critics into a trap of ‘a too literal interpretation of his symbols, which in any event he rarely bothers to hide; their very obtrusiveness should act as a caution’ (LeFanu 1975: 4). LeFanu suggests that Le Boucher refers to the film’s ‘repeated insistence on its own fictions’, not the psychology of the characters. He writes: ‘There is everywhere an overt visual symbolism, puzzling and ironical, as it seems to dare us by its very obviousness to offer an “interpretation” ’ (LeFanu 1975:  4). LeFanu comments that Chabrol is a filmmaker ‘whose concerns are primarily with formal patterns’ (1975: 5). For LeFanu, the ‘overt visual symbolism’ in Chabrol’s films suspends the possibility of meaningful interpretation. He suggests that instead of interpreting the meaning of such symbols, it is better to describe their ‘formal disposition’. Michael Walker’s 1975 Movie article on Chabrol responds to LeFanu’s article in Monogram. Walker argues that ‘one can speak, without violating the fictional framework, of characters having histories, where the film sets these up, as is the case with Le Boucher’ (1975: 49): The signs and symbols do not function independently within the body of the film, but form part of its dense texture of allusions and insights. LeFanu seems to think that, because Le Boucher contains symbols which are ‘obvious’, they ‘stand out’, and force one to view them, and consequently the film, ironically. But John Belton’s observations demonstrate that ‘obviousness’ is a question of interpretation. (Walker 1975: 51)

As an example, Walker cites the flashing red light at the end of Le Boucher which Hélène watches. Walker suggests that during the shot/reverse-shot sequence the red light assumes a connection with Popaul’s heartbeat. However, he argues that this represents Hélène’s point of view: ‘It operates as a symbol because Hélène sees it that way’ (1975: 51). As Walker acknowledges, we notice the ‘extreme formality and symmetry’ (LeFanu 1975: 5) of Chabrol’s symbols, but this does not mean that ‘they are signs which exist in a quasi-autonomous role, forms without meaning in a circular discourse’ (LeFanu 1975: 5). Chabrol

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has integrated ‘overt visual symbolism’ into the film; the symbols are interpretable aesthetic constructs rather than ‘forms without meaning’. LeFanu is correct in his identification of the overtness of symbolism in Chabrol’s films, but Walker is correct to refute the suggestion that the symbolism is an arrangement of pure form.

Aesthetic Distance Chabrol’s asserted symbolism and stylistic excesses destabilize the spatial presentation of the fictional world. On a first viewing, we notice something askew in the presentation without necessarily being aware why or how the effect is achieved. Camera movements are unexpected and intrusive; objects are foregrounded; framings suggest subjective emphases. However, the style disorientates without destroying narration; Chabrol’s flaunted stylistic devices remain with the domain of narrative fiction film. The director exploits narrative’s addictive effects, but withholds the reassurances that much fiction offers. The stylistic assertions are one of Chabrol’s strategies for creating aesthetic distance. These distancing elements accompany ambiguous narratives. In Le Beau Serge when Marie (Bernadette Lafont) descends the stairs with François (Jean-Claude Brialy), after they have made love upstairs, she tells him: ‘It’s strange. You observe us as if were insects. You don’t like anyone, do you?’13 Critics thereafter labelled Chabrol an ‘entomologist’ to characterize the effect they perceived whereby his films analyse his characters instead of encouraging identification with them. The title of the Chabrol episode of the French television series Cinéma, de notre temps is Claude Chabrol:  l’entomologiste (1992), directed by André Labarthe, who, in his 1960 review of Les Bonnes Femmes, describes ‘Chabrol’s gift for “entomological” observation’ (Labarthe 1992:  50). Labarthe argues that the distance Chabrol’s film maintains from its characters does not imply ‘some superior, suspicious or contemptuous level’: ‘It indicates the eye of a filmmaker striving for freedom from preconceptions. The study of human behaviour is in nature no different from the study of animal behaviour: the only difference is the object of study’ (Labarthe 1992:  51). Labarthe refers to the ‘impassivity’ and ‘objectivity’ in Chabrol’s camera (1992: 52). Years later, Chabrol says of La Fille coupée en deux: ‘We wanted to follow the reality of this small event closely, to emphasize, a bit like

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entomologists, the great revelation it makes about human nature’ (2009:  5). Isabelle Huppert also speaks of the distance Chabrol’s films maintain from their characters: When I work with Chabrol I feel like a butterfly caught in a net. The net is his camera. The way he places his characters, and the way he looks at them implacably, from above, with the eyes of an entomologist. He watches them struggle. (Poncet 1995) Chabrol does not excuse, does not judge, does not even explain. He simply looks. Like an entomologist observes fighting beetles. (Lavoignat 1995: 10)

Wood and Walker write of Les Godelureaux: ‘Chabrol’s cold and heartless film at least leaves the spectator free and uncontaminated, able to appreciate objectively the unfailing skill and elegance with which its negative attitudes are expressed’ (1970:  64). Of the same film, Douglas Morrey writes:  ‘Chabrol’s camera simply observes these characters dispassionately and allows them to condemn themselves by their behaviour’ (2013: 429). Of Le Scandale, Wood and Walker write: ‘The film confronts us with the Chabrol problem in its acutest form. On a first viewing, it appeared a film made out of exclusively negative emotions, its characters uniformly regarded with a loathing and contempt’ (1970:  98). Chabrol’s films prevent identification with the characters. Isabelle Huppert, who plays Emma Bovary in Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991), comments: ‘There is a strong correspondence between Flaubert and him [Chabrol], a similar way of remaining outside the work, of dividing his look into multiple points of view to achieve the effect of an objective opacity’ (Guérin and Taboulay 1997: 66).14 Henry James asks whether Flaubert was ‘condemned to irony?’ and describes as a limit Flaubert’s focus on uncomplicated characters (James 1981: 232).15 Wayne Booth quotes Flaubert’s recommendation that the novelist adopt the attitude of the scientist, ‘treating the human soul with the impartiality which physical scientists show in studying matter’.16 Booth also cites B.F. Bart’s essay on ‘aesthetic distance’ in Madame Bovary in which Bart analyses the way that distance from Emma varies during the novel: ‘When the distance remains considerable, irony is usually present and bitter. The distance sometimes narrows, however, and the irony becomes gentler or even disappears’ (Bart 1954: 1115). At these points, ‘irony is very naturally being displaced by intimacy here. Flaubert feels sympathy and invites the reader to feel it, too’ (Bart 1954: 1121).17 James points out that, among Flaubert’s novels, ‘in Madame

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Bovary alone emotion is just sufficiently present to take off the chill’ (1981: 148). Similarly, in Chabrol’s best films, emotion is sufficiently present ‘to take off the chill’, the ‘chill’ being the aesthetic distance from the characters. For Chabrol, aesthetic distance should not be too intrusive: I try to avoid – except when it’s the purpose of the film – making the camera subjective in relation to the characters in the film. That is, directly subjective – to make the audience identify with one of the characters by the effect of the camera. Except when I want to play a trick – to make them identify with a character and then make them realise what horrible scoundrels they are. That amuses me . . . But otherwise, I think that the role of the camera is to give its own point of view on what is happening. Without going so far as to use the ‘pretty’ vehicle of distanciation, which is heavy, let’s say that a light step backward in relation to the story allows you to avoid a deterioration into bad taste, into grandiose affects. (Yakir 1979: 9)

Chabrol’s aim is to vary distance and involvement: What is amusing is to see just where one can loosen one’s grasp of the spectator. If it’s too complicated, then it happens too quickly and the spectator is turned off. At the same time, it’s funny that the spectator is afraid of letting go. It’s a question of balance, of a tension between the two poles. (Rouyer and Vassé 2003: 35)

The director says: ‘Lots of recent films irritate me a bit because they privilege sensation over reflection. For me, the truly beautiful films invite reflection before they provoke sensation. This is why most of the time the best cinema is cryptic’ (Alion 2006a: 79). The obviousness of Chabrol’s primary asserted symbols is one of his strategies for privileging reflection over sensation. Chabrol describes his aim to balance distance with involvement: A change of shot means something. You change shots. Let’s take the Lang principle that every shot is the whole story. So if you change shots, you change stories. The number of shots must be calculated to the nearest millimetre. The principle of shot/reverse-shot is the stupidest principle ever. It’s perfectly valid in certain trivial conversations, but as soon as it stops being trivial you have to find another way. Otherwise what’s important and what’s not important to the character is not known. And no dreadful grimaces in a predictable sequence of shots; you could ask the actor to do this, but that’s not good. What I like is when a scene seems to be unfolding normally and you get a slight delay compared to what you’re expecting. It doesn’t create a sense of unease, but it catches the audience’s attention . . . It changes things dramatically. The audience senses that and it gives them pause for thought. It’s the same thing with camera movements. You just

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The Late Films of Claude Chabrol reframe certain shots. Often the introduction of a particular background, the appearance of a window in the background, for example, can really change the impact of the shot. But at the same time it mustn’t ruin the invisibility of the narration. (Gibert 2011)

Huppert says: Suddenly, he changes the point of view, so as to place us a little to the side. This permanent unbalancing of points of view, and their mixing up, creates a tension, the impression of being in the middle of turbulence and trying to hang onto something. (Ciment and Tobin 2011: 69)

Cécile Maistre, co-writer of La Fille coupée en deux and Chabrol’s assistant director for many years, says: You sense that something is going to happen. You sense it but you don’t know where it’s going to come from. And I  think that’s very common in Chabrol’s films. It’s a sort of tension. I wouldn’t really call it suspense. But there’s a permanent tension. You sense that it’s going to end badly from the start. (Gibert 2011)

Magny notes that ‘we always observe characters from the outside. Identification is only temporary’ (1987:  38), while Neupert writes:  ‘The spectator is caught between identifying with the characters and being distracted from them by an obvious narrative presence’ (2007: 130). Magny discusses how Chabrol uses camera movements to interrupt identification (1987: 39–40). In many Chabrol films, camera movements are so noticeable that we follow them as much as the characters. But these are just one of Chabrol’s distancing devices, used to produce a dispassionate narrative point of view. As Mark Shivas writes: Chabrol’s colour and décor are very important to this dual aspect of Landru. They give a certain ‘distancing’ effect to the story, which allows us to look at Landru as an ordinary man, but at the same time to look at him as a myth in action. (1963a: 7)

Fieschi also remarks that Chabrol ‘rejects audience-identification’ (1963:  11). Shivas adds: There is no figure with whom we are able to identify for more than a short while, and we cannot happily enter the film because it has too much of the grossness, the play acting and the absurdity that are a part of all our lives. The characters in Chabrol’s films don’t remain within the rules of the game. They affront the audience, they offend it. (1963b: 14)18

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25

Later, Shivas notes: The ‘excesses’ in the characters are the worrying part for audiences. They cannot watch characters, much like themselves, doing outrageous things, much as they do on occasion, without setting up defences and telling themselves that the film is nothing but crude nonsense. (1963b: 14)

Deborah Thomas describes her experience of watching La Cérémonie as ‘a sort of clinically detached curiosity rather than anything approaching liking or identification’ (2005: 169); ‘we are consistently made to feel distanced from both the killers and their victims, yet remain intensely – and emotionally – involved in the film’ (2005: 170). Chabrol’s distancing techniques resemble Hitchcock’s, such as those described by Elisabeth Bronfen, who writes of ‘the dual mode of narration found in Hitchcock’s work, itself predicated on fusing the emotional identification elicited by suspense with the ironic distance afforded by the director’s implicit presence as the presiding intelligence of the film’ (2015:  3). Bronfen cites Susan Smith’s analysis of Hitchcock’s balance of ‘character-based involvement and a detachment based on Hitchcock’s directorial presence’ (Bronfen 2015: 3). Smith’s superb book (2000) provides ample evidence of the means by which Hitchcock ‘sabotages’ spectatorial complacency, but Chabrol cites Lang as a stronger influence. I don’t consider Lang and Hitchcock from a thematic point of view. I consider them in terms of style, and in this I’m much closer to Lang than to Hitchcock. Hitchcock tries to convey a story subjectively – everything is based on the subjectivity of the character, while Lang seeks the opposite, to objectify all the time. I try to objectify too. (Yakir 1979: 3)

Chabrol’s films maintain a distance from their characters and combine incongruous elements to prevent spectatorial identification. Chabrol’s strategies of tonal disruption resemble Lang’s and Hitchcock’s, but they also remind some critics of the films of Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Roman Polanski. Chabrol’s artificial style shares something with Fassbinder’s approach in Fox and his Friends (1975) or The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972) and Polanski’s approach in Cul-de-sac (1966) or The Tenant (1976). Cédric Anger notes how much excess is a part of Chabrol’s aesthetic: ‘The excessive and the over-the-top are the natural domain for Chabrolian actors’ (1997: 86).19 For Anger, the excess belongs to the characters: ‘as in late period Renoir or Buñuel, it is not the actor who is false and hammy, but the character

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The Late Films of Claude Chabrol

they are performing . . . Here, Chabrol rejoins Fassbinder’ (1997: 86). Emmanuel Burdeau and Eugenio Renzi describe Chabrol as ‘the French Fassbinder’ (2009a: 9), while Wood and Walker note the similarities to Buñuel (1970: 16), as do Blanchet (1989: 15–16) and Toubiana (1982b: 59–60). Buñuel, Polanski, Fassbinder and Chabrol all combine stylistic excess with a dispassionate tone. As Wood and Walker write, ‘we are also encouraged to contemplate the protagonist’s behaviour objectively and critically’ (1970:  7). Thomas points out that tone and point of view shape our emotional and intellectual involvement with a film (2005: 167). Thomas suggests that some films emphatically hold us at arm’s length from their characters to the extent that it makes little sense to couch our relationship with any of them in terms of identification, however that may be defined, but where we remain caught up in these films and implicated in their unfolding events with an emotional intensity undiminished by the lack of such figures. (2005: 168)

Thomas’s metaphor of being held at arm’s length is similar to Chabrol’s metaphor of taking a ‘light step backwards’. Intellectual distance comes from noticing the control over elements that contribute to tone and point of view. As Austin writes: Chabrol’s work is essentially a cinema of ambivalence. His films are funny in both senses:  often unexpectedly comic, they are also strange, unsettling and disturbing. Their ambivalence is most evident in the fluctuating tone, the open endings, and the lack of moral judgement that these endings imply. Very few of Chabrol’s films are totally consistent in tone. (1999: 164)20

Chabrol’s overt expressionistic elements contribute to tone and point of view: camera movements, performances, music, framings and adjustments.

Narrational Ambiguity and Opacity Chabrol says: ‘My great pleasure is to reveal opacity’ (Guérin and Jousse 1995: 30; in Austin 1999: 5). Isabelle Huppert describes Chabrol’s way of filming as ‘musical . . . it was a dive into the intimate, the unspoken. And with a camera that was approaching a little like a probe’ (Huppert 2011: 214). Several critics comment on Chabrol’s opacity. Magny argues that Landru is the first of many murderers in Chabrol’s œuvre whose motives the director leaves impenetrable (1987: 112). Buss notes that Le Boucher refuses to confirm one explanation for Popaul’s murders: ‘There is no

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27

neat explanation, from cause and effect, for this likeable man who goes to his death saying that all blood, whether animal or human, has the same smell’ (1994: 85); ‘The open ending of Le Boucher leaves us with a mystery unsolved’ ( 83). The lack of cathartic involvement when watching Chabrol’s films is connected to their opacity about motivation. Austin summarizes this opacity when he discusses Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol, 1978) in which Isabelle Huppert plays a woman who poisons her parents (1999: 127–32): ‘the crime is presented as a mystery, irreducible to the socio-historical context or to individual psychology. Violette herself is a totally opaque and ambivalent figure’ (1999:  128). Austin argues that the opacity is linked to the foregrounded style: As Violette, Huppert portrays an ultimately unknowable individual. The ambivalence of all human psychology (as Chabrol sees it) is paralleled in the film by the competing explanations for Violette’s notorious crime. While the narrative addresses the possible explanations – psychosexual, financial, moral, political – without reaching a definitive conclusion, so too the camerawork and the editing appear to suggest answers, but with the same result. The repeated close-ups on Violette’s face and the flashbacks to her childhood suggest that we are going to learn something concrete about her motives, but we never do. As she tells the police, and as her impassive, mask-like make-up implies, ‘Il n’y a rien àcomprendre’. Violette and her crime have to be accepted but cannot be understood: she is as unfathomable as her pale, made-up face, as intangible as her ghost-like presence hovering in the night. (Austin 1999: 129)21

Charles Derry writes: His partisans find especially notable the subtle tone of Chabrol’s cinema:  his films are apparently cold and objective portraits of profoundly psychological situations; and yet that coldness never approaches the kind of fashionable cynicism, say, of a Stanley Kubrick, but suggests, rather, something closer to the viewpoint of a god who, with compassion but without sentiment, observes the follies of his creations. (2001: 172) The narratives of his films are developed through a sensuousness of décor, a gradual accumulation of psychological insight, an absolute mastery of camera movement, and the inclusion of objects and images – beautiful and evocative, like the river in Le Boucher or the lighthouse in Dirty Hands – which are imbued with symbolic intensity. (2001: 172)

Perfect shape and form suggest simple principles. Parallels and symmetries that are too obvious suggest mathematical precision more than the

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randomness of human life. However, Chabrol combines asserted symbols and stylistic devices with causal ambiguity. Ambiguous causal relations distinguish his films from most crime fiction. His films tell stories where social environment and psychological imbalance only offer partial explanations for violence. They show how socio-economic circumstances have impoverished individuals or decadent milieux have corrupted others. They appear to propose that conditions within a particular milieu combine with a predisposition to make that person act with detachment from social conditions and the requirements for their own safety. Yet his films avoid pinning motives to one cause; they explore the consequences of certain factors, but they suggest multiple potential causes, withholding the reassuring confirmation of one single cause. Wood comments on Chabrol’s combination of rhetorical assertiveness and causal ambiguity: The opacity of the motivation constitutes a valid artistic statement:  human beings are driven by motives inaccessible to the conscious mind which it would be arrogant to pretend to understand or explain, and which can only be guessed at in retrospect. The film’s limited but impressive tragic force arises largely from our sense of this. (1969: 21)

Wood and Walker describe ‘the inscrutability of human motivation’ as ‘a leading Chabrol theme’ (1970:  76). As Thomas says of the maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), in La Cérémonie:  ‘She herself remains opaque to the Lelièvre family, her face like a mask as she performs her role’ (2005:  169). Austin notes: ‘Human motivations remain obscure rather than transparent. Actions (particularly crimes) and their consequences are shown in uncompromising  – and often blackly comic  – detail, but no comforting explanations are given’ (1999:  4–5). Austin also writes of how little we learn about ‘the enigmatic and ultimately disembodied female protagonists of films such as Le Boucher, Les Innocents aux mains sales, Violette Nozière, Betty and La Cérémonie (1999: 5). Wood describes Chabrol’s interest in the opacity of motivation. The peculiar flavour of Chabrol’s films arises partly from our sense of the contrast between surface and all that is implied beneath it:  between the perfect clarity and sureness of his mise en scène, where action, gestures, expressions, camera-movements, seem precisely defined and purposeful, and our awareness of the perplexing tangle of ambiguities and complexities of motivation that it seems tantalisingly at once to express and conceal. (1969: 21)

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Wood’s assessment applies to the nine films studied for this book; all focus on ‘the perplexing tangle of ambiguities and complexities of motivation’ and all have a style which works ‘to express and conceal’. Chabrol’s films treat individuals as the pawns of fate or ideology, espousing a version of Gloucester’s despair in King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.37–8). His films present grim diagnoses of Western culture; they appear to offer the conventional pleasures of crime fiction but they make for uncomfortable viewing. Crises are unresolved; protagonists are trapped; puzzling and ambiguous forces shape characters’ actions; and the films end with failure or stasis. Like film noir, Chabrol’s films are dramas of scepticism. Any sympathy for the criminal derives from the films’ implication that anyone can become one. As Woolfolk says of film noir, ‘individuals are at the mercy of psychological obsessions and compulsions that threaten and frequently lead to self-destruction; on the other hand, they confront impersonal social and universal forces that preclude any remedy’ (2006: 118). Yet, as Telotte writes of film noir’s fatalism: ‘the films do speak a hope, even if it often seems a forlorn one, lodged in that ability for speaking or formulating the human situation’ (1989: 218). When an interviewer tells Chabrol that his films are pessimistic, he replies: ‘No, it is rather optimistic because it is enough to know, to be lucid’ (Alion 2003: 71). To the failures and disasters that end Chabrol’s films Robin Wood’s memorable dictum applies: ‘If the protagonist is trapped, the spectator is set free: a central principle of Lang’s American films, and one that absolutely demands distanciation and the refusal of identification as the prerequisites of its realisation’ (1988: 91). Wood’s example is Rancho Notorious, which shows the moral decline of the hero as he pursues vengeance for the rape and murder of his fiancée, a pursuit that ends with his death. In Lang, Wood suggests, fate is ‘more a matter of social mechanism than of metaphysical principle:  the individual is still trapped and ultimately helpless, but the entrapment can be subjected to analysis and explained’ (1988: 91). Pye, writing about Lang’s Clash by Night, states something similar about that film’s ending: Lang chooses to reinforce the cognitive distance which these narrative methods create through a visual style which often holds us spatially at a distance, observing and following the movements of characters. At the same time, as I  have suggested, the major characters seem constructed (through performance and dialogue) as well as presented, in ways which discourage – even prevent – ‘identification’. (2000: 17)

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Pye notes the similarities between Rancho Notorious and Clash by Night and concludes that the former’s distancing devices are more overt: Although Clash by Night seems deeply pessimistic, its point of view strategies imply a somewhat different position. In the extraordinary lucidity of its construction and the rigour of the analysis it pursues, the film embodies Lang’s characteristic (though always qualified) faith in rational thought. It offers us a kind of analysis and understanding – and therefore a kind of freedom – that is denied to its characters. (2000: 17)

The effect that Pye and Wood describe in Lang is found in Chabrol; the lucidity with which the films present their stories reveals, as Pye notes, a ‘faith in rational thought’. This book examines the aesthetics of Chabrol’s films to celebrate the precision in Chabrol’s handling of style, tone and viewpoint and to uncover the means by which he achieves lucidity in nine of his best films.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6

7

8

Magny (1987: 73–7) surveys the recurrent motif of the double in Chabrol’s films. See Austin (1999: 20 and 75) for discussion of Chabrol’s earlier use of Paul and Charles doubles. Warshow defines the gangster as a tragic hero who ‘speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects “Americanism” itself ’ (2001: 100). Schatz also notes that the gangster genre often criticizes the societies that force the poor to turn to crime (1983: 89). Armengol (2009: 71) notes that Chabrol’s films combine film noir and melodrama. Wilson distinguishes between the historical real person or persons, either alive or dead, who, to varying degrees, made the film, and the audio-visual narrator that we sense is personified in aspects of the film that we are watching (2011: 137). As well as citing the definitions by Ruskin, Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin, McElroy notes that Freud’s concept of unheimlich or the uncanny is relevant because the grotesque evokes a combination of fascination and revulsion (1989: 3). Morrey also notes that Les Godelureaux ‘is something far more baroque and difficult to pin down’ (2013: 428). ‘Baroque’ is a term that suits several of Chabrol’s films. Although Chabrol’s producer, Marin Karmitz, suggests: ‘In France, Chabrol is regarded in the same way as Hitchcock was before the intervention of Cahiers du cinéma, that is, before they interpreted his work, uncovered his dominant themes,

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9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

31

pointed to what was hidden behind things, perceived the metaphysical aspect and his direction of course’ (Jousse and Toubiana 1997b: 72). See Carroll (2009: 93–101) for discussion of the evaluation of art within categories. As Derry notes, Chabrol’s films have ‘an incredibly self-conscious, self-assured style’ (2001: 172). In his book Cinema Stylists (1983), Belton places Chabrol in the section named ‘From Distant Observers’, along with Kenji Mizoguchi and Robert Mulligan. In an article on Le Boucher, Bell describes the ‘visually arresting juxtaposition of quotidian innocence and its opposite’ (2008: 48) in the drops of blood on the schoolchild’s bread. Bell describes the ‘bloodied tartine’ as an ‘overdetermined element’ (2008: 49). See also Citron on La Cérémonie’s use of opera (2010: 165). Austin notes the comment in Le Beau Serge and suggests that François is an alter ego for Chabrol (1999: 16–17), an outsider who observes village life. Citron (2010: 138) also cites part of this quotation. Booth (1981: 85) also quotes James’s comments on Flaubert’s irony. Flaubert, Gustave (1926–33) Correspondence, vol. III (Letter: 12 October 1853) Paris: Conard; quoted in Booth (1991: 68). Booth argues that pure objectivity is both undesirable and unachievable: ‘The emotions and judgements of the implied author are, as I hope to show, the very stuff out of which great fiction is made’ (1991: 86). Later, Booth quotes from Bart’s essay: ‘Bart is one of the few sensitive readers of Flaubert who confesses to difficulty that might be attributable to Flaubert himself; for him, Flaubert never solved the problem of how to shift the “aesthetic distance” from point to point, with the result that the reader is not always sure whether to sympathize with Emma or condemn her’ (1991: 373, n. 27). Gibbs (2013: 191, n. 66) quotes this passage during his discussion of ‘Distance’ (2013: 180–81). Discussing performances in Chabrol’s films, Morrey mentions Les Godelureaux’s hostile reviews, several of which suggest that ‘the characters lacked credibility’ (2013: 421). Morrey cites Eric Rohmer’s comments that Ambroisine is an ‘archetype’ rather than a traditional psychological character (Rohmer 1989: 75; in Morrey 2013: 424). Dousteyssier-Khoze (2013: 58) notes of La Fille coupée en deux that the spectator is ‘at the same time immersed in the film and held at a distance’. Belton (1983: 79) also argues that Chabrol’s assertive style is linked to the ambiguity about causes.

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1

La Cérémonie (1995): Diary of a Chambermaid

Of the nine films that form the basis of this study, La Cérémonie has received the most attention. The amount of work done on La Cérémonie testifies to the film’s success and its importance in Chabrol’s career. It includes Florence Jacobowitz’s article (1995) on class and distancing; Guy Austin’s (1999) chapter on authorship; JeanClaude Polack’s (2001) psychoanalysis-inflected essay on the similarities between La Cérémonie and the Papin case, and the place of both within the French cultural imaginary; Susan J. Terrio’s essay (2003) on the film’s linking of class and food; Deborah Thomas’s (2005) essay on tonal disruption; Damien Armengol’s (2009) work on the adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s novels; and Marcia J.  Citron’s (2010) discussion of the film’s use of Don Giovanni.1 The discussion of La Cérémonie that follows focuses on the film’s use of asserted symbolism, the film’s schematic opposition of an illiterate servant and a cultured bourgeois family, the contrasts made between the servant’s food and that of her employers’, the film’s construction of space as part of its division of the bourgeois house into the servant’s domain and the master’s, the use of the hall mirror to mark the boundary between domains and the use of Don Giovanni, adapted from Rendell’s source novel. In Rendell’s Make Death Love Me, the hero, Alan Groombridge, goes with his new lover to see a Chabrol film at Notting Hill’s Gate Cinema. Rendell tells us that Alan thought it ‘very subtle’ (1980: 131), an acknowledgement of one artist by another. Fifteen years after Make Death Love Me, Chabrol adapted Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone (1977) into La Cérémonie, one of his most successful films. The surprise is that it took so long for Chabrol to adapt Rendell’s novels; in their political viewpoints and in their storytelling methods, they share much.2 Rendell’s left-leaning politics, expressed through her fiction, resembles Chabrol’s own politics, dramatized in his films. In 1999, when Chabrol filmed Charlotte Armstrong’s The Chocolate Cobweb as Merci pour le chocolat, he and co-writer Caroline Eliacheff changed it so much that the film comes to resemble a Rendell story more than the Armstrong novel

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on which it is based. Despite adapting two of Armstrong’s novels (The Chocolate Cobweb and The Balloon Man, as La Rupture), Chabrol’s sensibility is closer to Rendell’s than Armstrong’s; Chabrol shares Rendell’s interest in encouraging empathy for killers shaped by circumstances. When an interviewer tells Chabrol that both his films and Rendell’s novels place more emphasis on psychology than mystery and suspense, Chabrol agrees: Definitely. She knows what goes through people’s minds. At the same time, what’s pretty unusual is that she captures the impact of their social background, the way they earn a living, where they live and so on. All that can be totally fascinating, but there are very few thriller writers who are aware of it. (Chabrol 2004: 5)

La Cérémonie was a success; nine years later, Chabrol adapted another of Rendell’s books, The Bridesmaid. As Chabrol’s remarks indicate, he and Rendell both use crime fiction to mount politicized critiques of social inequality. Nevertheless, Chabrol’s La Cérémonie differs from Rendell’s novel. One difference is the age of the murderers; the film’s murderers are younger than their equivalents in the novel. Novelist and filmmaker provide sufficient information to understand the killers, although the film includes less explicit explanation of their pasts than the novel. Chabrol and co-writer Caroline Eliacheff replace the novel’s long descriptions of Joan’s earlier life with hints that the disturbed postmistress Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) has a dead daughter. Unlike the film’s Jeanne, the novel’s Joan is childless and yet to kill. The addition of Jeanne’s dead daughter creates a link between Jeanne and the illiterate servant Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire). The film implies that Jeanne and Sophie might both have killed people in the past: Jeanne may have killed her child (through negligence or by kicking her across the room); Sophie may have killed her father by starting a fire (the death is on purpose in the novel; she smothers him with a pillow). In the novel, Joan has had a disturbed youth, including working as a prostitute. She is now married and a born-again Christian, belonging to an obscure nonconformist sect, The Epiphany People. Chabrol and Eliacheff preserve the character’s madness, but make her religious activities more conventional; in the novel, she denounces sins (including her own) to anyone in earshot. Rendell’s Joan is forever shouting out improvised fire-and-brimstone sermons, whereas Chabrol’s Jeanne just collects and sorts old clothes for the Catholic Church. Yet the film’s version of the character is manic from the start, the opposite of

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La Cérémonie (1995)

35

the secretive Sophie, and Huppert’s agitated performance suggests the character’s potential for frenzy. The toning down of Jeanne’s religious affiliations, the secularization of her madness, makes the character less alienating than she is in the book. Rendell describes Joan as a fifty-year-old woman who still dresses like the working prostitute she once was; Rendell also describes her relationship with her husband in some detail, whereas in the film she is unmarried. Overall, the film’s character is made more attractive. The same applies to Chabrol and Eliacheff ’s conversion of Eunice into Sophie. Rendell’s servant is an overweight, sullen woman in her mid- to late forties who dresses in old-fashioned clothes. In the film, the attractive star Sandrine Bonnaire plays her. Furthermore, the film shows Sophie struggling to read, using a literacy book with a picture of a small boy making sounds and gestures that she tries to emulate. The scene ends with her failure; she hits the book and lays her head on it. This scene reveals Sophie at her most vulnerable and it marks the difference between the novel’s and the film’s presentation of the character. Unlike the novel, the film conveys her frustration; by associating her difficulties with those of a child, it generates compassion for her. However, the film offers no explanation of how Sophie, a twenty-eightyear-old woman in 1995, has grown up illiterate. Rendell’s plausible explanation implies criticism of the British education system before the 1944 Education Act. Eunice was born around 1930 (she is in her mid- to late forties in the mid-1970s) and Rendell describes the disruption to Eunice’s education caused by the Second World War, when she was sent away from London during the Blitz: After that Eunice attended school only sporadically. To this school or that school she went for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but in each new class she entered the other pupils were all far ahead of her. They had passed her by, and no teacher ever took the trouble to discover the fundamental gap in her acquirements, still less to remedy it. (Rendell 1994b: 31)

After staying away from school for much of the time, ‘a stratagem always connived at by her mother’ (1994b: 31), Eunice leaves school a month before her fourteenth birthday. In her discussion of Rendell’s novels, Susan Rowland contrasts the classic detective story with Rendell’s citing of class as the social problem liable to provoke disorder rather than maintain social stability. For Rendell, traditional class structures do not

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The Late Films of Claude Chabrol regulate desire but instead collide with it, often leading to crimes where individual murderous impulses cannot be isolated from more general social oppressions. A Judgement in Stone, for example, is Rendell’s most sustained critique of a social role that golden age writers took for granted as unproblematic, the servant class. (2001: 41–2)

Eunice’s illiteracy isolates her from society so that no morality prevents her from smothering her father when his disability starts to irritate her; afterwards, she experiences no guilt or remorse. Rendell uses Eunice’s illiteracy as a form of sociopolitical critique, of the type that depicts criminals as uneducated and unsocialized victims. This was Huppert’s understanding of hers and Bonnaire’s characters: ‘They are victims . . . There’s no premeditation in their act’, although Bonnaire adds that because they shoot everyone twice, the second time from much closer, it indicates their desire to make sure the Lelièvres are dead (Klifa 1995: 125). Chabrol says press commentary after the collapse of the Berlin Wall inspired him to adapt Rendell’s book into La Cérémonie: The idea for the film, my desire to direct it in a manner that was a little Marxist, came after I read an article published in Le Figaro or somewhere, a little while after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was entitled ‘The Fall of the Berlin Wall Spells the End of Class War’. It was an extraordinary phrase, because it could only have been written by someone who belonged to the upper class . . . It was that which provoked my desire to show what class struggle was. Ruth Rendell’s novel functioned perfectly. (Guérin and Jousse 1995: 28)

Chabrol adds: ‘I jokingly told Isabelle it was the last Marxist film. I’m not a Marxist so it’s amusing to make the last Marxist film when you’re not. I think it’s a bit political’ (Poncet 1995). When interviewers suggest that the upperclass family is ‘irreproachable’ Chabrol responds: ‘[it] is only attackable for its condition’ (Guérin and Jousse 1995: 28). The class is criticized, not individuals.3 However, the Lelièvres are smug and self-satisfied; in their dealings with Sophie, they convey privilege and an expectation of deference. They are reasonable people, but unsympathetic; as Terrio notes, Chabrol ‘undercuts the Lelièvres’ apparent lack of class snobbery’ (2003: 101). Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Mélinda (Virginie Ledoyen) are less sympathetic than Gilles (Valentin Merlet), whose adolescent rudeness lacks duplicity, and Catherine, whose fragility is made visible in Jacqueline Bisset’s performance. At their first meeting, in the café, Catherine remains seated when she greets Sophie and overrules her interviewee’s refusal of a drink. She orders tea, but

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La Cérémonie (1995)

37

her brief interview gives Sophie no time to drink it. Catherine’s social slights stem from assumptions about power relations, but she also behaves as if Sophie’s demeanour intimidates her (Rendell describes her selling herself instead of interviewing a potential employee). Bisset’s performance conveys the character’s brittleness. She is an attractive, middle-aged woman (fifty when she made the film; Jean-Paul Cassel was twelve years older, the same ages as their equivalents in the novel), but she often appears uncomfortable. As Chabrol says of Bisset: ‘The fact that she has a light accent, that French is not her mother tongue, that she has shifts in intonation, gives a sort of fragility, of uncertainty which I liked’ (Berthomieu, Jeancolas and Vassé 1995: 12). Bisset’s Catherine exudes social anxiety, as if she overcompensates for some lack of confidence.4 Deborah Thomas notes Jeanne’s unconfirmed allegations about Catherine’s ‘disreputable past in Paris’ (2005:  171). The film avoids confirming whether Jeanne’s gossipy insinuations are true, but, as Thomas observes, the film indicates Catherine’s uneasiness; as an example, she points to Catherine’s comment to her son, Gilles ‘One can never really relax’. As Thomas notes, this, together with her heavy smoking, indicates a ‘nervous disposition, or at least an ongoing feeling of unease’:  ‘In the scene leading up to the murder, she seems at odds with the rest of the family, and is the only one to be anxious and to suspect that something is wrong’ (2005: 171). One example of Catherine’s indecisiveness is her relationship with Gilles. After dinner, sitting with everyone, she stops him from smoking; when they are alone watching Les Noces rouges (Claude Chabrol, 1973) she offers him a cigarette. Gilles smiles: ‘Make up your mind.’ Catherine is unclear about where the boundaries lie between her and her son, and her and her servant, unsure of the attitude to adopt with either. Yet as she shares cigarettes with her son while watching television, Catherine is as relaxed as she ever appears. With no equivalent in the novel, this scene of mother and son parallels the scene of Georges and Mélinda discussing hunting and shotguns, both scenes suggesting internal loyalties within the family. Thomas also suggests as relevant the seating arrangements when the family watch the opera. Georges sits next to his daughter, Mélinda, and Catherine sits next to Gilles. As Thomas writes: ‘The scene of family unity is actually a scene of blood alliances within and at odds with the larger makeshift family’ (2005: 172). Georges and Mélinda are more interfering and patronizing:  Georges tries to get Sophie glasses and driving lessons, neither of which she wants; Mélinda tries to befriend her and, in doing so, discovers her illiteracy, triggering the final conflict. The decision to make the servant younger than she is in the novel

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means that Sophie was born on the same day as the daughter of the house. As a result, the film’s presentation of the two young women, one wealthy and the other illiterate, creates an unequivocal parallel; the shared birthday makes the depiction of their superficial relationship more ironic. Hence, the film indicates that Mélinda’s efforts to befriend the servant are one-dimensional. When Mélinda tries to relax with Sophie by offering her some tea, she still asks Sophie for the sugar and cups.5 Their interaction illustrates Mélinda’s assumptions about Sophie’s understanding of her subservient role. Without malice, Mélinda, like the rest of her family, conveys a sense of entitlement. Even when she restarts Jeanne’s car, her behaviour with the postmistress stirs up unspoken annoyance. When Mélinda asks Jeanne to try the engine, Jeanne walks around to the driver’s seat, lingering to look at the view. Mélinda watches her, puzzled, but Jeanne’s surliness is interpretable as resentment. Jeanne is proved right when Mélinda throws Jeanne’s oily handkerchief through the window. As Mélinda walks away, Jeanne calls out ‘Thanks again’, then tosses the handkerchief away. Youthful arrogance and class confidence merge in Melinda; for repeat viewers, the moment offers irony when Mélinda tells Jeanne, who will be killed when her car stalls, ‘Better go to a garage.’ The film’s wordplay with names is also ironic. Sophie Bonhomme translates as ‘Sophie Goodman’, while, as Frédéric Strauss (1995:  25)  notes, the family’s name, ‘Lelièvre’, is a play on words. ‘Le lièvre’ means ‘the hare’, that is, the object of a country shoot. Strauss also notes that the family are ‘sitting ducks’, as in the French phrase ‘tirer un lièvre au gite’, or ‘shooting the hare at home’. One French hunting encyclopaedia states: ‘As for shooting a hare at home  – a practice retained by some country-dwellers who know their area back to front  – this is not only an act contrary to all ethics, but perfectly unworthy of anyone wishing to earn the right to be called a hunter’ (Paloc and Pasquet 2004: 53). The disapproval of shooting hares at home suits the film’s distinction between the upper-class hunters and the lower-class murderers, who shoot the family at home. Chabrol also has fun with the family’s discussion of what to call Sophie. During their first dinner (of mussels), they wonder if they should call her a ‘bonne’, as in maid, or a ‘boniche’, a more derogatory term, approximate to the British ‘skivvy’. Catherine reprimands her son for calling Sophie a ‘boniche’, but when Georges loses patience with Sophie, he calls her this. Taste and culture, including hunting and opera, distinguish servant from master.6 The family’s consumption of opera is the film’s primary asserted symbol,

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its most prominent contrast between the cultured Lelièvres and the illiterate Sophie. But food and television viewing also form other contrasts while space in the bourgeois house is marked as belonging to either the servant or the masters, with the hall mirror marking the boundary between domains. To use Perkins’s phrase (1978:  118), the editing produces ‘bald oppositions’ between cultured masters and illiterate servants, such as the cutting between Jeanne and Sophie searching for food for a meal, and the Lelièvres eating in their dining room, or the move from the sumptuous buffet prepared by Sophie to the mushrooms gathered by Jeanne. These are ‘palaces and slums’ (Perkins 1978: 118) contrasts between employer and servant, which oppose the social classes schematically. However, asserted meanings in Chabrol’s films function within a mode and with a tone that naturalizes their usage. Chabrol uses the purchase, preparation and consumption of food to dramatize the igniting of the conflict between servant and employer. Hostility escalates when Catherine forgets that Sophie told her she was going out on Mélinda’s birthday. Their discussion of Sophie’s absence takes place in Catherine’s car, when the employer gives the servant a lift home, after coming across her walking, burdened by shopping. Catherine asks Sophie if she can help on Sunday; the latter replies that she is going to help at the church with the postmistress. On the day itself, which is Mélinda and Sophie’s birthday, Sophie has prepared the food in the morning. The party begins with the arrival of Mélinda’s boyfriend, Jérémie (Julien Rochefort). He recognizes the music that is playing. Mélinda praises him for ‘doing his homework’ to impress her father. As he arrives, Sophie walks into the hall with a tray of canapés, passing Gilles, who grabs one. The shot of Mélinda introducing Jérémie frames Sophie standing on the right in the doorway, between the hall and the living room. Mélinda ignores Sophie, who holds the tray in front of her like an eighteenth-century servant. A reverse shot of the family greeting Jérémie shows Sophie on the left in the background. The perspective in the shot makes her appear much smaller than Georges and Catherine in the foreground. Embarrassed by her presence or sensing that Sophie is unsure what to do, Catherine orders her to place the tray on the table. This scene of food being served contrasts Sophie’s status with that of her employers. The film’s editing makes other strong contrasts around food; for instance, on the evening of Sophie’s first day she serves the Lelièvres chicken and salad in the dining room. The film then shows her in the kitchen picking at the carcass. A contrast is also made between Mélinda’s party and Sophie’s afternoon with Jeanne, first at lunch in her flat and then at the church charity. This prepares

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the way for the climatic contrast between Jeanne and Sophie finding nothing to eat at Jeanne’s flat and the Lelièvres eating dinner before settling down to watch Don Giovanni. Editing creates another striking contrast when the film cuts from the grand exterior of the Lelièvres’ house to the interior of Sophie’s gloomy attic room. As soon as she is left alone, Sophie closes the curtains and puts on the television before she has removed her coat. She soon descends the backstairs into the kitchen where she finds Catherine perched on a table drinking coffee: ‘This is your domain’, announces Sophie’s new employer. The domains comprise the servant’s space (kitchen, backstairs, hallways) and the master’s space (dining room, living room, library, front stairs, bedrooms). At strategic points in the film, the characters enter each other’s spaces, the crossing over marked by the hall mirror. When Sophie descends the stairs for the first time, Catherine’s comment about the kitchen being ‘her domain’ is an order disguised as a welcome, a dynamic that defines their relationship. Sophie then follows Catherine through the passageway that connects the two domains. There is a cut to a door opened by Catherine onto the dining room. The camera retreats to the front hall which is wider than the hall that leads to the kitchen. The camera’s sinuous movements around the space encourage awareness of its reframings. As they approach the front stairs, moving away from the camera, visible on the right is a part of the gilt mirror, our second view of the hall mirror. The first view occurs when Catherine arrives home after interviewing Sophie. After the credit sequence shows Catherine’s drive home along the Breton coastline, the first interior shot of the Lelièvre home shows the hallway that becomes the boundary between domains. As Catherine enters, the film shows the black and white tiles on the floor, the small hall table on the left and above it the large ornate gilt mirror. After the opera, mirrors are La Cérémonie’s most asserted symbol, in particular the hall mirror which reflects characters moving between the domains of master and servant. When an interviewer remarks, ‘Concerning opacity and strangeness, there is in the film a constant utilisation of windows and mirrors’, Chabrol replies: Above all, the oval mirror in the hall which marks the passage into another world, the kitchen. I like mirrors because they suggest the sense of going beyond appearances. I always pay attention to not have too many . . . This mirror here seemed to me to be indispensable: it was a simple and obvious way to make evident the two worlds. (Berthomieu, Jeancolas and Vassé 1995: 10)7

As Chabrol says, the hall mirror dominates (it appears fourteen times in the film), but Chabrol also uses mirrors during both scenes in Jeanne’s room: the

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wardrobe mirror to reflect Sophie when Jeanne looks for the newspaper, and the wall mirror to reflect Sophie at the beginning of the scene where they drink coffee because they have no food. Several crises take place near the hall mirror. After the mirror’s first two appearances, it is next visible when Catherine leaves Sophie alone in the house for the first time. Chabrol presents the mistress’s departure from inside so that Sophie’s reflection appears on the left. The film repeats this set-up when Sophie opens the door to the delivery man, and when Gilles and Georges depart. The foregrounding of the hall mirror becomes noticeable in the film’s first extended use of it when Catherine leaves a shopping list for Sophie. The film starts this interaction in the kitchen. Catherine enters and tells Sophie that she has left the list for her by the phone. They stand with their back to each other, neither giving the other full acknowledgment: Catherine pulls on her gloves while Sophie leans over the sink. Catherine thanks Sophie, then, as she leaves, she gives her servant a patronizing parting tap on the shoulder. Throughout this interaction, the camera approaches Sophie, who looks over her shoulder after Catherine taps it. After this comes a cut to a close shot of the shopping list on the hall table. The shot begins on the list and pans left to Sophie striding across the hall; the camera pans back with her as she removes her sunglasses and lifts the list. The shot is noticeable because the camera tilts down with the glasses and up with the list. The camera then returns to Sophie’s mirror reflection. This emblematic framing suggests a disturbance. The mirror hangs away from the wall at its top; the floor appears to slope upwards at the back of the image and down at the front. In the reflection, one of Sophie’s shoulders is higher than the other. Everything looks askew and the effect is multiplied because three planes are visible, all angled away from the mirror; from right to left, there is the upheld list, Sophie, and then the tilted door and door frame. The light coming from the hall that leads to the kitchen makes another contribution; the image would be less effective with a closed door. (In several scenes, the film shows people entering this small hall by showing a mirror reflection of their movements.) When the camera moves forward, the mirror’s gilt edges almost disappear from view so that the film shows a reflection of an out-of-kilter world. When Catherine and Sophie arrive home with the shopping, part of the mirror is visible on the left in the hall. It then plays a part on the day of Mélinda’s party. As Sophie retreats from the living room, after putting the canapés on the living room table, the camera retreats with her into the hall, pans left as she passes the mirror and holds the framing of the mirror, thereby presenting a reflection

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of Sophie entering the hallway that leads to her domain, the kitchen. The mirror image reinforces the sense of disturbance; what began with the shopping list is continuing with her now going out with Jeanne, a trip that was arranged after Jeanne helped her with the list and which she told Catherine about in the car when the latter picked her up. This framing of the mirror is repeated when Catherine leaves the living room to look for Sophie. The film presents her entering Sophie’s domain as a reflection in the same way that it presents Sophie entering the hallway, a minute and half earlier in screen time. The repetition of the mirror image so soon after the previous one foregrounds its usage. Chabrol stages the next two crises by the mirror. The first is when Georges fails to get Sophie to finds his papers for him. The shot of the empty hall is followed by an overhead shot of Sophie rolling pastry, the height suggesting that the pressure on her is increasing. The eleventh view of the mirror comes after Sophie hangs up on her employer and stands staring at the phone. The same event happens in the novel but without a mirror. The next crisis comes when Sophie listens to Mélinda tell Jérémie that she’s pregnant. Jeanne has told Sophie to discover some gossip about Mélinda. Therefore, when Mélinda speaks to her boyfriend on the phone, Sophie sneaks into the hall behind Mélinda and picks up the receiver. The shot tilts up from the phone to Sophie by the mirror. Then the film cuts to Mélinda in the library. When the film returns to the hall, it cuts to a closer shot of Sophie and her reflection. The camera approaches until the reflection fills the frame. The mirror is also used when Mélinda runs out of the kitchen after Sophie threatens her, the framing the same as on previous occasions. In the penultimate scene, the camera retreats through the hallway then pauses by the mirror. The film cuts to the dead bodies in the living room to Sophie wiping the guns and then back to the hall where Sophie decides to leave without phoning the police. For one last time, she retreats into her domain, the kitchen, and the mirror once again reflects her entering the hallway. In all these instances, the mirror symbolizes the separation between the masters’ and servants’ domains, but, as in other films, the mirrored reflections hint at doubleness, deception, appearances, lies, visions and split or conflicted personalities. In Sophie’s case, the mirror symbolizes her secretive and conflicted mind. As with the other asserted symbols discussed in this book, La Cérémonie’s mirror is foregrounded, but the Mozart opera Don Giovanni is the film’s primary asserted symbol, part of a range of consumable objects and experiences used to differentiate the culture and taste of servant and master. Chabrol integrates the family’s viewing of the televised opera with other scenes of characters watching

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television.8 The film introduces television when Catherine returns home from interviewing Sophie and finds Georges and Gilles engrossed with the new television’s multiple channels. Among the film’s many ironies is the family’s gift to Sophie of their old television, which tempts Jeanne to visit. La Cérémonie shows Sophie and Jeanne enjoying popular quiz shows and the family watching opera; it also shows mother and son watching Chabrol’s Les Noces rouges. Catherine tells Georges that they will be watching a ‘good film’ that evening while he works late; this turns out to be Les Noces rouges. Chabrol combines extracts from two scenes which in Les Noces rouges are ten minutes apart. The first extract is from the opening scene when Stéphane Audran and Michel Piccoli’s characters make love in some woods near a lake. Catherine and Gilles are eating from trays until she sends him to get her cigarettes from upstairs. Upon his return moments later, the television is showing a shot of Piccoli lighting the gas on an oven, turning to give Audran a cheeky look and blowing out the match. This shot makes recognition of Piccoli easy, though it is illogical when placed straight after the exterior love-making scene. Furthermore, after Catherine gives her son a cigarette, the television shows Audran and Piccoli embracing in the kitchen, followed by a shot of the lake from the earlier scene of Les Noces rouges. Recognizing Les Noces rouges as an earlier Chabrol film increases both our pleasure and our detachment from the characters. The reference to an earlier Chabrol film also implies that Chabrol is acknowledging that his films are consumed as entertainment by the class they criticize. Chabrol links the sequence of Catherine and Gilles watching Les Noces rouges with the escalation of conflict between Sophie and her employers. When Gilles goes upstairs to get his mother’s cigarettes, he sees Jeanne and Sophie sneaking up to her bedroom to watch television. Chabrol includes a close shot of the pair, with Jeanne looking down at Gilles, almost smirking, and Sophie looking startled but indifferent. Gilles tells his mother that Jeanne is with Sophie; the next morning, Georges tells Sophie that Jeanne cannot come to their house. This prompts Sophie to increase her defiance. Dropping a plate on purpose, she tells him ‘See what you made me do’. The impression it conveys is of the servant gaining the upper hand. Don Giovanni is the film’s primary asserted symbol, but its use and its prominence derive from Rendell. The family’s viewing of a televised production of Don Giovanni gives Rendell’s novel its title, and both film and novel their climatic scenes. Rendell’s title derives from the ‘judgement in stone’ that is Don Giovanni’s judgement by the statue/ghost of the Commendatore of Seville,

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Donna Anna’s father, whom Don Giovanni has killed. Don Giovanni mockingly invites the tombstone statue to dinner and the statue accepts. At dinner, the Commendatore’s statue asks Don Giovanni if he will repent. Don Giovanni refuses and the statue drags him down to hell to punish him for his sins. The final lines of the opera are:  ‘Such is the end of all wrong doers!/The death of those who betray/Is worthy of the life they lead!’. In novel and film, the father, like the Commendatore, defends his daughter’s honour against the servant’s blackmail attempt. Rendell writes of Melinda: She was Ana, she would be Elvira, and, when the time comes, Zerlina too. She leaned her head against George’s arm of the sofa, for George, in her eyes, had become the Commendatore, fighting a duel and getting himself killed for his daughter’s honour. (1994b: 150)

Yet when the servant kills the father, she too acts like the Commendatore, judging and executing him. The internal doubling of opera and film is explicit: the Commendatore judges Don Giovanni; Sophie/Eunice judges her upper-class employers. After the killings, Joan/Jeanne switches off the tape recorder and Rendell describes the effect of the silence on Eunice, linking her with the Commendatore’s statue: It held Eunice suspended. It petrified this stone-age woman into stone. Her eyelids dropped and she breathed evenly and steadily so that, had she had an observer, he would have supposed her fallen asleep where she stood. A stone that breathed as Eunice, as she had always been. (Rendell 1994b: 160)

The connection between the servant’s ‘judgement in stone’ and Don Giovanni is lost in the French title of Rendell’s novel, L’Analphabète (the illiterate). The heroine’s illiteracy is central to the opposition of social classes, but the primary asserted symbol of book and film is the opera. More than L’Analphabète or a French version of ‘a judgement in stone’ would, the new title evokes the rituals of judgement. Chabrol says that he liked La Cérémonie for two reasons (Guérin and Jousse 1995: 29). First, because it summarizes the film’s ritualistic quality, the feeling that the film gives of it being a ceremonial procession towards an inevitable conclusion, in this case execution. Second, two previous films with the same title are both about capital punishment:  Nagisa Oshima’s Gishiki (The Ceremony, 1971) and Laurence Harvey’s The Ceremony (1963). That ceremonial or ritualistic tone of La Cérémonie is connected to Chabrol’s characteristic achievement of opacity and detachment. However, before discussing that, I will comment on

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some of the music of the murder/opera-watching sequence, drawing on Citron’s work. After that, I will discuss opacity and detachment in La Cérémonie, drawing on Thomas’s essay about tonal disturbances. The Don Giovanni broadcast begins with a frame within a frame as the television frame fills the screen. The film uses the first chord of the overture and then cuts to Jeanne and Sophie in the car. The overture tapers out as Mathieu Chabrol’s film music takes over. The inclusion of the start of the overture provokes two reactions. The first is relief that the finale has commenced, thus ending the tension that has been growing throughout the film. The second is amusement at the overt way that the finale is signalled, turning narrative foreshadowing into a detached following of ritual. Thomas describes how the film generates spectatorial anxiety about the servant and postmistress’s disruptive activities, to the extent that ‘the killings themselves come as a welcome relief from this particular unease’ (Thomas 2005: 175). Relief from spectatorial anxiety is linked to the sense of aesthetic distance. As in the novel, the film alternates Sophie and Jeanne’s rampage through the house with the family watching Don Giovanni, cutting between spaces as the novel does; Rendell and Chabrol both have George enter the kitchen after the start of Act II (Rendell 1994b: 156). In Rendell’s novel, George is killed to Elvira’s ‘O, taci ingiusto core!’ (1994b: 157); then, a few minutes later, the women kill the rest of the family while Don Giovanni is accompanying himself on the mandolin singing ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ (Rendell 1994b: 158). Chabrol changes some of the music. As Citron explains, the music heard after Jeanne and Sophie arrive at the house is the trio from Act I, ‘Protegga il giusto cielo’, (‘Protect, righteous heaven, the zealousness of my heart’) sung by Donna Anna, Don Ottavio and Donna Elvira. Citron remarks that ‘Protegga’ is an excellent choice because it offers both parallels with the Lelièvres’ situation, facing invaders who wish to proceed from exterior to interior, and ‘more than a whiff of irony’ (2010: 145). Citron notes that Rendell uses consecutive numbers from Don Giovanni, though ‘their unfolding in the novel obviously does not correspond to actual performed time’ (2010: 152). The film, however, uses music from different scenes, though Chabrol keeps Rendell’s choice of ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ for Sophie and Jeanne’s murder of the remaining family members. As Citron writes: The final stage of executions produces the greatest irony, as it occurs during what is arguably the most innocuous number of the opera, ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’. The effect is intensified by the total lack of emotion by the murderers. In an odd way, however, this fits with the evenness and lack of drama of ‘Deh vieni’. (2010: 154)9

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Citron also points out that the film withholds subtitles for the opera (2010: 163), either on television or on Chabrol’s film. Irrespective of whether one understands the lyrics, one responds to its music: ‘its musical calm belies the elevated tension surrounding it. This is obviously parallel to the situation in the film’ (Citron 2010: 146). Deborah Thomas also finds explicit the parallels between Don Giovanni and La Cérémonie; both have a ‘thematic interest in class and gender exploitation’ (2005: 169). Thomas also points out that the film parallels Sophie and Jeanne’s throwing of Catherine’s clothes on the floor upstairs with the flinging of the cape on the ground in the opera (2005: 171). The film makes a further parallel because the image of Sophie and Jeanne kneeling on the floor in front of the pile of Catherine’s clothes recalls the scene of them sorting out clothes in the church hall and throwing clothes around in the old couple’s house. The ripping of Catherine’s clothes is a culmination. After ripping up the clothes, Sophie and Jeanne creep around the house and enter the library from above, spying on the family watching the opera. Several critics comment on the overhead point-of-view shot of the Lelièvres.10 Strauss notes that: ‘The simple revelation of this layout of the room chills the blood, symbolises the revenge which has taken hold of Sophie, who finally enjoys a breathtaking view, a look which dominates the situation and gives her all the power’ (1995: 26). Strauss cites this as an excellent example of Chabrol’s expressive use of space because before that the film conceals these stairs: ‘it would have been easy, and banal, to use it during the scene when Madame Lelièvre shows Sophie around the house, a scene which is ingeniously cut short’ (Strauss 1995: 26). The ingenuity of the cutting short is achieved by having Sophie stand on the threshold of the library, as if intimidated by the room and its books. Both Citron and Thomas agree that for all the explicitness of the parallels between opera and film, Chabrol’s film is opaque when it comes to the killers’ motives.11 As Citron writes: The opera’s ambiguous class antagonism muddles Chabrol’s view of class and inserts distance between opera and the plot of the film. It also complicates subjective identification between the viewer and the events on the film screen, including the opera. Whom do we identify with, and what subjective connections form between the plots enacted before us? Ambiguity abounds. (Citron 2010: 146)

Asserted symbolism, opacity of motivation and aesthetic distance are all connected. Chabrol’s films have a place within what Gerald Mast calls ‘the ironic tradition’:

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The third major tradition of sound comedy descends from the films of Lubitsch, Clair and Renoir – comedies of complex structural conception rather than of personality or dialogue. In these films, parallel lines of action comment on each other; consistent thematic motifs run through the films creating a system of symbols (both verbal and visual) that speak to one another; complex character foils and balances reveal different choices and styles of living. Many of these comedies are the works of directors who specialised in films that were not comedies. They used the comic form to make ironic comments on human values, usually contrasting the dead assumptions of a sterile society with a more personal kind of human response. (Mast 1979: 320)

Anthony R.  Pugh says something similar of Le Mariage de Figaro’s dramatic irony: ‘Time after time we are invited to smile at the spectacle of neat, formal balance’; formal symmetry, Pugh argues, promotes ‘an attitude of amused detachment’ in an audience (1968: 50). The irony in Chabrol’s work comes from his use of strong parallels and counterpoints; visible patterns establish a response of amused detachment. La Cérémonie remains opaque about characters’ motives; it offers no single dominating explanation and much less explanation than the novel. As Polack notes, La Cérémonie reveals reasons for the murders that go beyond ‘individual psychopathology’ (2001:  79). Chabrol’s collaboration with Caroline Eliacheff on La Cérémonie continues his preexisting interest in psychoanalysis. Eliacheff was a practising psychoanalyst who published several books about psychology, children and families; with Chabrol, she co-wrote three of his films. However, when asked about his relationship with psychoanalysis, given his collaboration with Eliacheff, Chabrol replies that he has never felt the need to be analysed and that he distrusts the psychoanalytic impulse to unlock secrets: I criticize them for thinking that there is an explanation for everything. Ultimately, it [psychoanalysis] provides answers, like a master. I am a little wary of it, but Caroline is also. She psychoanalyses children and she does not really believe in explanations. For me, my great pleasure is to reveal opacity. (Guérin and Jousse 1995: 30)

Rendell’s novel explains causes more than Chabrol’s film does; for example, she explains the causes of the servant’s illiteracy. Chabrol replaces explanations with asserted symbolism and foregrounded imagery which produce aesthetic distance and spectatorial detachment, thus inhibiting identification. La

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Cérémonie’s ending confirms the opacity of motivation. The film implies various potential explanations, but confirms none.12 Austin compares La Cérémonie with Sister My Sister (Nancy Meckler, 1994), which is based on the Papin case, noting that Chabrol’s film ‘does not privilege the psychological reading over the political one’, whereas Sister My Sister does (1999: 152): Meckler’s film focuses on the psychotic and ultimately incestuous closeness between the two maids. Chabrol, on the other hand, avoids any sustained or direct psychological explanation for the murder of the Lelièvres. This allows him to maintain a sense of opacity of human motives and to introduce a possible political interpretation of the killing. (Austin 1999: 152)

As Austin emphasizes, La Cérémonie withholds a definitive explanation of Sophie and Jeanne’s motives for killing the Lelièvres. Florence Jacobowitz comments: ‘Although the narrative placement is with Jeanne and Sophie, there is also a discernible detachment, and direct identification with any character in a simple way is thwarted’ (1995:  39). For Thomas, Chabrol’s camera movements create complicity between audience and film, one that excludes the characters. Thus, she writes: a camera movement from the television to the window indicates to us that Jeanne and Sophie have arrived, though the family remain oblivious, producing a kind of complicity between us and the knowing camera which has an independence from both the family and the two girls outside. (2005: 172)

Thomas refers to the ‘privileged knowledge’ produced for the viewer by the cross-cutting between the women and the family. This cross-cutting ‘reinforces our detachment from them all (though cross-cutting, in a context where we were more insistently involved with the characters, might have generated a heightened anxiety on their behalf instead)’ (2005: 172). In many suspense films, crosscutting would generate anxiety on their behalf but, as Thomas suggests, when watching Chabrol’s films we are already detached from the characters.13 Furthermore, Thomas observes that when Jeanne and Sophie go upstairs the film includes a shot of the gun in the kitchen before it cuts to the living room where Georges sings along to the opera, ‘his self-satisfaction and pretentiousness weakening our resistance to whatever danger the emphatic shot of the gun may have foretold’ (2005: 172). Thomas gives another example, of the moment when Sophie and Jeanne climb the stairs with the tray of hot chocolate and cups,

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the camera viewing them from above (an image that was used in publicity for the film): ‘although we are well placed to see what Jeanne and Sophie are doing, we are nevertheless positioned at one remove, allied once more with a camera that can predict their arrival and get there first’ (2005: 173). Thomas is correct to highlight Chabrol’s creation of an alliance between audience and camera. As she suggests, when watching them we are involved with ‘the camera’ as much as the characters. Thomas also points out that ‘the lack of emotional display’ by Jeanne or Sophie and the ‘unsympathetic portrayal of Georges’ helps maintain detachment from the characters and awareness of the camera. She cites the humour in Jeanne’s comment ‘One down’, attributing the humour to the film’s self-conscious artifice about its own status and Chabrol’s complicity with the viewers: ‘It’s a playful moment inserted in the midst of a scene where it really ought not to exist, a playfulness which acknowledges, perhaps, that the prospect of further murders which awaits us is also more exhilarating than it ought to be’ (2005: 175). Thomas describes the ending, when Jeanne is killed in a car crash when her car is hit by another car driven by the abbé who had earlier rebuked her. Thomas notes the irony in this and the ‘exquisite irony’ of the murder being recorded on tape, accompanied by the opera (2005: 170), describing the moment that Sophie hears the tape recorder playing as follows: The situation is so aesthetically delectable – and so intricately framed and laminated, like the earlier murder scene itself – that it is difficult to suppress a smile, as, once again, we embrace our utter complicity with Chabrol and the film, rather than with any of the characters who have been killed or caught before our eyes. The fact that the end credits have already begun to roll gives the moment an extra punch, presenting events which are so momentous for the characters as a sly parting shot from Chabrol to his audience, a sort of cinematic wink. (Thomas 2005: 177)

The phrases that Thomas uses (‘aesthetically delectable’, ‘complicity with Chabrol’ and ‘cinematic wink’) all describe Chabrol’s typical strategies. The result is that, as Thomas notes, we feel almost no involvement or identification with any of the characters in La Cérémonie, either murderers or victims; rather what we feel is the film’s irony. As Thomas notes, other moments in the film hint at potential explanations, but remain unconfirmed. She describes ‘the evocative shot of Jeanne and Sophie with raised guns aimed at Catherine and Mélinda, who are standing face to face with them as if each pair of women is looking into a mirror’ (Thomas 2005: 176). Unlike

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their equivalents in the novel, Sophie and Mélinda are mirror images of each other, born on the same day but in contrasting circumstances. The director states, evoking Nietzsche: ‘The notion of good and evil is always relative to something’ (Yakir 1979: 6).14 Moral values evolve in particular social and historical circumstances; morality comes from humans rather than heaven or God. As Nietzsche states: No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates. Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another:  thus I  found. I  found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours. (Nietzsche 1961: 84)

Chance, for Nietzsche, is ‘the law of absurdity in the total economy of mankind’ (1973: 88). This ‘law of absurdity’ applies to chances of birth which affect language, ethnicity, nationality and class. La Cérémonie emphasizes the role that chance plays in identity formation. Chance determines that Sophie was born into conditions that allowed her to grow up illiterate and that Mélinda was born into a literate and cultured bourgeois family. Chance brings the two together, the one to kill the other.

Notes 1 Rendell includes this sentence in her novel: ‘They bore no resemblance to the Papin sisters . . . Eunice had nothing in common with them except that she also was female and a servant’ (1994b: 72). 2 Armengol (2009: 129) also notes their similar aims. 3 Austin notes: ‘The Lelièvre family are unobjectionable. Their only fault is in fact simply their function – as Sophie’s employers, and as the embodiment of the bourgeoisie. They represent the masters, the norm, the “dominant ideology”, and it is as such that they are destroyed’ (1999: 153). Austin also cites Chabrol’s comment about La Cérémonie being ‘the last Marxist film’ (Guérin and Taboulay 1997: 68; in Austin 1999: 154). 4 Catherine’s lack of confidence in some social situations is perceptible and perhaps linked to social class. The Lelièvres are neither nouveau riche nor wellestablished upper class, of the type epitomized by Paul’s mother (Caroline Silhol) in La Fille coupée en deux or Michèline (Suzanne Flon) in La Fleur du mal. As Eisenreich puts it, ‘the Lelièvres do not truly represent the traditional provincial (Breton) bourgeoisie linked to a terroir’ (2011: 71). For Jacobowitz: ‘Chabrol, therefore, maintains a distance from the family and exposes the cracks in the

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5 6

7 8

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10 11

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Lelièvres’ carefully maintained façade of propriety, pointing to the narcissism and exploitation which underlines bourgeois appearance and good taste’ (1995: 40). Austin also notes this (1999: 155). In addition to the shotguns and their evocation of the upper-class shoot, visible in the Lelièvres’ kitchen are a pair of trompe-l’œil paintings of niches. Hanging upside down in both paintings are large birds with pans underneath them to collect drips of blood. On the opposite wall is a painting of a small dead deer, also upside down. Hung in the kitchen, the paintings evoke hunting and food, but, like other still lives, they belong to the vanitas tradition and its associations with mortality. Austin (1999: 161) and Armengol (2009: 58 and 75) also note this. Chabrol says: ‘The subject of illiteracy is, logically, really foregrounded in the novel; therefore, it was something that it was necessary to change because, instead of a reader, there is a viewer. So, I developed the relationship with television’ (Guérin and Jousse 1995: 27). Beauvillard writes of the television in La Cérémonie, ‘Chabrol perceives this instrument not as a tool for information or learning but as a powerful negator of morals’ (2010). Citron provides an illustrative table of correspondences between film and opera (2010: 142). She also notes that the family’s ‘formal attire connects them with the audience at the performance, whom we never see, and the elegance of the Salzburg Festival’ (2010: 143). Citron explains that the production used is from the July 1987 Salzburg Festival, conducted by Herbert von Karajan (2010: 278 n.21). See Austin (1999: 163), Citron (2010: 150) and Armengol (2009: 17). Citron writes: ‘The overdetermined nature of the family’s viewing of the telecast forms another transparent feature of the relay-murder sequence, but it leads us to wonder about the reason for the excessive ritual’ (2010: 165). Citron writes: ‘Chabrol’s surface opaqueness by way of textual omission does not preclude a sureness of narrative meaning’ (2010: 164). Citron also argues that ‘the opera creates parallels and irony with filmic events, and the contradictory relationships serve up “opacité” that accords with Chabrol’s style’ (141). Vassé notes that Chabrol preserves ‘shadowy areas’ in his characters’ personalities (1995: 6). Brown notes: ‘Chabrol’s film allows for almost no catharsis, instead imposing a kind of Brechtian aesthetics that force us to reflect on what we have just seen (1997: 51). Thomas argues that the moment after Jeanne cuts the telephone wire is a ‘crucial turning point’, which the film makes clear by the ‘cut back to the opera, where the intermission is indicated as the curtains close on the television screen’ (2005: 173). In La Cérémonie, one of the party guests quotes Nietzsche: ‘Much about your good people moves me to disgust, and it is not their evil I mean’. The quotation is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s ‘Of the Pale Criminal’ chapter (1961: 67). It is another example of the film’s irony: Georges recognizes the quotation as Nietzsche’s but not that it might apply to him.

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Rien ne va plus (1997): Preparation Meets Opportunity

La Cérémonie maintains an unvarying aesthetic distance, presenting its murders with a disturbing detachment. In contrast, Rien ne va plus’s tone is varied, moving from comedy to melodramatic thriller. Reviewing Rien ne va plus in Positif, Jean A. Gili praises the film’s style, its changes in tone and its dialogue (‘some lines could be signed by Prévert’); Gili calls Chabrol a ‘grand pro, a director who never lets himself be imprisoned within the codes of a genre’ (1997: 33). Chabrol says: For Rien ne va plus, the main idea was to make an amusing film about the circulation of money. As I had had the idea about a couple of crooks for a long time, I mixed it all up . . . It is a film which I really like, but it had a mixed reception, no doubt because it is a bit light-hearted. (Rouyer and Vassé 2003: 38)

The story concerns two con artists, Victor (Michel Serrault), a wise old man with quasi-magical powers, and Betty (Isabelle Huppert), his Miranda, or a stand-in for such a daughter. The film never defines their relationship; as Huppert says:  ‘We don’t know if they are father and daughter, lovers, or just accomplices’ (Ciment and Tobin 2011: 70). The structure of Rien ne va plus is simple, so much so that it resembles the formal layout of a game. Three sections are each set in distinct locations to which the film never returns; a coda is introduced by the subtitle ‘A Century Later’. The first section is split between Aix-les-Bains (its casino, the Grand Cercle, and a nearby hotel) and Paris. In a lighthearted, comic tone, the first section establishes the characters of Victor and Betty, their wit, spirit and criminal activities. This section depicts their conning of a lawnmower salesman, their journey home and their reconvening in their apartment in Paris. The second section takes place in Sils Maria; it repeats elements of the first. The two con artists are in another hotel, again working on a suitable victim, Maurice (François Cluzet). However, in contrast to the first section, the

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Sils Maria set-up is more fluid and unstable; Maurice and Monsieur K. (JeanFrançois Balmer) complicate the con artists’ relationship and plans. Victor starts to lose control and the unresolved issues in his relationship with Betty emerge. The third section is set in Guadeloupe where a climactic confrontation with Monsieur K. takes place. The master criminal thinks he has control, but Victor manages to steal two million Swiss francs from him. The coda shows the reconciliation between Victor and Betty. The three sections are repetitions with variations; each section shows people trying to decipher performances and take control of events. As gambling and deception are the film’s subjects, it is appropriate that the film’s primary asserted symbol is roulette. The croupier’s phrase provides the title. ‘Rien ne va plus’ translates as ‘no more bets’, ‘no further bets’, ‘nothing more’, ‘no more’ or ‘all bets are down’. In non-gambling contexts, it translates as ‘nothing goes anymore’, ‘nothing works anymore’ or ‘nothing is going right’. The phrase also evokes a moment where one says ‘let’s wait and see what the results of our gamble are going to be’, the moment where everything has been set up and one is waiting to see what happens. The roulette wheel appears in the credit sequence and the first scene, in the casino in Aix-les-Bains, but gambling permeates the film. Victor and Betty swindle people by staging scenes and giving performances. Their performances are games of chance which become more dangerous as the film progresses. In the first section, Betty plays roulette as a means to hook the victim. The title refers to the gamble she takes with him. In the second section, another game comes into view, played by Betty and Maurice, with Victor their potential dupe. Unbeknown to them, Monsieur K. is watching all three, confident they are pawns in his game. The ‘all bets are down’ moment comes in the hotel lounge in Sils Maria. The protagonists are con artists, but the comic tone and their theft of small amounts distract us from thinking about their criminality. The film’s comedy traps us so that the shock of the later violence is greater. As Thierry Jousse writes, Rien ne va plus ‘adopts a mask of frivolity so as to better confuse the issue and send the viewer on a sinuous route around a series of hairpin bends’ (1997a: 44). Various elements establish the comic tone. One example is the running joke about Victor’s appetite, whether it be for extra croissants, lamb chops and sauté potatoes in the caravan, a kebab with extra onions, washed down with a beer in the park, or caviar and vodka in front of a trashy television show. Other gags include the pickpocket (Yves Verhoeven) on the Metro, whose wrist Victor slaps, and the interaction with the kebab seller (Henri Attal), who refuses payment. One

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actor familiar from several Chabrol films is Pierre-François Dumeniaud who plays a conference delegate in Aix-les-Bains. He delivers several comic lines, first expressing admiration for his colleague’s apparent success with Betty (‘The guy from Clermont has pulled’; ‘I didn’t know Chatillon was such a Romeo’; ‘Quick worker too’) and then sighing, ‘I’m off to bed to watch some porn’, just before he notices Betty leaving the hotel. Some gags are repeated in the second section; for example, Victor orders frogs’ legs and lake fish in Sils Maria and indulges in fondue. New gags are introduced, such as those with the Italian widow, Signora Trotti (Mony Dalmes), who has amorous designs on Victor. Victor escapes from Signora Trotti on three occasions, in the lift, restaurant and bar, where he hides beneath a table, and each occasion is comic. Thomas Chabrol’s performance as the desk clerk in Sils Maria also leans towards the comic. The overall effect of comic moments like these is to suppress the melodramatic elements of the story, yet despite their comic dimensions they resonate with the larger themes. Victor’s hiding from Signora Trotti contributes to the film’s references to deception, while the sequences showing Victor enjoying his food depict a man with a healthy appetite, who enjoys life, but they also suggest that he is bored and looking for stimulation. Jackie Berroyer’s performance as Robert Chatillon, the first person Victor and Betty cheat, contributes to the comic tone of the first section. He is a lawnmower salesman from Clermont-Ferrand, a delegate at an agricultural machinery convention. Berroyer’s amusing performance contains elements of deadpan physical comedy. For instance, as Betty looks at the croupier, he looks at her cleavage. She catches him looking. Startled, he snaps his head up with exaggerated haste. Berroyer endows his buffoonish character with an attractive, self-deprecating irony. His embarrassed self-consciousness helps establish a humorous tone, despite him being a crime victim. In the bar of the Park Hotel, when Betty asks: ‘So, lawn-mowers are your speciality?’ Huppert has a slight irony in her voice, as if to demonstrate the pleasure her character takes in her work and signal her enjoyment of her game with Robert. But Berroyer’s tone of voice neutralizes the sting of her teasing and makes his mild-mannered character likeable: ‘Not only. I deal with all electrical and mechanical gardening tools’. ‘Ah, that’s nice’, she replies. ‘What do you mean “nice”?’ ‘I find it poetic’, she smiles, as if their interaction amuses her. Throughout their scenes together, Robert’s hesitancy plays against Betty’s directness. When he asks her about herself, she lies that she is a ‘deputy manager at an insurance firm’. ‘Well, well’, he replies, to which she responds, ‘Why,

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did you think I was a whore?’ She then asks if he is married; he hesitates, but admits, after looking at his ring, ‘I certainly am’. She breaks the subsequent awkwardness (and gives herself time to spike his drink) by asking him to get her some Gitanes Blondes from the bar. While Robert asks the barman for cigarettes, Victor watches Betty emptying the sleeping potion into his drink. Robert comes jogging back with the cigarettes. His little jog, his outstretched arms and the open packet with one cigarette extended suggest his eager anticipation of a passionate night ahead, but the way in which Robert moves is endearing as well as enthusiastic. Berroyer’s performance gives the character an innocent, guileless quality, devoid of sleaze or deceit. The trumpet helps the actors develop the comic tone of this sequence. As soon as Betty and Robert enter his hotel room, he tries to kiss her, before either of them have put down their coats. She squeals, then picks up the trumpet and asks him about it. He explains he is learning it for a bet, appropriate because he met her in a casino. She removes her coat and wanders into the bathroom, promising to return in five minutes. As if he believes that the trumpet will keep him awake, Robert plays a scale. The film cuts to the bar downstairs, which Victor leaves, and then to Robert’s en-suite bathroom, in which Betty is hiding, waiting for the drug to take effect. As she smokes over the sink, the sound of the trumpet is heard. The film cuts back to Robert, who yawns, sits down and tries to play the trumpet with one last gasp, before passing out. With the trumpet silent, Betty emerges from the bathroom, checks his eyelids and starts removing his shoes. The trumpet enhances the comic tone, but Betty’s waiting for the sound to stop and Robert collapsing on the bed while clinging to it make the scene appear absurd rather than threatening. The trumpet also allows the film to indicate Victor’s competence; as soon as he arrives, Victor goes straight for the trumpet, plays a tune and criticizes its mouthpiece. There are gags later, but they diminish as the film progresses. The two black Frenchmen on the aeroplane discussing the exploitation and cheating of colonialism constitute a further gag. Frédéric Bonnaud (1997) calls this ‘an interminable gag’, but it matches the film’s other foregrounded elements. For example, just as the film is deceiving us, Betty returns from the toilet with the briefcase (also deceiving Maurice) and one of the black passengers says: ‘On the pretext that I realised that everything is a sham, half-truths, manipulation, red herrings, decoys, deceptions, lies’. The gag exemplifies the film’s obviousness, of which there is much. For example, in the first victim’s hotel room, an oval mirror frames Victor and Betty as they look at his driving licence and prepare to fake his

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signature on a cheque. The mirror is an asserted piece of imagery which symbolizes their deception as they fake a signature, but the symbolism is foregrounded; the film asserts the formality of its presenting the pair within the mirror. This asserted symbolism is like the assertion of two black men talking about cheating just as Betty is deceiving Maurice and the film is deceiving us. Both types of assertion are like the roulette wheel and the film’s title. The assertion destabilizes more conventional patterns of identification because the obviousness encourages complicity between Chabrol and the audience.1 The film changes its tone from comic to melodramatic in its third section, in Guadeloupe, but it starts to foreshadow this change in Sils Maria. The comedy begins to move towards melodrama when Victor dines alone in the Sils Maria hotel, watching Betty and Maurice. The dining room scene begins as comedy, with Victor asking the waiter to seat him away from Signora Trotti and gesturing apologies towards her, but it ends in a melodramatic mood. This change in tone is achieved by the use of ten seconds of Schönberg’s Transfigured Night during the close-up of Victor that ends the scene. The sequence runs as follows. Victor looks at Betty and Maurice dining in a corner. Betty offers Maurice her hand; he kisses it. The film cuts to a close-up of Victor looking at them, his face expressing concern. He turns from them as Schönberg’s music starts; he then turns back to look at them before the film cuts to the next scene, which begins with a track forward, down the aisle, towards the dancer. The music bridges the cut to the next scene, but the close-up and the music combine with Victor’s expression to communicate foreboding. The dance scene and the first seven minutes of Schönberg’s Transfigured Night intimate the change of tone. This effect only lasts for the duration of the music performance, however, for the fondue scene is played as comedy, that is, until one of Monsieur K.’s henchmen, Yvon, starts spying on them from the dentists’ table. The dancer’s slow moves, Schönberg’s dramatic music and the transition into the scene, including the slow track forward down the aisle, all contribute to the increased sense of threat. The track forward ends when the camera is near the stage. The film then cuts to Victor watching the performance. Surrounded by dentists wearing blue badges to signify their status as conference delegates, Victor again looks concerned. The film cuts back to the dancer, then returns to Victor, who looks to his left, watching, one assumes, Betty. The film cuts to another forward-tracking shot through the audience, approaching Betty. She lifts her wrap onto her shoulder and looks back at Victor. She smiles a little at him and looks at Maurice. A two shot of Maurice and Betty follows: ‘It’s far too

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hot in here’, she says. The film shows the dancer twirling as the music increases in intensity. It returns to Maurice and Betty, then the dancer and then Victor looking at them. Sitting two rows behind Victor is a blonde woman in a blue suit, whom the film will later reveal to be ‘Madame K.’ (Nathalie Kousnetzoff ). A wide shot of the audience shows Betty and then Maurice leaving. Soon after, in a wide shot that tracks backwards along the aisle, Victor leaves. As he does so, Madame K. turns her head to watch him leave. Outside, the music continues to be audible and the dance performance visible through the curtains. The film uses Schönberg’s Transfigured Night to switch the tone from comic to melodramatic, to mark the transition towards the unknown. Moments earlier in the dining room, Victor had been avoiding Signora Trotti, but as soon as Schönberg’s music begins the tone begins to change. When Betty, followed by Maurice, stands up and leaves the performance, the music increases in its intensity. As Victor runs out after them, the music endows his actions with a feeling of panic. Moreover, the film also shows us what Betty, Victor and Maurice fail to see, which is that Madame K. is keeping an eye on them. The film’s plot appears simple, but as it develops it reveals suppressed elements. In Sils Maria, the film provides clues that Maurice (and by association Victor and Betty) are being watched by Monsieur K., Madame K. and Yvon. The foreground depicts the developing complications in the triangular relationship between Maurice, Victor and Betty, while the background reveals the other criminals keeping an eye on the three principal characters. By showing Monsieur K. and his associates lurking in the background in Sils Maria, the film provides clues about the suppressed parts of the narrative.2 The film accomplishes this suppression by first implying that the Sils Maria section will repeat the moves of the Aix-les-Bains section. Therefore, the Sils Maria sequence repeats with some differences the set-up in Aix-les-Bain. In Sils Maria, the film offers glimpses of Monsieur K. and his two associates (Madame K. and Yvon) watching the other three, just as in Aix-les-Bains, the film shows Victor watching Robert and Betty. In the first section, Victor is directing his star, Betty, in a plot of which he is the author. In Sils Maria, despite the initial similarities, Victor is an actor, rather than director; he fails to realize that he is competing with Monsieur K. to be a stand-in for Chabrol. Monsieur K. appears four times before his final confrontation with Victor: he walks through the lounge when Victor arrives in Sils Maria; he is in the lounge when Betty introduces Victor to Maurice; he is on the plane; and he is near the luggage carousel in Guadeloupe. If Monsieur K. is absent, his two associates

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watch Maurice, Betty and Victor: Madame K. watches them during the dance performance and Yvon watches them in the Alpine restaurant. Yvon sits down with the crowd of dentists, whose arrival appears to crown the staging of the fondue scene as comic, with Maurice being set up as Victor and Betty’s second mark, but Yvon’s presence introduces a note of danger of which Victor, Betty and Maurice remain unaware. Like Madame K. in the dance scene, Yvon appears in the background; both become noticeable when they turn their heads to spy on the principals. In an additional self-referential touch, the initials for Monsieur K. (M. K.) allude to those of Chabrol’s regular producer Marin Karmitz, while Yvon, Monsieur K.’s henchman, is played by Yvon Crenn, the production manager on Rien ne va plus and Chabrol’s production manager from Une Affaire de femmes (1988) onwards. Monsieur K. explains his earlier appearances when he tells Victor and Betty that Maurice was being watched. His four appearances are noticeable, thanks to Balmer’s distinctive looks, his skulking behind the protagonists and his pronounced staring. The long hair, silk scarf and sunglasses aid recognition while suggesting decadence. However, the biggest creative decision that has been made is to have Monsieur K. spy on Maurice, Victor and Betty in the public space of the hotel lounge. The film uses the hotel lounge for three scenes, each of which emphasizes performance and display. The lounge is first used to show Monsieur K. when Victor arrives in Sils Maria. It is next used for the dance performance. The third lounge scene is Betty’s introduction of Victor to Maurice. Each lounge scene begins with a wide frontal view that emphasizes its theatrical dimensions, yet each time the space changes its function. The transformation of the lounge is part of the film’s range of imagery connected to misleading appearances, relationships reworked and performances misinterpreted. Notions of performance and role-playing are developed throughout the film, but most of all in the three scenes that take place in the hotel lounge. In the first lounge scene, Monsieur K. walks through it during Victor’s arrival. On this occasion, the lounge is being transformed into an auditorium: one man moves a pot plant, another opens curtains, a third positions a signpost. While stage hands dress the set, Monsieur K. crosses the foreground in the middle of a line of dentists. The marble pillars, which will function as a proscenium in the evening’s dance performance, are framed on either side. Behind the dentists are the rows of seats, laid out for the performance, in the middle of which runs an aisle. As he walks across the foreground, Monsieur K. pauses just long enough to make his wavering noticeable; almost stopping, he turns his head, fiddles with

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his scarf and looks in Victor’s direction, hesitating centre frame, in front of the aisle. Only he looks left and his fiddling with his scarf draws attention to himself, as does his long hair. Following him in the line of dentists is Madame K. in her recognizable blue suit. As Monsieur K. passes out of frame, the desk clerk steps into frame to show Victor the way to the lift. The film marks the clerk’s reappearance with a flagrant adjustment of the camera’s focus. The second lounge scene is that of the dance performance; the third scene is Betty’s introduction of Victor to Maurice. This scene begins by showing Monsieur K.  and Madame K.  sitting on the left. Monsieur K.  is fiddling with his sunglasses; opposite him, in her blue suit, is Madame K. Chabrol flaunts the scene’s significance by using several assertive camera movements to present it, beginning with a showy establishing shot that cranes down until a large bunch of flowers are centred in the foreground, obstructing the view of the lounge. While the camera’s slow movement downwards draws attention to the shot, the flowers also symbolize the obscuring of views. This mobile establishing shot arrives at the same position as the first shot of the lounge, during preparations for the show and the scene derives additional resonances because it is a return to the site of the two earlier lounge scenes. In its first appearance, the lounge is being set up as an auditorium; in its second appearance, the lounge functions as an auditorium; in its third, it is being turned back into a lounge, yet the proscenium’s pillars remain visible, framing the space, a reminder that performances continue to take place. The chairs are also laid out symmetrically, with red armchairs in the foreground and middle ground, and grey chairs in the background where waiters serve drinks. The slow crane downwards flaunts the symmetrical form of this presentation; the orderliness of the presentation is noticeable as orderliness. Monsieur K. has an orange juice in front of him (on the plane, he asks Betty for an orange juice); Madame K. in her blue suit sits opposite him. As the camera cranes down, Monsieur K. removes his sunglasses, then replaces them and leans forward. While Monsieur K.  plays with his sunglasses in the left foreground, Victor walks into frame, as if taking centre stage. He walks around with his hands behind his back, waiting for Betty. The film cuts to Victor being questioned by two dentists; after they leave, the focus changes to reveal Betty at the piano. The camera moves sideways as she stands and they approach one another for a two shot. The camera’s movement is noticeable; it tracks right and pans left at the same time until it frames them in profile while they have this discussion:

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What are you playing at? Who’s that guy? I’ll tell you later. Enough’s enough. It’s like The Castle by Kafka. Come on, spill the beans. No, he’s coming. Play along

The film then cuts to Maurice, who walks behind Betty. She moves to Victor’s right and the film again cuts to Maurice as she introduces him to Victor. The film then cuts back to a two shot of Betty and Maurice. Betty moves to stand between Victor and Maurice. The camera pans right with her, then adjusts to frame her with Maurice. Each time the camera moves, its movements are noticeable. Meanwhile, Monsieur K. moves around behind them, looking over several times. With his sunglasses, his scarf, his slow walk and his blue-suited wife, he is recognizable, despite a slight blurriness in the shot. As soon as he becomes too visible, the film cuts to a new shot. This strategy is appropriate because, at this point, Monsieur K. is unknown to Victor, Betty and Maurice, each of whom thinks that they are in control. Furthermore, these events take place in a lounge which, in the preceding scene, doubled as a theatre. The ingenuity involved in the staging of this scene is evident in its combination of three things happening: in the foreground, Victor, Betty and Maurice’s interactions raise questions about who is deceiving whom; in the background, Monsieur K.  spies on them; to challenge our attentiveness further, Chabrol presents both these actions using assertive camera movements. The intertwining of three elements that compete for attention strengthens the film’s themes of deception and performance: Victor, Betty and Maurice deceive one another; unnoticed, Monsieur K. watches them; the camera adjusts, moves and reframes noticeably. The stylized quality of this scene’s shots connects with the film’s point of view on its characters and their actions; the asserted formality of the visual presentation highlights the ambiguity about the perspective offered, that is, ambiguity about who is in control, who is watching whom and who knows what about the others. Yet although Chabrol combines a formalized visual presentation with narrational ambiguity he uses this strategy in tandem with his incorporation of more mainstream narrative and genre conventions. In the third lounge scene, the film reveals that the gangster Monsieur K. watches Victor, Betty and Maurice, who are unaware of him. Monsieur K.’s louche appearance distinguishes him from the dentists. His fiddling with his sunglasses evokes a man biding his time, watching his money, waiting for the moment to show his hand; he toys with his sunglasses as he later toys with Betty and Victor. Meanwhile, Victor continues his performance as a Colonel, but the

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two Hungarian dentists misinterpret his performance and mistake him for a hotel employee. This gag repeats the earlier one in the Aix-les-Bains casino, when Victor is mistaken for a member of staff. The casino customer is younger than Victor but calls him ‘young man’ and asks where the baccarat is. Tipsy, brandishing a large cigar, the customer puts his hand on Victor’s shoulder. The latter raises his eyebrows and nudges the customer along saying ‘over there’. On a first viewing, we make the same assumption as the customer, that Victor is a member of staff; on subsequent viewings, we know that Victor, in his black tie evening wear and with his customary air of competence, is performing authority so well that he resembles a member of staff. When the gag is repeated, it is again because Victor is standing around, looking like a man who knows things; Betty’s comment (‘Still manning the information desk?’) confirms that it is a regular occurrence. However, in both scenes, the gag relates to the themes of performance and deception. Just as the film’s incidental comedy takes attention away from the crime story, tricks us into forgetting the danger, so Victor’s humorous demeanour with people (whether pickpockets, kebab stall owners, dentists, desk clerks or amorous widows) helps him deceive them; that is how he tricks Monsieur K. In the lounge scene, though, Monsieur K. is taking control from Victor (hence the latter’s comment about Kafka). First, however, the film suggests that Betty is working with Maurice. When they descend from the restaurant, Maurice appears so drunk that he has to be put to bed. This scene seems to repeat the earlier one in which Betty put Robert, their first victim, into bed. The repetition encourages an assumption that Victor and Betty are again acting together to deceive someone, that Maurice is a harmless mug, as Robert was. But the film undercuts this assumption when Maurice appears sober later that evening. Betty embraces him on his balcony and reports on Victor: ‘He’s leaving tonight’. The camera emphasizes their collaboration by tracking in towards them. Maurice’s clear-headed welcome implies that Betty has refrained from telling Victor the whole truth and that she and Maurice are in league together against Victor. However, what the lounge scenes and the restaurant scene also show is that, in the background, Monsieur K.  is watching all three of them. Therefore, the third lounge scene is central to the film’s development because it is here that all the players are present, though they are unaware of who is doing what. This scene embodies the moment named in the title; all bets are down, now the wheel just has to spin. Turning a hotel lounge into a theatrical space is an ideal way to emphasize the film’s theme of performance because social performances already

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take place in hotels. The hotel suits the work that the con artists do, their work requiring performances, but hotels are also spaces where everyone performs to some degree. The staff perform their jobs, serving their guests, suppressing their feelings because they are on display. The guests too are on display, hence, Victor’s question about whether black tie is required in the evening. For these reasons, hotels are the perfect location for spy films and thrillers. By introducing Monsieur K., Madame K. and Yvon in the hotel in Sils Maria, Chabrol teases us with hints about things that Victor cannot control. Monsieur K.’s two further appearances come on the journey to Guadeloupe. On the plane, while Madame K. is asleep on his arm, he asks Betty for an orange juice, a ruse, one assumes, to see her face before she enters the toilet with the metal briefcase handcuffed to her wrist. The close shot of Monsieur K.  apologizing increases suspicions. (This interaction repeats the earlier ones when Victor is twice mistaken for a member of staff; in this case, Monsieur K. pretends to mistake her for a member of staff.) Then, in the airport at Guadeloupe, Monsieur K. watches Maurice pick up his bag from the carousel. Maurice fails to recognize Monsieur K., but he recognizes the deep-voiced man who greets him from off-screen. This, we later learn, is Gilbert, the tall black henchman who holds the razor against Betty’s neck. The third section of the film comprises the climatic confrontation between Victor and Monsieur K.3 Balmer convinces as the chief gangster, Monsieur K., bringing out all the sleazy criminality of his character, his performance both plausible and excessive. In tonal register, Balmer’s performance is the opposite of Berroyer’s turn as the hapless lawnmower salesman, but both performances have the quality of skits in an evening of variety acts. Moreover, the overloading of the scene in Monsieur K.’s villa with violence and threats gives it a brazen irony that brings it close to being tongue-in-cheek. It begins when Betty and Victor are escorted into Monsieur K.’s villa, and the film reveals that black and white square tiles cover the floor, evoking a board game. As they enter the villa, the music becomes more dramatic. The music is Tosca, the incorporation of which crescendoes when Gilbert takes Betty to see the dead Maurice. As they climb the stairs, the camera curls around the curved staircase; against the white Art Deco interior, Betty’s black dress and short red hair are as dramatic as Puccini’s music. The music quietens after she enters the bathroom and sees Maurice, killed by a metal skewer through his eye. She opens her mouth in horror, without making a sound; the silence is broken by Tosca singing ‘Mario, Mario’, after which Betty runs downstairs.

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With the death of Maurice, revealed in a grotesque close-up, the mood changes. Monsieur K.  has already set the tone by playing Tosca; now he jokes about Maurice’s death: ‘We had to change the mood. I’m sorry, but times are hard’. The close-up of the spiked eyeball finalizes the tonal shift. After Betty asks: ‘Why did you do that?’ Monsieur K. calls out: ‘Yvon, play the finale of Tosca again please’; as the music is repeated, a shot of a surreal painting of two hens in clothes is repeated, with a fan turning beside it. The choice of Tosca’s finale, when Cavaradossi is shot and Tosca falls over the parapet, declares the obviousness of Chabrol’s incorporation of passionate drama from another art form. This bombastic incorporation is an obvious musical means for increasing the excitement; in many films, the selection would make us cringe at the cliché. But it works in Rien ne va plus because Chabrol has already established complicity with his audience; he knows that we know what he is doing and that, for this reason, we accept it. Instead of having it just playing in the background, as tonal colouring for the scene, Chabrol incorporates it as Monsieur K.’s schtick. The film foregrounds the music by having Monsieur K. insist that it is played twice, thereby integrating the gangster’s choice of music with other examples of his taste for what he calls ‘the most intensely dramatic’. As in some Hitchcock films, the music obtrudes from background accompaniment to foreground drama, with the characters interacting with the music. The Tosca excerpts intensify the drama of the scene, yet they are presented as Monsieur K.’s taste for the ‘intensely dramatic’, just as Schönberg’s Transfigured Night is presented as the choice of the dancer in Sils Maria, though it too functions tonally, changing the mood from comic to melodramatic. The spike in the eyeball is grotesque; the close-up depicting it highlights the reality of the violence and the threat intended for Betty and Victor. But Chabrol combines this violence with a streak of comic absurdity, such as the man who sleeps in an armchair during Monsieur K.’s confrontation with Betty and Victor and waking when they leave. Chabrol comments on the man sleeping: The idea was to have a character who, in the middle of the action, was indifferent to it, as if it was effectively absurd. As it is a part of the film about power, it gives it extra power, in the sense that this character is beyond these power relations: it is God who is snoozing! (Jousse and Toubiana 1997a: 26)

The sleeping man adds a provocative dimension to this scene; he does suggest, as Chabrol indicates, that for Monsieur K. and his associates violence is a normal activity, yet the sleeping man’s indifference also introduces an absurd element.

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Rien ne va plus is one of Chabrol’s most loveable films. A large part of this lovability derives from the two lead performances by Michel Serrault and Isabelle Huppert. In addition, with Victor and Betty the film presents a self-reflexive portrait of director and star, Chabrol and Huppert.4 The story of two con artists staging scenes and giving performances to deceive the victims of their crimes is all about illusions, performances, deceptions and trust, about relationships, both personal and professional, such as that between an older male director and a younger female actress. Films about con artists offer ample opportunities to evoke the processes of cinema; Rien ne va plus takes full advantage of these.5 Its self-reflexivity about film acting and film directing is explicit. For several critics, Rien ne va plus recalls Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch), but it has stronger echoes with The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) in the way that Serrault and Huppert echo Charles Coburn and Barbara Stanwyck in Sturges’ film.6 Huppert suggests: For La Cérémonie, he said: ‘It’s the last Marxist film!’. For Rien ne va plus, the definition was ‘Carpe Diem’, but he also said: ‘It’s my first autobiographical film’. On the other side of this quip, there is of course a profound truth. This last film is really mysterious, opaque and it does resemble Claude. It is apparently open and readable while remaining enigmatic. It is a very personal film. . . . It is a film about direction, about his relation to the world, to women, money, trust, film production, France; finally lots of things are said. But, indeed, through these characters constantly changing their identities, there is a reflection on the relationship of the director with his actress. (Guérin and Taboulay 1997: 68)7

Huppert adds:  ‘The breaking down of identity becomes an explicit process, it drives the plot, but not in a way that further explains the characters’ (Guérin and Taboulay 1997: 69). Betty’s changing appearance is connected to the film’s examination of her identity and her relationship with Victor. The breaking down of identity is a part of The Lady Eve in which Stanwyck portrays two roles and Serrault’s Colonel Victor echoes Coburn’s Colonel Harrington. However, if Serrault’s role evokes Coburn’s role in The Lady Eve, his performance calls to mind the poise, equanimity and debonair charm of William Powell in The Thin Man series. Like Powell, Serrault is witty, clever and adaptable, able to talk to everyone, exuding confidence and competence. And, as with Powell’s performances, Rien ne va plus offers immense pleasure in the way it depicts Serrault fitting in everywhere, his adaptability exemplified by his ability to dress for every climate and occasion, black tie for the casino, business suit for the Park Hotel, athletic shoes and body warmer for caravan travel,

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parka, hat and boots for snowy Sils Maria, summer suit and Panama hat for Guadeloupe.8 Victor’s remembering of his hat as he leaves Monsieur K.’s villa irritates the henchman; the remembering demonstrates, to the henchman at least, that Victor still feels that he has the upper hand over Monsieur K. This prompts him to beat Victor. Betty changes her hair; Victor changes his clothes. Maurice dies because he fails to adapt, wearing the same three-piece suit and tan brogues in the snow in the Alps and the tropics. Victor, meanwhile, is as elegant and suave as Powell. Despite his crooked behaviour, Victor invites admiration. His manners are those of a professional performer, but he executes them with commitment and sincerity. In moments of stress, Victor maintains his equilibrium. When Monsieur K.  addresses his captives for the first time, Victor opens his hand and gestures to his accomplice, turning his body towards her as if presenting her at court. When Monsieur K. addresses him, Victor does a tiny bow with his head, a distant echo of chivalric code; he executes this bow with a slight bounce in his body, suggesting deep reserves of energy and resourcefulness. Victor’s actions imply anxiety, but his appearance suggests calm; a professional trickster, he inspires confidence. Monsieur K. breaks his finger, but Victor remains ironic. Nevertheless, Monsieur K.’s threats are real, never less so than when he competes with Victor to control events, competes to be a stand-in for the director. And because Jean-François Balmer’s performance is as entertaining as Serrault’s, the film convinces us that Monsieur K. could kill Victor and Betty. Seen within the history of Chabrol’s œuvre, Rien ne va plus further explores competition between two men. Many of Chabrol’s films mount this contest between a Charles and a Paul, fictional allusions to Chabrol and his friend Paul Gégauff; often, the struggle between the two men ends with one killing the other. This struggle dramatizes the pressure of competing impulses, one towards nihilism, violence and death, the other more accepting of the transience of life’s pleasures. In Rien ne va plus, two criminals represent that contest, competing to direct events and stage scenes. As director of the cons, Victor represents Chabrol; the more dangerous manipulator Monsieur K. is his direct competitor for this role (the Paul to his Charles). Monsieur K. lurks in the background, organizes events so they turn out in his favour, ‘changes the mood’ by killing Maurice, directs the confrontation with Victor and Betty, and plays the finale of Tosca twice as background music. Monsieur K.’s role as director is made most explicit through his exercising his right to choose Tosca as the accompanying music for his big scene and it is easy to see Monsieur K.’s declared taste for the ‘intensely dramatic’ as

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synonymous with Chabrol’s taste. However, in the end, Victor manages to steal Monsieur K.’s money, directing the scene as he wishes. The links between Victor and Chabrol are cemented in the final scene when Betty, finding him in a wheelchair, asks: ‘Qu’est ce que cette mise en scène?’ and Victor replies: ‘Quelle mise en scène?’ The subtitles translate this as: ‘What is this play-acting?’, but Chabrol’s choice of mise en scène alludes better to his role as director.9

Notes 1 Jousse writes: ‘As always, Chabrol frustrates, with a perceptible pleasure, the grubby process of spectatorial identification that he has always shunned like the plague. He offers the spectator a reflection on appearances, to take him for a ride, to mix things up while giving him the means to free himself. Everything is hugely entertaining. From the beginning, everything is misleading’ (1997: 45). 2 Jousse notes the suppressive narrative in his review: ‘Rien ne va plus is a deceptively simple film which risks generating some misunderstandings. At its heart, the rather incredible plot is treated like a piece of music, like a form of orchestration, of musical arrangement, where a bass line continues, on top of which are layered some motifs that are more or less crazy, more or less complex, more or less explosive. On top of Transfigured Night or Tosca, Chabrol constructs his movements, his choreography; he “musicalizes” his staging’ (1997: 45). 3 Morice (2006) writes: ‘Casually, it offers a downright delirious last half hour, as if his film is derailing from within. The duo finds themselves in Guadeloupe, trapped in a mafia mess. Pastiching Sunday evening thrillers, the bantering face-to-face with the dangerous Balmer (giving a stellar turn!), flanked by sinister thugs, is a gem of nonsense’. 4 Huppert states: ‘This somewhat mysterious relationship between Serrault and myself really expresses the magnetic but ambiguous relationship between a director and his actress, with all that that suggests about desire, affection and play’ (Guérin and Taboulay 1997: 69). Jousse calls Rien ne va plus an ‘oblique self-portrait’ (1997: 45). 5 Gili writes: ‘Rien ne va plus – his vision of an existence dominated by chances, where the metaphorical ritual of roulette returns a metaphysic – has the allure of secret confidences: with characteristic irony and the art of never saying anything so that one has to seek the hidden meaning of words, Chabrol does not hesitate to declare, obviously forgetting Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins: “This my first autobiographical film” ’ (1997: 33–4). 6 Chabrol says: ‘Trouble in Paradise, by Lubitsch, has always impressed me: the plot is absurd and badly carried out, but that is of no importance because the structure is

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perfect and it overcomes the plot. By definition, structure always wins out. It is why I readily agree to adapt books even when their plots don’t interest me much, as long as they allow an interesting structure’ (Magny 1987: 203). Bonnaud (1997), Jousse (1997) and Grassin (1997) all suggest a resemblance between Rien ne va plus and Trouble in Paradise. Jousse also suggests the influence of Charade (1963, Stanley Donen), both for its relationship between an older man and a younger woman, and for its participation in the cycle of lighthearted 1960s jet-setting spy films. 7 Huppert also says: ‘There is really in this film the metaphor of masks, which is recurrent in his cinema, and which comes through in my hair’ (Ciment and Tobin 2011: 70). Huppert again: ‘It was written like that in the script, my real colour became another mask. As one says that even without a mask an actress is in disguise. Or that one never knows behind which mask lies the real person. In making the film, I thought of Vertigo, of course, where there is this same troubling confusion, fetishised by hair, between two female characters incarnated by the same actress’ (Guérin and Taboulay 1997: 69). 8 In Sils Maria, Victor wears a red ribbon on his buttonhole, the symbol of the Ordre national de la légion d’honneur, presumably a part of this small-time con artist’s disguise. 9 The final credits are accompanied by ‘Changez tout’ by Michel Jonasz, the chorus for which tells listeners to change everything to make life worthwhile. Gili notes that the song is a final nudge from Chabrol, yet one which remains ambiguous, perhaps celebrating the art of storytellers (1997: 34).

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Au Cœur du mensonge (1999): The Fabric of Vision

Au Cœur du mensonge starts with the rape and murder of a child, the pupil of a painter, René (Jacques Gamblin), the last person to see the child alive. He becomes the prime suspect. However, the film’s interest extends beyond the murder investigation to wider themes of lies, deception and appearances. A celebrity writer, Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), tries to seduce the painter’s wife, Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire). They meet in a hotel room. On her return home, her husband tells her he has invited the writer to dinner. The dinner scene that follows is the film’s longest scene. After dinner, the painter takes the writer home. The next morning, the writer’s cleaner finds him dead. Once again, the painter was the last person to see the dead man alive. He becomes a suspect for a second time. Twice suspected of murder, the painter becomes depressed. However, the history of his marriage is that of an injured, unsuccessful painter supported by his nurse-turned-wife. That history already exerts pressure on them, which events in the film exacerbate. Furthermore, nothing indicates that Vivianne tells her husband about her meeting in the hotel room. In contrast, although René first lies to Vivianne about what happened when he took Desmot home, in the film’s final scene he confesses to her. Pierre Murat summarizes the relationship drama: The essential thing is always to prioritise the essence:  in this case, it is the tension, anxiety and hell that, little by little, engulf the two central characters. That is, Jacques Gamblin, sombre, tortured, the inheritor of a role that long ago in Chabrol’s films would have been taken by Maurice Ronet or Michel Bouquet. And Sandrine Bonnaire: on the surface, her role is the most thankless in that she suffers more than she acts, but in fact she is the pillar of the whole film, the type of woman favoured by Chabrol, tempted by a stupid affair, but loyal to her role when the threat becomes clear, a sort of invisible heroine against whom danger suddenly stumbles and crashes. (Murat 1999: 44)1

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Murat (1999:  43)  notes the echoes of Juste avant la nuit (1971) in Au Cœur du mensonge, as does Ginette Vincendeau (2001:  39), who mentions the use of doubles in both films. Juste avant le nuit, one of Chabrol’s finest films from his ‘Hélène’ period, is about a man (Michel Bouquet) consumed with guilt after murdering his mistress. Like Bouquet’s character in Juste avant la nuit, the depressive René seems incapable of happiness, suffering from past injury and present suspicions. As Jacques Gamblin says of René, ‘About my character, all [Chabrol] said to me was that he’s been dead for ten years. I had to manage with that’ (Sorg 1998: 35). For Richard Combs, who also notes the allusions to earlier Chabrol films, Au Cœur du mensonge is ‘the most intense, haunting film he has made in the past ten years’ (2005: 79). Despite its investigative framework, Au Cœur du mensonge examines a relationship under duress while a man is suspected of murder. The film’s theme is deception, expressed in various ways. As Olivier de Bruyn comments: With Au Cœur du mensonge, Chabrol in effect delivers one of his relentlessly mechanical works, for which he holds the secret. The murder of the child is only a pretext, something to put the fiction in gear. The heart of the lie itself is nestled in the destructive triangle constituted by René, Vivianne and the wellnamed Germain-Roland Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), the hack already mentioned, whose Parisian celebrity makes local worthies happy and who seduces the nurse. Yet the film is not a drama about jealousy. Just as Chabrol leaves the murder on the surface of the film (we never see either the child’s parents, nor the Cancale environment, nor everything that we normally see in a thriller), he is only superficially interested in adultery . . . The ambition is purer: to look behind the interactions between the three characters at the sinuous web of their lies and their consequences, their relationships as much as their interiority. (De Bruyn 1999: 23)2

Au Cœur du mensonge was released in English as The Colour of Lies, but, as De Bruyn implies, ‘at the heart of lies’ or ‘at the heart of the lie’ is a more literal translation. This is just one of several plays on words and allusions. Vivianne is married to painter René Sterne, as in René Magritte, painter of The Human Condition, and Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. As de Bruyn remarks, the writer and media celebrity is well-named as Germain-Roland Desmot, with ‘Desmot’ evoking ‘some word’ or ‘just words’, while the new chief of police is Inspector ‘le sage’, ‘the wise’.3 Au Cœur du mensonge is a companion piece to Rien ne va plus, though their tone differs. Rien ne va plus, despite its violence, has a lighthearted humorous

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tone, whereas Au Cœur du mensonge, apart from the hint of black humour in the scenes with the pathologist (Thomas Chabrol), maintains a sombre tone. De Bruyn calls it ‘a cold film, cerebral and theoretical’ (1999: 22); for Antoine de Baecque, ‘Au Cœur du mensonge is a film admirably well played, in a mode of reservation, restraint, almost atonality’ (1999: 62). Nevertheless, the films’ similarities are striking. Both films depict two men competing for one woman; both protagonists are creators of fictions (Victor, the con artist in Rien ne va plus, stages dramatic scenes, and René, the painter in Au Cœur du mensonge, paints trompe-l’œil). Both protagonists compete with antagonists (Monsieur K. in Rien ne va plus and Desmot in Au Cœur du mensonge) to be on-screen stand-ins for Chabrol. Both films have similar themes (deception, performance and lies). Au Cœur du mensonge uses several motifs relating to lies, illusions and deceptions, including cinema, and Chabrol succeeds in creating a pervasive ambiguity about the fictional world of Au Cœur du mensonge and the characters’ interactions within it. The film’s primary asserted symbol is the trompe-l’œil, which epitomizes the film’s themes of deception and lies. The case of the little girl’s murder is solved, as is the case of the theft of religious artefacts, but other narrative questions remain unanswered. Two unresolved ambiguities relate to Vivianne’s infidelity and René’s involvement with Desmot’s death. With the first ambiguity, the film leaves two issues indeterminable: the extent of Vivianne’s adultery and the extent of her confession to René. The combination of an ellipsis and a comment by Desmot creates ambiguity about Vivianne’s adultery. The film uses several dissolves and fade-outs to signal ellipses; one example is the ellipsis used during the depiction of Vivianne’s time with Desmot, as a result of which the film avoids confirming whether she slept with him. The film introduces this ellipsis by cutting from Vivianne with Desmot to René painting. When the film returns to the hotel room, Vivianne is dressed. She says she is glad that she did not ‘get screwed’ by Desmot. However, Desmot comments that her ‘pretty phrase’ is out of context. In tandem with Chabrol’s ellipsis, this creates some ambiguity about what took place. Their parting conversation in the hotel room is about lies:  ‘What will you say to your friend?’ asks Desmot. ‘I don’t know. I’ll lie. At least you’ve taught me that’, she replies. He says: ‘Thank God lies exist. Society would be hell to live in otherwise’. ‘Who did you steal that from?’ Vivianne asks. At this point, Chabrol cuts to a shot of the television on which appears some news footage of the Pope being driven through an appreciative crowd. Desmot’s reply comes over this image:  ‘From every liar in purgatory since the dawn of time. And there are a lot of them’. The

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combination of the image of the Pope and Desmot’s cynical comments constitutes a forthright anti-clerical gesture by Chabrol, but it is also linked to the film’s other crime, the theft and sale of religious antiques and paintings, some of which Desmot buys. Also unclear is how much Vivianne tells René about her experiences with Desmot. Vivianne may deceive René by omission; the film does not indicate whether she tells him about her meeting in the hotel room. René’s suspicions begin when Betty contradicts Vivianne’s account that Betty was with her when she bought the blue dress. Combined with Vivianne’s absence from the concert, which René observes on television, Betty’s contradictory account leads René to suspect Vivianne of lying. The film avoids confirming this, but it may be the reason René paints an unidentified man handing a naked Vivianne the blue dress. When Vivianne returns from her time with Desmot, she finds the painting waiting for her. René says nothing accusatory, but his painting is confrontational. She starts crying and embraces René. He tells her that he loves her; she replies: ‘I feel I prevent you from finding yourself ’. ‘It’s the opposite’, he states, ‘the very opposite. When you’re here, everything works’. They continue to embrace until the film dissolves to a shot of them naked in bed. With the dissolve signalling an ellipsis, the film avoids clarifying whether Vivianne tells René about Desmot. All the film confirms is that she has returned from her clandestine meeting feeling upset. René may have suspicions, but nothing indicates what he knows. Irrespective of what Vivianne tells him, the intensity of their embrace in front of the painting and the short scene of them in bed suggest a reconciliation. However, the film introduces a further irony and increases pressure on the couple by having René tell Vivianne while they lie in bed together that he has invited Desmot for dinner. The second ambiguity concerns the extent of René’s responsibility for Desmot’s death. At first, René lies to Vivianne about what happened when he took Desmot home. Later he gives her an account which he thinks makes him guilty of murder, or at least manslaughter, but which Vivianne thinks indicates that Desmot’s death was accidental. This issue remains interminable. All these narrational ambiguities connect with the film’s primary asserted symbol, the trompe-l’œil. In general, trompe-l’œil paintings create an illusion of tactility, emphasizing what Miriam Milman calls ‘the strangeness of visual and conceptual uncertainty’ (1983: 43). As Martin Battersby (1974: 11) puts it, deception is inherent in trompe-l’œil:

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The aim of a trompe-l’œil – using the term in its widest sense and applying it to both paintings and objects – is primarily to puzzle and to mystify. At its best it can give rise to a feeling of disquiet in the mind of the beholder and it was this particular quality which, as already described, ensured its use by some painters of the surrealist school whose use of trompe-l’œil elements drew attention to hitherto neglected examples from the past. This disquiet is brought about by a conflict of messages conveyed to the brain by the eye. (Battersby 1974: 19)

Mark D.  Mitchell goes further, asking:  ‘Is trompe-l’œil ever not surreal?’ (2009: 105) and his question applies to Au Cœur du mensonge. The trompe-l’œil creates an appearance of reality, where we delight that our eyes are tricked. This reaction distinguishes the trompe-l’œil from the still life; with the latter, writes Battersby, ‘however beautifully their form and colour is realised by the artist the temptation to touch is absent’ (1974: 20). Unlike the still life, the trompe-l’œil invites touch. That ambivalence about reality and fiction often allows for ironic humour. Many things associated with trompe-l’œil apply to Chabrol’s films, to the extent that the trompe-l’œil in Au Cœur du mensonge is a form of internal doubling. Fakes and forgeries differ from trompe-l’œil, but ambivalence about the border between reality and fiction is part of the subject of Au Cœur du mensonge. Mixing the real and the artificial, trompe-l’œil shares features with cinema; as Ginette Vincendeau notes: The painterly references are not just part of the elaborate play on reality and appearances. They are brought to life for the spectator and form part of the plot: Desmot bumping his head on a shelf because he confuses the real thing with the trompe-l’œil seems to represent the spectator, taken in by the director’s technical mastery. (Vincendeau 2001: 39)

There are trompe-l’œil paintings in three of the film’s locations:  the Desmot home, the theatre and the Sterne home. Desmot’s trompe-l’œil comprises fake bookshelves and fake books; concealed behind it is a locked safe containing his laptop with his half-written new book on it, based on the lives of René, Vivianne and Desmot. The police reveal Desmot’s trompe-l’œil when they open his safe. A literal interpretation is that he has fake books and he is himself a faker, a nouveau riche media personality who thrives on appearances and superficialities. René may have painted Desmot’s trompel’œil. He did paint the theatre’s trompe-l’œil, which is a large installation in the foyer, designed to amuse waiting audiences. Battersby notes the association between trompe-l’œil and theatre: ‘Trompe-l’œil shares with the theatre the art

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of illusion – the creation of an apparent reality – and it is no co-incidence that many of its exponents have also worked in the theatre’ (1974:  27). Battersby points out that stage scenery looks crude when seen up close, but realistic when seen under coloured lights from the stalls. Milman says this of theatrical spaces and trompe-l’œil: Play-acting and make-believe, living in an imaginary environment or watching others do so, these were so many ludic activities for which the architectural trompe-l’œil could provide the setting . . . When the inhabited space of everyday life is transformed by simulated architecture, it becomes a theatrical space which calls for and makes possible the ludic activity of spectators now converted into actors. So it is, very often, that fictive characters take over and concealed or displayed within the painted architecture, they become the audience of a living show. (Milman 1986: 67)

Milman’s description matches Chabrol’s use of a trompe-l’œil; as she observes: ‘When transformed by an architectural trompe-l’œil, real space may in turn become a theatrical stage’ (1986:  71). In the theatre foyer, spectators become actors. The connection between theatre’s art of illusion and the illusions of trompel’œil extends to cinema. The way in which the trompe-l’œil engages the viewer shares some perceptual processes with cinema, although one difference, as Battersby emphasizes, is that trompe-l’œil invites touch. As the primary asserted symbol in Au Cœur du mensonge, the trompe-l’œil paintings incarnate the film’s theme of lies, and, as Vincendeau observes, they intervene in the plot when Desmot walks into the shelf and cuts his nose. This accident rhymes with others: Desmot’s and René’s falls in the fog, and the fog itself, which, like the blackout and trompe-l’œil, impedes vision and causes confusion.4 Milman writes: Even though trompe-l’œil is meant to deceive and in some cases very nearly succeeds, it is not always accepted at once as a reality. At first sight the image comes as a surprise. By turns it inspires doubt and certainty in a continual readjustment of the gaze. The puzzled viewer is torn between the message of his eyes and the message of his brain. The mind may already know the right answer, and yet the spectator’s reaction is to abandon his receptive passiveness and act in order to test what he sees. (Milman 1983: 103)

As Milman notes, successful trompe-l’œil create ‘a relation of uncertainty between the image and the viewer’ (1983: 103). Chabrol embeds this same sense of uncertainty in his film: René is unsure of the reality of his wife’s relationship

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with Desmot; Vivianne is unsure of the reality of René’s responsibility for Desmot’s death. Before the concert scene, the film shows René at work. Connecting the two artists at work, the film cuts from Desmot at his computer to a shot of a slide projector, its beam facing us. It then cuts to a slide projected on a wall which shows the beach on which René painted and Desmot ran. René traces the outline of the beach onto paper, converts a photograph into a painting. Then Vivianne walks into frame. The film presents a striking image of her standing next to René, her shadow cast onto the wall as they talk. The film cuts to a closer two shot of them in profile, her shadow still between them. She kisses him. There is a slow dissolve to a shot of the real beach, then a cut to the concert stage, where pianist and singer perform. The music begins when René and Vivianne kiss, continuing over the beach shot and into the concert. The image of René and Vivianne in front of the slide-projected photograph is conspicuous. When Vivianne enters the frame, she walks between the projector beam and René so that her shadow fills half the frame and places René in darkness. When she stands before him in profile, her shadow remains prominent, separate from her. In the closer two shot of them kissing, the shadow interposes between the couple. The shadow image is a doubled self, a reverse image that implies Vivianne may be concealing something from her husband and Chabrol forces this image on our attention. The projected slide emphasizes illusion. René’s tracing alludes to the making of illusion by copying reality, whether trompe-l’œil or film. The scene’s imagery binds René’s painting and Vivianne’s lies to illusion-making. By inserting the shot of the real beach, Chabrol invites comparison of it with the slide image of the same beach in front of which René and Vivianne kiss. Meanwhile, the slide projector symbolizes the film projector, further elaborating the theme of lies. The music performed at the recital is by Reynaldo Hahn; the lyrics are poems that Hahn set to music, Victor Hugo’s ‘Si mes vers avaient des ailes’ and Paul Verlaine’s ‘D’une prison’. If my poems had wings, the poet says, they would fly, sparkling to your happy home; if artistic creations had wings, they would fly home to the arms of a loved one. Hugo’s words and Hahn’s music are romantic, but with a melancholic intrigue that matches the image of René and Vivianne kissing in front of a projected slide, haunted by her shadow. The scene again exemplifies Chabrol’s skill at incorporating music into his drama; as in La Cérémonie and Rien ne va plus, the music has tonal and dramatic functions: tonal because its romantic sound accompanies Vivianne and René’s kiss;

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dramatic because René observes on television that Vivianne is absent from the audience after the interval. The interval scene begins with a shot of several people standing in front of or near René’s trompe-l’œil lift, including Vivianne. To the left and right of the fake lift are fake windows with fake views of the beach, the same image that René projected from a slide. Off-screen, police inspector Lesage’s (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s) distinctive voice comments:  ‘We’re dealing with organised gangs. Objects vanish. They often go abroad, but it’s hard to tell’.5 While she speaks, a waiter walks past with a punch bowl and the camera travels left to reveal a couple entering the real lift in the background. The shot continues left until it frames Lesage speaking to a suited bespectacled man, a local official. Lesage looks around; the film cuts to her daughter taking a biscuit from the buffet, then back to Lesage, who calls her daughter. The manager leans in and asks Lesage how the investigation is going. The camera moves to a more frontal position facing Lesage; there is a cut to Vivianne, who, with a determined look on her face, walks towards them. The man greets her: ‘Isn’t René with you?’ Vivianne says she came with friends, indicating Desmot in the distance; he raises his glass to her. The man continues: ‘It’s a pity, I’d have liked to talk to your husband. His trompe-l’œil is a big hit. The local paper took a photo, and regional television also filmed it’. By starting the scene with the trompe-l’œil, Chabrol asserts its symbolism. At the start of the opening shot, with people milling around the fake lift, the trompe-l’œil looks real; it deceives the eye. Moreover, Lesage’s off-screen comment ‘Objects vanish’ is placed in a direct relationship to the film’s revelation of the trompe-l’œil. Just as she says ‘objects vanish’, the camera accelerates its movement away from the fake lift, revealing the couple entering the real lift. As the camera traverses the crowd, one notices the precision of its movement, as if the owner of the voice (Lesage) is pulling the camera towards it. As is often the case with Chabrol, the camera is both involved with the story, in that it singles out the protagonists, and distanced, in that the speed and precise trajectory of its movement draws attention to itself; the flaunted framing adjustments signal a narrational independence from the characters. When Vivianne confronts Lesage, the camera turns around the police inspector’s head to frame her. After speaking to Lesage, Vivianne heads towards Desmot, who gives her a glass of champagne. While the audience return to their seats, Vivianne and Desmot go behind the trompe-l’œil lift to enter the real lift. The fake lift now resembles stage scenery. Vivianne and Desmot’s entrance into

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the real lift confirms the status of the fake lift, yet when they walk towards the lift, René’s trompe-l’œil surrounds them. They walk into a trompe-l’œil space, onto a set. The framing is conspicuous: devoid of people; paintings of the beach on the wall (similar to the slide and the real beach on which Vivianne and Desmot walk; real walls (though they belong to the film’s set); the fake lift obtruding as a two-dimensional part of the trompe-l’œil and looking like a stage scenery. Instead of returning for the second half of the concert, Vivianne and Desmot enter the lift behind the trompe-l’œil as if they are entering a world of illusion. At this point, the film reveals the extent to which René’s paintings of the coastline decorate the foyer walls. The film then cuts from the real lift (within the film’s fictional world) to the trompe-l’œil lift, now shown on the television that René is watching at home. The presentation of the theatre’s trompe-l’œil emphasizes its status as the film’s primary asserted symbol. The film further emphasizes this by cutting from the framing of the real lift to the shot of René’s television. The frontal shot of the trompe-l’œil lift on television increases ambiguity about the film’s intertwining of fake and real. Furthermore, as the television camera shows the concert and the audience, allowing René to see that Vivianne’s seat next to Betty is empty, it points, shows and demonstrates, as if the television camera and the film’s camera merge, both representing René’s interest in this audience. Chabrol has made a rewarding decision to stage this sequence in the theatre, parts of it in the auditorium and parts of it in the foyer, and to place a trompel’œil in the foyer and stage some of the action in front of it. The trompe-l’œil in the foyer invades the real world; when first shown, with Vivianne standing in front of it, the fake lift looks like real. When the camera moves, the film reveals its two-dimensionality. With the fake lift intruding into the spectator’s space, the trompe-l’œil introduces a momentary misperception. Yet even once the camera has revealed the two-dimensionality of the lift, the trompe-l’œil installation reinforces the theme of lies, or of an ambiguous and confused perception of reality. Whereas the auditorium has distinct onstage and offstage spaces, the foyer functions as a metaphorical stage for social performances; the trompe-l’œil accentuates this impression of society as theatre. Like his commission exhibited in the theatre foyer, René’s domestic trompel’œil intrudes into the space of his and Vivianne’s home. An installation designed to trick the eye with its falsity, it comprises a table, fruit bowl and paraffin lamp, a copy of the lamp they use during the blackout, all of which is painted, and two fake plates painted so they appear to be resting on a shelf, which is real. This domestic trompe-l’œil makes several quick appearances before it intervenes in

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the plot. It appears first when Vivianne returns with some shopping and passes it as she enters the kitchen. When she removes her coat, she again passes the trompe-l’œil. The film next shows it when Desmot visits Vivianne. He looks at René’s seascape and then at the trompe-l’œil, saying: ‘He’s changed style. I like his trompe-l’œil work also’. Vivianne replies: ‘The one for the new theatre is lovely’. The trompe-l’œil is visible between them as they talk, though on a first viewing it looks real. In the same scene, when Desmot is on the sofa and Vivianne is standing before him, the trompe-l’œil is visible though blurry behind her, obscure enough to appear real. Later that day, when René chats to Vivianne in the kitchen, the lamp of the trompe-l’œil is visible. The whole thing is shown when René takes coffee to Lesage and, as a blurred background, when René and Vivianne embrace. In all its appearances before the dinner scene, the trompel’œil is either out of focus or in the background; the film suppresses its existence until the dinner party. The dinner scene begins after the film dissolves from René kissing Vivianne’s hand at table, as they eat an omelette, to the same table set for dinner. The camera tilts upwards. René limps across the hall. On the right, just visible, is a corner of the trompe-l’œil; in the kitchen, to the left of the trompe-l’œil, Vivianne whisks a sauce to accompany the lobsters. To her right, on top of the fridge, is the gin, which she gave to Desmot on his earlier visit. The kitchen is separated from the rest of the living space by a low wall, on which are stuck children’s paintings. On the left, in the background, is a poster advertising a René Sterne exhibition. In this framing, the trompe-l’œil looks like part of the furniture. The dramatic intrigue of the scene derives from questions about what will happen between Vivianne and Desmot; the last time they saw each other was in a hotel room as they attempted a romantic liaison. René may suspect that they have been together, but Desmot and Vivianne keep quiet about their misadventure in front of him. Before they eat, Vivianne clears the fourth setting from the table, telling René that Betty has phoned to say that she cannot come. Desmot declares ‘Oh lobster, how wonderful! The room then goes black as the electricity cuts out. While the lights are out, Desmot bumps into the shelf. When the lights come on, he is holding his nose: ‘I’m bleeding’. There is a cut to Vivianne: ‘I have what you need’. She finds a plaster in a drawer as the lights go out again. René brings a paraffin lamp closer, saying: ‘It takes them a while’. He looks at Desmot’s nose: ‘It’s only a graze’. The light comes back on as Vivianne attends to the injury. When the nurse has finished with her patient, they walk out of frame in opposite directions, their movements revealing the clearest image yet of the

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dangerous trompe-l’œil. Confusion about the physical existence of the plates and shelf lures Desmot towards René’s trompe-l’œil. As Desmot comments: ‘Fancy banging into a trompe-l’œil in the dark’. His words alert us to the trompe-l’œil, which is given its clearest view in this shot. The characters’ movements out of frame and the duration of the shot foreground the deliberateness of the staging; the shot has the quality of curtains being pulled back to reveal the trick, after it has performed its duty and injured the unwary Desmot. The illusion of reality is what trompe-l’œil offers, an invitation to touch. Milman describes how a successful trompe-l’œil engages the spectator: He is surprised and deceived at the first sight of it. His eyes tell him that what he sees here is an integral part of his familiar visual world, and his reaction is not to accept what he knows is only an illusion, but to test its reality by reaching out and touching it. (1983: 7)

Yet Milman also points out that if the trompe-l’œil is to transcend this game, ‘it has to convey a message or establish a dialogue’ (1983: 7). René’s domestic trompe-l’œil does this. Just as the fog impairs vision and causes Desmot to fall over, so the electricity blackout causes Desmot to bang his nose on the real shelf with the trompe-l’œil plates on it. As well as the blackout impairing vision, the trompe-l’œil itself destabilizes perception. The painter is an expert in manipulating vision and views, obsessed with changes in light, the effect glass has on vision or how Seurat discovered pointillism. His trompe-l’œil wounding of Desmot conveys the message that he has the skill to disorientate and deceive his audience. The combination of fake plates and real shelf creates uncertainty about illusion and reality, hence Desmot’s injury. René’s trompe-l’œil invades the space of his home; as Milman writes: ‘The painted scene is projected out of its frame and seems to enter the real world’ (1983: 14). In René’s case, the trompe-l’œil deceives the eye twice. The first deception comes because it creates an illusion of reality. The second deception comes because this realization that it is a trompel’œil means that the spectator fails to notice that a real shelf projects outwards. The blending of the virtual with the real confuses, rendering perception of space unstable. René’s combination of real shelf, fake table and fake plates intrigues the viewer and invites a closer look; the viewer (in this case, Desmot) steps too close and walks into it. Milman (1983: 45) discusses various examples of trompe-l’œil niches, recesses and shelves, including work by Henri Cadiou (1906–89), whose trompe-l’œil painting Kitchen Shelf (1963) includes familiar, everyday objects

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similar to those painted four hundred years earlier by anonymous Flemish artists. As Mitchell notes, ‘Vanitas, the reminder of mortality, is one of the great trompe-l’œil themes’ (2009: 105). For Milman: The repertory of trompe-l’œil painting is made up of obsessive elements, it represents a reality immobilized by nails, held in the grip of death, corroded with time, glimpsed through half-open doors or undrawn curtains, containing messages that are sometimes unreadable, allusions that are often misunderstood, and a disorder of seemingly familiar and yet remote objects. (1983: 105)

Milman’s description of the repertory of trompe-l’œil applies to Chabrol’s film. René demonstrates that his painting has the power to wound. The small wound is a warning from the painter, who later stages a scene in the dead writer’s house, turning it into a trompe-l’œil designed to deceive the police and making the link. The message René’s domestic trompe-l’œil conveys to Desmot is ‘beware, I have it in my power to hurt you’. René uses his painting of Vivianne coming naked from the bathroom for a similar effect; her tearful embrace of her husband confirms the painting’s success. Both the trompe-l’œil and René’s painting of Vivianne in a blue dress associate the painter with the filmmaker, as if the director is implying that art, including cinema, harms and rewards. The trompel’œil cuts Desmot and the painting of Vivianne reduces her to tears. A further link between Chabrol and René is the way the painting suggests that both artists have the power to imagine the scene of Desmot and Vivianne’s meeting. The dinner itself begins after the film cuts from the trompe-l’œil to the lobsters. Condensed into small parts, separated by dissolves, the dinner scene starts after an ellipsis, the film having already jumped forward from Vivianne’s nursing of Desmot’s injured nose. As they help themselves to lobsters, they are in the middle of a conversation about lies. Desmot declares: ‘In the end, a mask reveals more than a face. I know hundreds of people whose appearance is now their nature’. The film then elides more of their dinner: an empty Sancerre bottle stands behind Desmot; René pours from a second. The guest continues:  ‘The most profitable lie is when you make a liar think you believe him’. Another dissolve takes us to an angled shot, more distanced from the table; Desmot praises Vivianne’s cooking. The next dissolve takes us to the end of the dinner. The two men sit on their own as Vivianne clears away the plates: Desmot states ‘It’s amazing how thirsty lobster makes you!’ René opens a third bottle of Sancerre; behind Desmot are two empty bottles. He continues to talk about lies, as if taunting René to think that he is concealing something (which he is). René asks him if he

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is working on anything right now (it turns out that he is writing a novel based on the lives of René, Vivianne and himself); Desmot replies: ‘Another novel but I’m afraid I’ve dried up’. Tipsy, Desmot knocks over a wine glass. As the camera approaches the two men, they resemble doubles more than ever, both wearing suit jackets with open-necked blue shirts and the wine bottle between them. There is a cut to a close-up of Desmot’s hands moulding a bread figure. René thinks this embodies Desmot’s egotistical treatment of people: ‘Is that how you see human beings?’ The film answers this with a close shot which reveals that Desmot wears a signet ring with a blue insert of the same colour as Vivianne’s new dress. When the men stand, Desmot sees behind them a metal sculpture by a friend of René’s, Tilburce, who, René tells Desmot, committed suicide after Desmot’s review of his work prevented galleries taking his work. Desmot is sceptical: ‘I don’t have that much power. His problem was his wife, a very pretty girl, in fact, very moving, twenty years his junior. She smelled of warm bread’. ‘Did you screw her?’ René asks. ‘Maybe I  should have’, replies Desmot. As René and Desmot joust with words, Vivianne looks at her husband; this subject is close to home. Desmot stands to leave and asks to make a phone call; in the police station, Régis (Pierre Martot) later tells René that Desmot had arranged an appointment with him for three o’clock in the morning; one assumes that Desmot phones Régis from the Sterne’s house. René gives Desmot a large brandy (‘one for the road’). Vivianne smiles as she glances at her husband, enjoying the spectacle of Desmot as a drunken buffoon, aware that her husband is plying him with alcohol. The guest staggers away. ‘You’ll have to drive him home’, says Vivianne. ‘It’s still foggy out there. I’ll take him back by boat’. There is a slow dissolve from the married couple to the boat on the sea. Desmot complains of feeling ill and asks René to accompany him up to the house, having floodlit his own property. ‘I can’t breathe tonight’, says Desmot, as he touches his chest; ‘My heartbeat is too fast to count’. ‘Be quiet’, says René, ‘that might help’. Their scene together ends with a dissolve from René saying ‘shut your mouth’ to a shot of Vivianne reading in bed. This dissolve, like the other dissolves in the film, symbolizes an ellipsis, one that introduces the second ambiguity, the extent of René’s responsibility for Desmot’s death. When René returns home after dropping Desmot off, he walks across the muddy path in the fog and he too trips over, just as Desmot trips up in the mud when he arrives for dinner. Their falls before and after the dinner are further instances of doubling. A version of this scene of René picking his way across the

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path features in the credit sequence; the placement of it in the credit sequence introduces its importance, and the importance of René’s responsibility for Desmot’s death. They are Chabrolian doubles, similar to Monsieur K. and Victor in Rien ne va plus. René is a depressive, reclusive and talented painter; Desmot is a smooth-talking, vacuous and wealthy celebrity writer.6 The film sets René’s absorption with his work and his sense of failure against Desmot’s success and his indulgence of pleasures. They compete for Vivianne and they compete as stand-ins for the storyteller. As in Rien ne va plus, both male protagonists want to direct events. However, the painter of optical illusions outwits the writer of fictions, just as the con artist Victor outwits the criminal boss Monsieur K. in Rien ne va plus. The painter outsmarts the novelist, wounding him with his trompe-l’œil and staging a fake scene after his death. At the film’s end, the police catch the girl’s murderer, thanks to Victor (Rodolphe Pauly) snooping around in Monsieur Bordier’s (Noël Simsolo’s) bag. In truth, though, there is never much doubt about the killer’s identity. The film presents Bordier as a quasi-clichéd type. Bordier and his wife (Bulle Ogier) both look odd; they dress in matching clothes, carry similar black leather bags and drink the same blue drink. The film shows that Bordier is over-attentive to children at Eloise’s funeral and at the station, where he hustles a group of children away from René. The impression he gives is of a man dominated by his wife. Chabrol provides a further clue in the first scene in the bar, when René and Loudun (Bernard Verley) are chatting about a rugby match. The Bordiers are sitting nearby. When Monsieur Bordier says something insinuating to René, whose questioning by the police is already local gossip, Madame Bordier looks at her husband as if she knows the truth. However, although René is cleared of both murders ambiguity persists and the film never confirms the extent of René’s responsibility for Desmot’s death. The hint that René and Desmot’s last conversation on his jetty gives is that Desmot has a heart problem. He may be about to have a heart attack before René hits him. In addition, the film shows that Desmot smokes and drinks too much; he works all hours; he takes pills. Earlier in the film, after Desmot listens to a phone message (which says: ‘It’s six months since you saw your daughter’) he takes a tablet from a small box. Later, when investigating his death, the police inspector holds up a packet of Prozac, which the cleaner confirms he took, but the film also indicates that he had an existing heart problem. The pill he takes could be Prozac or it could be a pill for his heart condition; both speculations remain unconfirmed.

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René tells Vivianne that he hit Desmot; as Vivianne says, it could have been an accident that he had a heart attack after that. Vivianne’s judgement appears to be shared by the prosecutor, whom the detective speaks to on the phone. Lesage tells the prosecutor that René had a motive for killing Desmot. She is frustrated by the prosecutor’s response (which we don’t hear): ‘There again, the autopsy says it was a heart attack. As you wish, your honour. It’s your decision’. In a close-up, in the final scene, René tells his wife: ‘It was me’. There is then a flashback to a close-up of Desmot’s face, his head held by René. ‘Shut your mouth’, says René twice. Desmot looks alive, but pacified; his eyes are open and he is still. René then describes his actions to Vivianne: ‘Then I went up to the house. I was at peace, see. It was like some force urging me to do everything calmly’. Off-screen, she asks: ‘How did you kill him? How?’ René replies: ‘I don’t know how. I hit him. I don’t remember’. She insists: ‘It was an accident then’. But René feels responsible: ‘No, it holds together too well. I arranged everything after, like for a painting, to make people think he spent the night there’. The couple embrace; he says ‘Welcome to death’s realm’; she holds his cheek and says, ‘revive, revive, revive René’. The final words in French play with the sounds for ‘renais’ and ‘René’.7 Rien ne va plus and Au Cœur du mensonge both end with their protagonists using a film term, mise en scène, to describe the way that the characters stage scenes to deceive people:  Victor stages a scene to pretend to Betty that he is wheelchair bound; René stages a scene to convince the police that Desmot had a normal evening at home. When he confesses to Vivianne, René admits that he dressed the set, using a familiar term from film culture: ‘J’ai tous mis en scène après, comme pour un tableau [I arranged everything afterwards, like for a painting]’: the admission that he has done the mise en scène consolidates his role as a stand-in for Chabrol. However, the film never confirms the facts about René’s involvement. During the dinner scene, Desmot comments about masks: ‘In the end, a mask reveals more than a face. I  know hundreds of people whose appearance is now their nature’. The line alludes to Nietzsche: If someone wants to seem to be something, stubbornly and for a long time, he eventually finds it hard to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even the artist, begins with hypocrisy, as he imitates from the outside, copies what is effective. (Nietzsche 1994: 51)

Au Cœur du mensonge explores deceptions and lies in a domestic environment. Hence, Madame Bordier’s confession about her husband reiterates Desmot’s

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comment about masks:  ‘Women don’t interest him. I’m just his mummy, you see. As for the rest. He’s never been normal. He had shots. I never thought it would end like this. You never know who you live with, you know nothing’. The line reinforces a parallel between the Sternes and the Bordiers. Monsieur and Madame Bordier are perverse doubles of René and Vivianne. The link is made by Madame Bordier’s comment that she is her husband’s ‘mummy’, because Vivianne ‘mothers’ René. They met when she was his nurse and she continues to support him. Madame Bordier tells Lesage about her husband, but the theme of lies and mysteries in relationships connects her comment back to René and Vivianne’s marriage, with her deception of him with Desmot and his delay in telling her about hitting Desmot. The pathologist declares that Desmot died of a heart attack, but René hitting him may have prompted this; it is unclear whether René tells the police that he hit Desmot. It is also unclear what Vivianne and René will do. The prosecutor accepts the pathologist’s conclusion that it was a heart attack, but the story ends without redemption. With suspicions removed, the painter might be reborn. The judgements of Inspector Loudun, an experienced policeman, support this interpretation. Loudun likes René and dislikes Desmot (when he looks over the scene of Desmot’s death, he eats Desmot’s jam from the jar, suggesting disinterest).8 Nonetheless, the film ends on a depressive note, with René’s words ‘welcome to the kingdom of death’ overpowering Vivianne’s instruction to ‘revive’.

Notes 1 De Baecque describes Sandrine Bonnaire as a ‘marvel of opacity’ (1999: 62). 2 The film uses very few recognizable places in Cancale and its environs (Saint-Malo and the Solidor tower where Vivianne bumps into Desmot); his film does not explore the locale. 3 Vincendeau also notes Chabrol’s play on words (2001: 39). 4 The film uses several elements of overt expressionism and the fog is one of these. Chabrol uses it to suggest befuddlement, but he does so in the way that a theatre director might use stage fog blown from a machine, as with the fog that causes Desmot and René to trip. Similarly, Chabrol uses mist, sea and cliffs to portray a generalized sense of claustrophobia in this small town in Brittany. 5 Bruni Tedeschi has a recognizable, high-pitched voice that gives her an air of permanent annoyance. As Murat notes, the character has the voice of a ‘stubborn little girl’ (1999: 43).

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6 Antoine de Caunes, at the time, was a well-known television presenter. As de Baecque notes, the film uses de Caunes’s existing screen persona (1999: 62). 7 Screenwriter Odile Barksi says: ‘From the start, I had the idea for the last line of the painter’s alter ego, Sandrine Bonnaire: René, renais . . . renais, René. It really inspired me while writing’ (Garbarz and Nuttens 2011: 60). 8 There are echoes of Rohmer’s L’Amour, l’après-midi in this account, with two people who have almost strayed returning with renewed intensity; the presence of Bernard Verley, the young husband in L’Amour, l’après-midi, as the policeman Loudun hints at Chabrol’s homage to Rohmer.

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4

Merci pour le chocolat (2000): Cause and Effect

Merci pour le chocolat is based on Charlotte Armstrong’s novel The Chocolate Cobweb (1948), translated and published in France in 1949 as Et merci pour le chocolat.1 Chabrol collaborated on the script with psychoanalyst Caroline Eliacheff, who had worked with him on the script for La Cérémonie. They made several changes, the most obvious of which is the change of setting, from California in the novel to Switzerland in the film. The filmmakers also developed the novel’s single mention of poisoned hot chocolate into a pattern of references to milk, chocolate and drinks, including the addition of a Swiss chocolate factory. Another addition is the murderer’s adoption, which enhances the theme of parentage. The characters’ professions are also different:  the murderer is a chocolate factory owner rather than a housewife; her husband is a pianist not a painter; his dead wife was a photographer not an artist’s model; and the heroine’s mother is now a forensic scientist. There are also changes to plotting and causality. Noticeable elements in Merci pour le chocolat include the controlled choreography of camera, setting and characters; the use of doubles; the references to milk and childhood; Mika’s (Isabelle Huppert’s) opacity, expressed by the closeups of her expressionless face; the precise evocation of milieu (achieved with an expressionistic dimension so that the film almost caricatures the upper classes). Several of these elements feature in the sequence that depicts Jeanne’s (Anna Mouglalis’s) first visit to the Polonski house. Also present in this scene is the film’s primary asserted symbol, which is the brown throw knitted by Mika in the shape of a chocolate cobweb. Jeanne’s entrance into the Polonski house is a good example of Chabrol’s controlled choreography of camera, setting and characters. The film shows Mika, André (Jacques Dutronc) and Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) at home, the film’s central location. Chabrol weaves together Mika’s delivery of the drugged hot chocolate, André’s negotiation with his son over their shared use of the living

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room and Jeanne’s arrival, which prompts a reaction in Mika. The sequence begins with the camera approaching the house as if it represents the point of view of someone watching from outside; a hint of menace is attached to the shot, achieved by the forward-tracking movement and the accompanying music. Inside the house, André plays the piano, Guillaume plays a handheld computer game and Mika ascends the stairs with a metal flask which contains the drugged hot chocolate that she will later spill on purpose. The noise of the computer game irritates André, but placid either from his addiction to sleeping pills or his musical obsession he negotiates with Guillaume to get him to stop, just before the doorbell interrupts his playing. The controlled camera movement during the shot that first shows André and Guillaume at home heightens the contrast between background and foreground, and thus the incongruousness of Guillaume’s absorption with his yellow plastic computer game and André’s playing of his expensive piano, a contrast also achieved on the soundtrack by the combination of Guillaume’s electronic bleeping and André’s assured playing. The framings of Mika in the next two shots exemplify Chabrol’s characteristic refusal to clarify why the film shows some things and avoids others, the refusal creating an uneasy ambiguity about the characters, their feelings and their motivations. When André and Guillaume hear the doorbell, they remain seated. Chabrol cuts to Mika poised on the stairs. As Mika asks about the doorbell, she is descending the stairs, halfway in her journey back from delivering the hot chocolate to Guillaume’s bedroom. Vertical bars proliferate in this image of her: banisters in the right corner, window bars on the left and security bars outside the window. The next shot begins on Guillaume and tilts up as he rises to answer the door. This image again presents Mika on the stairs, behind the curved banisters and within the door frame, looking out of the window, the curtain pulled back enough for her to look outwards. The shot of Mika on the stairs holds her at a distance through doorframe and banisters. Placement and posture emphasize her curiosity; her position on the curved staircase enables her to observe Jeanne. From here, the film cuts to a point-of-view shot of Jeanne standing outside, embodying Mika’s perspective on the stairs. The film shows Jeanne through the window bars, as Mika sees her, with vertical bars visible; and, as in the shot of Mika on the stairs, the film presents an entrapment image. Her position on the stairs indicates her attentive presence, but framing and setting keep her at a distance: the film shows what Mika sees, but it conceals her thoughts.

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This scene is exemplary for the way that it draws attention to Mika’s perception of Jeanne as a threat and, at the same time, emphasizes ambiguity. The scene focuses on Mika, but refrains from presenting an insight into her motives. Her sense of peril exemplifies the film’s larger strategy of concentrating on Mika’s thought processes, with actress and filmmaker conveying her disquiet yet keeping her intentions opaque. Throughout, the film indicates Mika’s opacity by using close-ups of her mask-like face; these appear intimate but conceal her thoughts. The film’s first shot is a close-up of Mika that typifies this strategy.2 Other examples include the close-ups of Mika during the wedding scene while Guillaume’s voice is audible off-screen. Her face is expressionless, though the combination of close-up and off-screen voices gives a sense of her listening to other people’s conversations. The film also shows Mika alone, for example, in Guillaume’s bedroom, but without revealing her interiority. She walks towards the photograph of Lisbeth (Lydia Andrei) and touches it, yet, while her actions are odd, they communicate nothing. During Jeanne’s visit, Huppert’s performance and the film’s presentation of it hint at various things that Mika is thinking. She fingers her necklace as she talks, the fixed smile on her face implying some effort to control her expression. In the group shot of the four characters, for example, André stands on the right foreground, his back visible, his head turned towards Jeanne. On the left is Jeanne, facing André. In between them stand Mika and Guillaume. Mika almost bites her lip as she stares into space, her hands behind her back. Listening to her husband and Jeanne, she appears self-absorbed. Caught between André’s fond memories and Jeanne’s eager excitement, Mika’s face expresses a smidgeon of frustration. Furthermore, she appears to be scratching her back, something she does again when André and Jeanne go to the piano and when she takes Jeanne to see Lisbeth’s self-portraits in Guillaume’s bedroom. To regain her composure, Mika plays the charming hostess and offers Jeanne a drink. Well-practised hospitality masks feelings, yet Huppert’s gestures express her character’s tussle to gain control; for example, as Mika turns and walks between Guillaume and Jeanne, she touches them to initiate their movement into the living room, the precise contact of a seasoned conductor of social events. However, André’s spontaneity interrupts Mika’s assertion of control and halts Jeanne’s progress. When Jeanne tells André that she is a pianist, competing in Budapest, the camera stops moving: Guillaume lingers at the door; Mika stands between Jeanne and André, with one hand behind her back, again scratching

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away at something, an uncontrollable symptom. Then, Mika starts to move away from them, with her hand still behind her back. The camera follows Mika as she sits on the sofa. The film avoids revealing what Mika is thinking about or whether she knows what she is thinking, but the gesture suggests unease. As a symptomatic expression of discomfort, Mika’s scratching of her back is obvious, yet its precise meaning remains vague and its awkwardness is consistent with Mika’s odd removal of herself from the socializing when she sits on the sofa. She starts to do this as soon as she hears that Jeanne is a musician, the camera following her movement away from the pianists. When Mika sits on the sofa, she takes up a part of the cobweb-shaped brown throw and begins knitting. Chabrol then cuts to a shot of Jeanne and André facing each other in profile, the framing suggesting they are doubles. When Jeanne tells André that she has chosen Liszt’s Funérailles for the Budapest competition, the film cuts back to Mika knitting on the sofa, then returns to the two pianists as André leads Jeanne to the piano:  ‘It’s a good choice, but it’s full of traps. You mustn’t only play it like a funeral march’. As he finishes his line, the camera pans left, away from the pianists, back towards Mika on the sofa, again directing attention to her exclusion. This shot shows her from behind, sitting in the middle of the cobweb-shaped brown throw. When Guillaume returns, he asks Mika if she wants something to drink. She declines and then touches her mouth. Huppert’s gesture and the film’s presentation of it imply a combination of self-consciousness and absent-mindedness, thought and self-involvement, but neither performance nor camera indicate what she is thinking. After Mika takes Jeanne upstairs, André sits down where Guillaume was sitting when the scene began, explains that ‘she just reminded me of those days’, then picks up Guillaume’s computer game and starts playing it as he says: ‘How did she fall asleep at the wheel?’ The symmetry in the use of the computer game to open and close the scene is obvious and Chabrol’s decision to end the scene with André playing Guillaume’s game is an authoritative flaunting of that symmetry; it offers a sense of satisfaction at the formal neatness of the scene. However, two things offset the obtrusiveness of the symmetry: the first is the revelation of André’s bond with his son and his relaxed frame of mind, so different from Mika’s personality; the second is the slow dissolve to the photograph of Lisbeth, which emphasizes André’s sense of loss and grief. In addition, Chabrol’s slow camera movements throughout the scene heighten the tension; the film’s concentration on Mika is as careful as the character’s self-presentation.3

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Writing of La Cérémonie, Deborah Thomas argues that Chabrol’s overt camera movements generate complicity between audience and camera, separate from the characters (2005: 172). Thomas also speaks of the ironic ending of La Cérémonie as ‘a sort of cinematic wink’ (177), a humorous moment shared by filmmaker and audience. In Merci pour le chocolat, the cobweb-shaped brown throw is the film’s primary asserted symbol. It symbolizes Mika’s weaving of her web, yet its obviousness as a symbol is a form of ironic distancing. It also functions as a homage to Armstrong’s novel, The Chocolate Cobweb. The film introduces the cobweb-shaped brown throw during Jeanne’s first visit to the Polonski household. Six shots in that scene show the brown throw on the sofa. It next appears when Jeanne sits in the middle of it as she drinks hot chocolate after her piano practice. The final sequence begins with Guillaume and Jeanne sitting on and near the brown throw as they drink the poisoned coffee, or in Guillaume’s case avoid drinking it. The brown throw is then prominent during Mika’s confession. The film ends with a long take of Mika as she leans back on the brown throw, her head at its centre; she cries, and stares into space while André plays Funérailles. She curls into a foetal position beside it; the camera cranes above her, Funérailles comes to its climax and the film fades to black. Unlike the film, Armstrong’s The Chocolate Cobweb refers to a cobweb once, an imaginary one, used as a metaphor for the murderer’s plotting when the heroine realizes the truth about the drugged hot chocolate and the murderer’s pattern of behaviour (Armstrong 1967:  133). In the novel, the chocolate cobweb is the character’s metaphor as much as the novelist’s. In addition, the novel mentions the murderer’s knitting four times, in each case describing her actions as an expression of her control or loss of it, but the film contains no equivalent of Armstrong’s ‘her small hands looped the yarn furiously’ (1967:  31).4 Furthermore, the heroine’s metaphorical cobweb is distinct from the murderer’s knitting; Armstrong describes the killer as knitting ‘something blue’ (1967: 29). The novel has no cobweb-shaped brown throw; nor does Armstrong connect the murderer’s knitting to the hot chocolate. The film, however, brings all three things together: the knitting, the hot chocolate and the heroine’s perception of the murderer’s web. In the film, the cobweb-shaped brown throw symbolizes Mika’s weaving of her web, an adaptation of the film noir trope of the ‘spider woman’. As Janey Place notes of the ‘spider woman’ Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder): ‘she weaves a web to trap and finally destroy her young victim, but even as she visually dominates him, she is presented as caught by the same

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false value system’ (Place 1998: 53). Armstrong uses the cobweb as a metaphor for the heroine’s perception of the murderer’s pattern of behaviour and Chabrol attaches it to the killer’s knitting. However, although the film shows Mika knitting the brown throw, it does so without indicating the correct interpretation of her actions; it gives no special weight to her knitting. Instead of Jeanne spotting the pattern in Mika’s behaviour, André becomes suspicious because he sees Mika washing the coffee cups, awakening his memory of the sequence of actions that led to his previous wife’s death. The film asserts the symbolic obviousness of the cobweb-shaped brown throw, but prevents a straightforward interpretation of it or of Mika’s knitting. Like other metaphorical webs, it symbolizes the murderer weaving her web and her entrapment in that web. The difficulty of interpreting it in this way is that its symbolic function is too blatant. Chabrol’s physical embodiment of the novel’s metaphorical chocolate cobweb is a foregrounding of narrational presence, what Thomas describes as a ‘cinematic wink’. Its obviousness as a symbol means that it functions in a way that is similar to the overt camera movements; as an asserted symbol, the murderer’s knitting of the cobweb-shaped brown throw creates complicity between audience and film. Thus, the brown throw has a distancing effect because of its overdetermined obviousness as a metaphor for entrapment; it helps the audience achieve, in Chabrol’s words, a ‘light step backwards’ (Yakir 1979: 9) because it increases self-consciousness about the viewing experience, makes us unsure how to react. Connected to the conversion of the novel’s metaphor into a cobweb-shaped prop is the film’s increased number of references to drinks, milk and chocolate, and the connection of these to themes relating to parents and children (the novel mentions hot chocolate once). Chabrol connects two of the film’s references to milk to the disclosure of Jeanne’s anonymous donor father and Mika’s adoption, both additions by the filmmakers, which function, like the Pollet and Polonski baby swap, to emphasize the random privileges of birth. When Dr Pollet (Brigitte Catillon) tells Jeanne that her father was sterile and that she is the daughter of a sperm donor, she almost lets the milk boil over because, while making breakfast for her daughter, she is interrupted by a phone call from Mika. Then, the lunch scene at which Mika reveals her adoption fades out on a shot of the half-eaten chocolate charlotte.5 Another example is Mika’s refusal of milk in her tea when visiting Dr Pollet’s laboratory; in contrast, Dr Pollet takes milk. Other references include Guillaume watching a documentary about yoghurt and the discussion about a milk pipeline at the chocolate factory board meeting.

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The filmmakers also invented the chocolate factory setting, which is linked to the sleeping drug by a transition from Jeanne looking up ‘Benzodiazepine’ in her mother’s encyclopaedia to the exterior of the chocolate factory and then to the board meeting, at which Patou (Michel Robin) criticizes Mika’s rejection of everything related to childhood and her use of ‘the public relations and sponsoring budget’ to subsidize anti-pain centres. Mika responds: ‘Keeping up appearances is all that counts’, her comment hinting at her obsessions. These multiple references to milk and childhood replace Armstrong’s explanation of the murderer’s motive and increase ambiguity about Mika’s thoughts and actions. The film’s expansion of the novel’s single reference to hot chocolate draws on the commonplace associations of milk as a basic human food, given by mothers to children, as well as the conventions of thrillers and melodramas on which Chabrol draws. The poisoned drinks appear to be inherited from Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946), although writers and dramatists have often used poison as a domestic, female crime.6 Like Hitchcock, Chabrol inverts the association of milk with nurturing; Walker argues that Hitchcock’s aversion to milk is ‘another manifestation of his rejection of the maternal’ (2005: 195).7 Merci pour le chocolat may draw on Hitchcock, but the film also acknowledges its indebtedness to Lang and Renoir. Mika gives Guillaume two films to watch during his recuperation, necessary after she scalds his ankle. The films are Lang’s Secret beyond the Door (1948) and Renoir’s adaptation of Simenon’s La Nuit du Carrefour (1932). Both films contain elements that influence Merci pour le chocolat. In Lang’s Secret beyond the Door, as in Merci pour le chocolat, a young woman enters a large house that holds a secret. She faces a number of challenges, including an attempt on her life, as she works to expose the secret. In Renoir’s La Nuit du Carrefour, an isolated house holds a secret, while sleeping drugs feature in the story. Maigret (Pierre Renoir) discovers that Else (Winna Winifried) was giving Veronal to her husband, Carl (Georges Koudria), to put him to sleep while she meets her lovers, first Oscar (Dignimont), then Michonnet (Jean Gehret). As in Merci pour le chocolat, in La Nuit de Carrefour the female villain tranquillizes her victims. To extend the themes of parenting and causation onto the wider milieu and its inhabitants, Chabrol depicts the social setting of Switzerland with precision, but also with an element of caricature. Armstrong’s novel is set in California; class and setting are irrelevant to its plot. The film is set in Lausanne and Chabrol exploits the cliché of a neutral conservative country hiding secrets. As Jeanne

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jokes to Axel when they arrive at the restaurant, ‘Afraid of thieves in Switzerland?’ The irony is that this milieu hides a murderer, yet no one suspects. Instead of the crime fiction convention of poverty causing crime, Merci pour le chocolat uses a melodrama convention of wealth breeding corruption.8 The film’s depiction of its upper-class setting is precise and exaggerated, particularly during the opening three scenes, all of which are set in public places: wedding, restaurant and gallery. The wedding highlights the importance of formality and etiquette while enabling Chabrol to contrast what people say in public and in private. Two distinct groups attend the wedding; artists and intellectuals are on one side of the room, Lausanne’s business class are on the other. With world-famous pianist and factory owner as figureheads, the two groups appear united through marriage, but the other members of these groups ignore each other. (The film later shows the businessmen and women at a factory board meeting and the four musicians arriving for dinner at the Polonskis.) The film reveals how pressurized this social scene is because of the differences between the two groups. By cutting between them, Chabrol generates tension through a comparison of who says what to whom. A good example of Chabrol’s edging towards caricature is the close framing of three gossips at the wedding reception, with Patou leaning towards a man’s ear while an adjacent woman maintains a fixed smile and outward gaze. Despite their ostensible politeness, their behaviour hints at hostility. With the gallery scene, the film again offers an incisive depiction of this milieu, though again one that borders on caricature. One guest states, ‘This Jewish gold business surfaces every year’; another (Patou) mentions, as if outraged: ‘A prosecutor, homosexual and from Geneva’. The film provides no other context for these comments, but their inclusion indicates this society’s conservatism, one that is given a national dimension because of the decision to set the film in Switzerland. The function of Chabrol’s detailed depiction of this social setting is to provide a context that camouflages the murderer’s behaviour. By placing Mika in an upper-middle-class society, where control over one’s appearance and behaviour is expected, Chabrol indicates the way that Mika’s mental disturbance passes unnoticed. As Tony McKibbin notes, Mika’s existence among the Lausanne haute bourgeoisie constitutes ‘years of buttoned-up repression’ (2005: 23). The film’s presentation of the murder differs from the book’s. The novel explains the killer’s thoughts about her past actions and the heroine’s thoughts about the killer; the film does neither. Furthermore, the novel has a complicated

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linear plot and a simple explanation of causality, while the film has the reverse. Chabrol describes his aims: ‘What interested me with Merci pour le chocolat was to arrange things in such a way that there were fewer certainties at the film’s end than at the beginning, and that the certainties arising during the film would be destroyed little by little’ (Manthoulis and Khalife 2000: 4). The film eliminates Armstrong’s complicated plotting, both for the murder of the previous wife and the attempted murder of the young heroine; both are simplified to an induced sleep while driving. At the same time as the film simplifies the novel’s intricate but linear plot, it makes the explanation of the causes of Mika’s mental disorder more complex by increasing the density of the visual depiction of people and spaces.9 As Chabrol says: ‘I’m in favour of simple plots and complicated characters’ (Magny 1987: 69). An example of the film’s more ambiguous causality is the scene in which the murderer visits the heroine’s mother. Armstrong explains that the murderer does this to ascertain the truth about the baby swap story, thus clarifying the murderer’s plans and strengthening the plot’s linearity. Chabrol, however, refrains from providing a straightforward motivation for the visit and we are left with an ambiguous impression of Mika’s motives. Another example of a difference between novel and film’s plotting is the scene in which the heroine learns about the drugged hot chocolate. In the novel, the heroine’s boyfriend warns her that the results of his experiment have revealed that the ‘sleeping dope’ was a ‘pretty stiff solution’, that ‘it is poison’ and that ‘it was damn dangerous’ (Armstrong 1967: 40). The novel’s heroine knows from the start that the dosage of the ‘sleeping dope’ in the stepson’s hot chocolate is lethal. She learns that the stepmother was trying to kill the stepson and warns him (Armstrong 1967: 78). In the film, the boyfriend tells the heroine about the Benzodiazepine (aka, Rohypnol) and that he failed to ‘check the concentration’ because he set fire to her sweater and, anyway, to die from it, ‘You’d need one hell of a dose’. The film’s heroine becomes curious about the Rohypnol, but has no reason to think that Mika is planning to murder her stepson. André later admits his addiction to the same sedative, which is also used to treat panic attacks and anxiety. The ambiguity about the dosage leaves open the possibility that Mika was sedating husband and stepson, keeping them docile as a way of controlling them. Armstrong describes her murderer as having one motive:  jealous revenge. The film presents various possible explanations for Mika’s actions, without confirming any as valid. Robin Buss describes Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol, 1969) in terms that apply to Mika; he says that the film offers ‘explanations for Popaul,

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then carefully discards them’ (Buss 1994: 83); ‘we are left with a metaphysical question about the mystery of human behaviour’ (Buss 1994:  93). The same is true of Merci pour le chocolat. Instead of being a suspense thriller about a woman seeking revenge, the film studies a social and psychological type. As in the book, Mika may have killed Lisbeth because of jealous revenge and she may want to kill Guillaume (and Jeanne) for the same reason, but the film also suggests other motives. First, the film suggests that Mika has an obsession with control; she feels compelled to intervene, as she admits to Dr Pollet: ‘It’s terrible, I’m always meddling.’ Mika organizes everything. André appears to let Mika run his life, buy his clothes, medicine, food, give him and his second wife a home after their divorce. The film emphasizes that Mika is a woman who is always performing, both in public and private, always thinking about the next thing, whether planning a meal or attempting murder. When she sees that Guillaume has not drunk his coffee, after he rejected her hot chocolate, she wonders aloud about his motives. She has suspicions about him, but her reaction is also a reflex monitoring of those around her. Mika appears to embrace the responsibility of looking after the successful artist, but she takes it further; the film exposes how the energy that she puts into maintaining this control covers a feeling of frustrated emptiness. Her compulsion to control is a symptom of her anxiety about her lack of control. Second, Mika sees civilization as a mask. She is an expert in wearing the mask, but is cynical about its superficiality. The film uses Mika’s adoption to imply that manipulation in this society is easy once one learns its rules and plays its games. As she tells André at the end, ‘Instead of loving, I  say “I love you” and people believe me. I have real power in my mind. I calculate everything’. Her emphasis on civilized behaviour being a mask recalls comments by Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, who thinks, ‘If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture’ (Highsmith 1999: 165). Again, Chabrol seems to be alluding to Nietzsche, as he does in Au Cœur du mensonge, which has its own theme of masks and lies; like Antoine de Caunes’s character, Desmot, Mika sees hypocrisy in civilized behaviour. The film uses this pessimistic worldview as a way of indicating the murderer’s mental disorder. Chabrol suggests that Mika rebels against a civilization she perceives as a thin façade, thus her accusatory comment to André: ‘Some people fool themselves.’ Mika is a version of Le Boucher’s Popaul; as Robin Buss writes of that Chabrol film: ‘The constraints of civilisation

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do not make life itself less savage, they can only draw a veil over our appetites’ (1994: 82). Third, Mika’s adoption (invented by the filmmakers) is a way of suggesting that Mika is aware of the randomness of her inheritance of wealth. In the novel, the murderer is a housewife supporting her famous husband; in the film, Mika is a businesswoman who owns her company (though she appears to be uninvolved in its day-to-day running). Furthermore, although she is an independent woman, she has inherited the chocolate factory from her wealthy adoptive parents. Neither her adoption nor her inheritance increase her self-esteem. Mika’s work differs from that of Jeanne’s mother, Dr Pollet, a contrast made by cutting from the chocolate factory to Dr Pollet’s forensic science laboratory (another invention by the filmmakers). In the scene of Mika’s visit to the laboratory, framing, costume and setting highlight the differences between the adopted inheritor of a family business and the working professional. Merci pour le chocolat suggests that Mika sees bourgeois society as a façade. In the final scene, she admits that everything she says and does is faked, that she is passing as an haute bourgeois. The film hints that this derives from her realization that everything is subjective. Her class status and her marriage are both created by her adoption; but her adoption, like Jeanne’s sperm donor father, is just a device for emphasizing the randomness in all births. For Mika, everything is fake and all values are transient, including Christian values such as ‘thou shalt not kill’. Mika is aware that chance put her where she is, among the Swiss upper class. Her adoption increases the emphasis on the unknowable and contingent in human action. It highlights the chances involved in one’s birthright, establishes that Pollet could have been Polonski, rich could have been poor, babies could have been swapped at birth, could have been adopted (as Mika was) or could have been the daughter of an anonymous sperm donor (as Jeanne was). The film suggests that our identities and our positions in society have as much to do with how we are formed by our societies and families as they have to do with any biological essence, which, in any case, is itself affected by class. A fourth potential cause is Mika’s repressed anger about her own adoption. In general, she appears hostile to children (e.g. she refuses to have her company involved in any promotional campaigns associated with children’s activities) and she gives the impression of feeling like an outsider. The film suggests that Mika’s resentment derives from her alienation, thus the contrasts with other people and the use of doubles. The main doubling is the potential baby swap between Jeanne Pollet and Guillaume Polonski. The film uses the story of an accidental exchange

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of infants at birth to indicate the potential effects of society, culture and environment on identity and behaviour. But the film includes other doubling motifs; for example, the registrar (Véronique Alain) has almost the same colour and hairstyle as Mika. When they face each other, they create a doubling effect. The profile shot of Jeanne and André talking about music is another example that contributes towards the themes inherent in a story of two babies swapped at birth while Dr Pollet and Mika are also doubled when the latter visits the former at work. Mika is also jealous of the creativity of Lisbeth, André and Jeanne. In their book on Chabrol, Wood and Walker write: There are also films in which envy, and the resulting desire to destroy what can’t be possessed (one of the most frequently recurring emotions in Chabrol’s work) is directed specifically against a relationship from which the envier feels excluded, a reaction explainable less as sexual jealousy than as a frustrated desire to be accepted into a family group. (1970: 17)

This describes Mika. Unlike Lisbeth, André and Jeanne, Mika lacks creativity. In the novel, the dead wife was a model for the famous artist; in the film, the murdered wife, Lisbeth, was a photographer. The novel’s exhibition shows the husband’s paintings; the film’s exhibition shows the dead wife’s photographs. Changing the painter into a pianist enables the film to show how André‘s obsession with his music prevents him from realizing the truth about the murderer, although both he and his son are still suffering the loss of wife and mother. Chabrol also uses André’s repetitive playing of Liszt’s Funérailles to give forceful solemnity to the film. Meanwhile, the film presents the investigating heroine as a talented young pianist. Mika’s stepson, Guillaume, is as restless as she is. Both his father’s and Jeanne’s musical talents exacerbate his teenage hesitations about what to do with his life. Sensitive about her own exclusion, Mika sympathizes with Guillaume. Though she tries to send Guillaume to his death with Jeanne, she ends up expressing concern for her stepson; in the novel, no such bond exists. Mika’s sympathy for Guillaume suggests that she envies André’s obsession with his music. For actress Isabelle Huppert, Mika ‘was one of the most sorrowful characters that he created, the sadness of being excluded from artistic expression . . . it’s this emptiness that turns her into a murderer’ (Ciment and Tobin 2011: 68). Mika articulates her emptiness when she dismisses André’s ‘You don’t realise how much you’ve helped me’ with ‘I know, I help everyone’. Her comment

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increases empathy for the murderer. Such moments introduce a sociopolitical dimension, showing that the frustrations of being an auxiliary to a husband contribute to Mika’s personality. At the end, Mika admits, ‘I know what I am. I’m nothing . . . Guillaume’s like me. We’re not like you. My mother never thought I was a genius. I’m just a hanger-on’. Unlike the pianists and the forensic scientist, Mika’s talent is for making hot chocolate. The film’s ending is all about Mika and the possible explanations for her mental disorder. Mika confesses with such ease, so unlike the murderer in the novel, where the killer denies attempted murder to the police and tries to blame her stepson, the confession needing to be tricked out of her by provoking her to anger (Armstrong 1967: 187). In contrast, Mika admits everything as soon as her husband confronts her. Chabrol eliminates the novel’s police questioning and the romance between the two young people, instead preserving the intimacy of the married couple in their living room. Whereas the novel creates suspense about whether the heroine will save (and then marry) the artist’s son, the film eliminates this and creates suspense about the murderer’s mental state. Merci pour le chocolat hints at many possible explanations for Mika’s actions, but all remain ambiguous and the film’s final suggestion is that Mika has a mental disorder that results from multiple causes. The film implies that there are multiple possible explanations for the killer’s mental disorder and her actions, rather than implying that Mika is, as McKibbin argues, ‘inexplicable’ (2005: 21).10 Instead of presenting Mika’s actions as inexplicable, the film suggests several possible causes of Mika’s mental disorder while refusing to confirm any one as definitive. When discussing film noir, Palmer describes this effect:  ‘The most striking alteration of Hollywood dramaturgy is that noir characters usually act from inchoate, unknown or pathological motives. Such characters prevent the narrative from being organized according to Aristotelian principles of cause and effect’ (1994: 19; also quoted in Pippin 2012: 111 n.25). This complicating of causality challenges simple explanations of cause and effect. The film avoids privileging one explanation of Mika’s mental disorder; instead, it offers multiple potential causes and explores the conditions in which the murderer’s motives have developed. As a result of suggesting several potential causes of Mika’s actions and of exploring her mental disturbance, Merci pour le chocolat enables us to perceive the murderer as a victim. Her complex motives encourage empathy for Mika. The novel, on the other hand, presents the character as a villain, motivated by jealous revenge. By contrast, Chabrol’s film generates sympathy for the murderer

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by revealing the fragility of her social mask. At the wedding, the registrar touches Mika’s shoulder and Mika perceives the registrar as inclining towards an informality that she cannot reciprocate. This refusal of informality is linked to her sense of exclusion when Jeanne arrives at her house. At the end, as her mask falls away, the collapse of her polished exterior reveals Mika’s vulnerability, while her criticisms of André prompt agreement. In conclusion, Merci pour le chocolat questions how we explain the causes of Mika’s mental disorder and it indicates the difficulty of agreeing on those causes. The film suggests a range of potential explanations for Mika’s motives, linking this exploration to parenthood through the motifs related to drinks, milk and chocolate. The destabilizing of narrative causality is also connected to the primary asserted symbol of the chocolate cobweb and the other foregrounded stylistic elements, such as the controlled choreography of camera, setting and characters. These features increase spectatorial unease and make the presentation of the social milieu unstable. The stylistic assertiveness is an essential component of Chabrol’s achievement for it heightens awareness of the patterning involved in constructing this fictional world, exposing the constructedness of all worldviews.

Notes 1 2

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Armstrong’s novel was published in France by Ditis, translated by Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe. Isabelle Huppert’s performance contributes to Merci pour le chocolat ’s delineation of a murderer’s psychology. Derry comments on Huppert and Chabrol’s collaborations: ‘The success of Une affaire des femmes, Madame Bovary, and La Cérémonie, as well as the earlier Violette Nozière (all four starring Isabelle Huppert), may indicate that Chabrol’s films – cold as an inherent result of the director’s personality and formal interests – may absolutely require an extraordinary, expressive female presence in order to contribute a human, empathic dimension’ (Derry 2001: 173). See McKibbin (2005) for further discussion of Huppert’s performances. In a perceptive review, Picard writes: ‘The interplay between doubles, masks and symmetries is rampant, but occurs within the auteur’s characteristic stylised formal elegance where cinematic rigour matches the relentless use of irony’ (2001: 72). The other three occasions are: ‘She said, picking up her knitting basket, smiling, “Elsie made you some chocolate, Thone, for later” ’ (Armstrong 1967: 26); ‘Mrs

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Garrison, still in her gray, was knitting on something blue. She was at home in a corner of the sofa, cozy and passive’ (Armstrong 1967: 29); ‘Her hands had let the knitting fall. It lay tangled. “I don’t understand . . .” ’ (Armstrong 1967: 30). The chocolate charlotte may also be a Chabrolian food-related homage to the novelist. Bell (2010: 100) discusses ‘the proliferation of female poisoners’ in post-war British cinema as a variant of the femme fatale of film noir, attributing the depiction of fictional female poisoners as a symptomatic response to postwar changes in women’s roles. Cypert (2008: 69) suggests that Armstrong was inspired by the Madeleine Smith case, but it is difficult to be conclusive about the influence of such a famous case. For instance, on the first page of Rendell’s first novel, From Doon with Death (1964), Rendell notes that one character has on a bookshelf a copy of The Trials of Madeleine Smith. Cypert (2008: 78) suggests that Hitchcock’s films may have inspired Armstrong when she was writing The Chocolate Cobweb (1948) in Los Angeles during 1946 and 1947. Hitchcock never made a feature film from Armstrong’s novels, but he met her in the summer of 1950 to discuss working together and she later wrote four scripts for Hitchcock’s television shows. Of the film version of Armstrong’s The Unsuspected (1947, Michael Curtiz), Walker (1992: 22) notes: ‘The film is suspenseful not only in its own right, but in terms of how it develops the generic features. One feels strongly that these are generic features with which Charlotte Armstrong, the novelist, and Ranald MacDougall, the scriptwriter, would have been perfectly familiar.’ Walker (2005: 195) discusses the sinister associations Hitchcock gives to milk in Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945) and Psycho (1960). Wood (1969: 22) comments on the importance of settings in Chabrol’s films. Comparing Truffaut’s and Chabrol films, Wood writes: ‘one could argue that a Marxist viewpoint underlies the Chabrol’ (1969: 17). Wood and Walker (1970: 15) note that Chabrol’s focus on milieu is one way that he complicates causality. Walker (1975: 45) identifies recurrent settings in Chabrol’s films, such as the village community, the city and the bourgeois family. Of La Femme Infidèle, Walker argues, there is ‘a persistent questioning of the assumptions and presumptions (in short, the ideology) of the bourgeoisie’ (1975: 46). Austin (1999: 64) notes Le Boucher’s contrast between the village’s ‘tranquil order’ and Popaul’s ‘repressed violence’, on which this order is based. After their success with Armstrong’s The Unsuspected, Warner Brothers expressed interest in The Chocolate Cobweb. Cypert quotes letters from 1947 held in the Armstrong papers: ‘Warner brothers rejected the work as “too complicated and

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too implausible at several points to make good material for a picture” ’ (Cypert 2008: 68–9). 10 McKibbin writes: ‘Motive here becomes inexplicable; Marie-Claire does not know what she wants, so reason retreats simply because reason cannot explain itself. Here reason and purpose should be mutually attached: that Marie-Claire’s reason for murder is an inheritance, and therein lies her purpose. But no such cause and effect is offered. Reason becomes so diffuse, it becomes reason in the plural, and so pluralized does reason become that it may resemble madness; the action seems to have no conceivable motive whatsoever’ (2005: 18).

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La Fleur du mal (2003): Keeping it in the Family

Incest, inheritance, politics and terroir: these are the leading subjects of La Fleur du mal. The film’s narrative structure is founded on a principle of repetition; it opens with Pierre Charpin’s corpse and it ends with Gérard’s (Bernard Le Coq’s) corpse. Micheline/Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon) kills Pierre Charpin; her grandniece, Michèle (Mélanie Doutey), kills Gérard. In both cases, separated by sixty years, incest is a factor. The film has five main characters, all of whom belong to the Charpin-Vasseur family:  Aunt Line, Michèle, Michèle’s mother, Anne (Nathalie Baye), her second husband, Gérard, and his son, François (Benoît Magimel). The vitriolic leaflet directed at Anne’s political campaign recaps the Charpin-Vasseur family history. Pierre Charpin was a collaborator who worked for the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1944. Charpin was estranged from his son, who fought in the resistance and whom he let the Germans kill.1 In 1944, the leaflet states, ‘Pierre Charpin was murdered in mysterious circumstances. One of his daughters, Micheline, was suspected. Her acquittal convinced no one, no more than the theory of political revenge’. Charpin’s wife died a few weeks after him. In 1958, a plane crash killed Anne’s parents, her mother being Aunt Line’s sister. In 1981, Gérard’s wife and brother (Anne’s husband) died in a car accident. Anne then married her dead husband’s brother, Gérard. La Fleur du mal is about family secrets and the past influencing the present. The film suggests that for Aunt Line past and present are interlaced because of her parricide. It does this by including voice-overs from her father, mother and brother. Thus, after François and Michèle depart for Pyla, the camera stays on Aunt Line when they drive away. As she walks towards the house, the soundtrack relays her parents’ voices telling her and her brother to hurry up. When Aunt Line arrives at Pyla, she hears her brother’s voice. The last scene of her remembering is in the garden on election night. An angry voice says, ‘Filthy little bitch!’ She replies, ‘Let go of me!’ Then, ‘Think I’d let him dishonour my family. Answer me’. And finally, ‘Let go!’ One assumes that Aunt Line quarrels with her

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father before she kills him; the dialogue hints that he was trying to abuse her and was aware of her love for her brother. Meanwhile, behind her, Gérard’s car pulls up in the driveway, thus establishing the parallel between Michèle and her stepfather, Gérard, and Micheline and her father, Pierre. The opening sequence also introduces the importance of the past. It features a 1942 song called ‘Un Souvenir’, the lyrics of which anticipate Aunt Line’s comments to Michèle that ‘time doesn’t exist’ and ‘life is a perpetual present’: A memory Comes to you in your dreams But it’s not what it seems And haunts you for eternity

Other elements of the opening sequence illustrate the 1940s setting, including the old car and the dead man’s dark grey double-breasted suit. The leaflet later confirms that the dead man in the opening credit sequence is Pierre Charpin, killed by his daughter, Aunt Line. The main repetition is the beginning and ending with a corpse in the bedroom, but there are additional repetitions. There are two cases of incest and characters who are older and younger versions of each other: Micheline and her brother François in the 1940s; Michèle and François sixty years later. Neither case of incest is confirmed, but the film foregrounds the similarities between Micheline and Michèle, and the narrative symmetry highlights the repetitions in the characters’ lives. As Frank Garbarz writes: ‘The perfectly symmetrical dramatic construction further underlines the game of mirrors between the past and the present’ (2003: 32). Several of Chabrol’s films use doubles; in La Fleur du mal, Chabrol has given the paired characters similar names, Michèle and Micheline, or as Garbarz observes, ‘Michèle-Line’ (2003: 32).2 After Gérard’s death, Aunt Line claims a release from sixty years of guilt, but in pretending that she killed Gérard she condemns Michèle to the same life that she has just had. By covering up Michèle’s involvement, Aunt Line ensures that she and Michèle swap places. Just as the film never confirms the incest, so it never reveals who writes the leaflet about the Charpin-Vasseur family. For Chabrol, the leaflet is a ‘MacGuffin’: ‘The spectator may have hypotheses, but eventually they get to a point where they don’t care about the truth. I don’t think anyone will leave the film asking who wrote this leaflet’ (Rouyer and Vassé 2003: 35). As well as the ambiguities about the leaflet’s author, the incest and Michèle’s responsibility for Gérard’s death, questions remain unanswered about Michèle and François

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(are they cousins, half-siblings or neither?); about Micheline and her brother (incest?) and her father (sexual abuse?); and about the past between Michèle and Gérard.3 François says: The Charpins always love the Vasseurs and vice versa. Together, they make a fine line, with a grand estate and a handsome fortune. Like in a nineteenth-century novel.

He later adds: ‘It’s been going on for four – what am I saying? For six generations.’ François jokes about his relationship to Michèle, but Chabrol is serious: Incest is the symbol of this world:  keeping it in the family. Less important is whether the incest is sexual or not. That’s why I remained very evasive about incest in my film. One never knows whether there is a sexual incest or not between the different members of the family. The most important thing is the idea of keeping it in the family. (Pinçon-Charlot and Pinçon 2003)

In Pyla, François tells Michèle that he overheard his mother tell Gérard that someone else is the father of François. ‘We may not even be cousins’, he concludes. Walking with François and Michèle in the garden, Aunt Line tells them that François’s mother and Michèle’s father were lovers before they died. However, nobody mentions the possibility that François and Michèle might have the same father. If Michèle’s father was François’s mother’s lover, then François and Michèle are half-siblings. If their fathers were brothers, François and Michèle are cousins. Or, if François’s mother had an affair with someone else, he and Michèle are unrelated. François latches on to this last possibility before they sleep together at Pyla. Aunt Line, for one, is pleased when she sees what she takes to be evidence of Michèle and François sleeping together. When she arrives in Pyla, she looks upstairs in the bedrooms. As she looks into the first bedroom, the camera reveals a made but slept-in bed, high-heeled shoes on the floor and clothes on a chair. When she looks into the second bedroom, she sees, one assumes, an empty bed; visible on top of a chest of drawers is a rolled-up mattress. She leaves the room smiling. Chabrol uses a series of short scenes to sketch this family’s life. After the reading of the leaflet, the film alternates between characters: Michèle and François almost kissing in his bedroom. Matthieu (Thomas Chabrol) and Anne visiting the HLMs. Gérard at the chemists, where he meets a young woman in his office.

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Matthieu and Anne talking to the Labières, then the young mother. Michèle and François kissing, then asking Aunt Line about Pyla. Matthieu and Anne at her headquarters doing a television interview. Anne and Aunt Line at home, joined by Gérard.

These quick scenes follow on from the fifteen minutes of screen time devoted to the first family lunch. The alternating scenes compare the family members with each other and the Charpin-Vasseurs with the people who live in the subsidized local authority flats, the habitation à loyer modéré or HLMs. When an interviewer asks Chabrol if he treats the scenes of political life with a franker irony than he uses for the depiction of the families, he replies: I didn’t want to show this election campaign in a serious manner because it is not a serious thing. In fact, it is totally derisory. It is one of the elements that explain that the grandfather was able to draw up lists of Jewish children. What it shows is that Anne’s political commitment is pretty meaningless. (Alion 2003: 71)

In the HLMs, the far right party, the Front Nationale or FN, gathers political support, which Anne tries to fight. Her first visit is to the Labières, who, says Matthieu, are supporters. The visit to the Labières ends with a display of awkwardness; finding himself caught on the wrong side of the door as Labière says goodbye to Anne, Matthieu has to squeeze between door and householder to leave, a comical demonstration of Matthieu’s unfamiliarity with the apartment’s small hall, which also contrasts with the Charpin-Vasseur’s large hallway, in which several graceful greetings and partings take place. After Anne and Matthieu leave the apartment, the film stays with the Labières: Not bad for a collaborator’s daughter. She’s not his daughter. She’s his granddaughter. Not bad for a collaborator’s granddaughter, then. I don’t trust her aunt, with her innocent airs. What did she do? Not a lot, just killed her father. You can’t say that. She was acquitted. Besides, her father was a real shit. He shopped his son to the Krauts. Not many went that far. I remember it well.

Their conversation illustrates how collaboration continues to resonate in France. The second visit, to the young mother, reveals she is looking after four children of her own, her sister’s two children and her father-in-law. She says to Anne:  ‘I don’t know how many kids you have but I  can’t keep up.’ In the crowded flat, the elderly father-in-law asks the young mother where his soup

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is; she explains that he has already had it. This reference to a lunch just finished increases the contrast between the Charpin-Vasseur household and this one. Coming so soon after the Charpin-Vasseurs’ lunch, this short scene adds to contrasts between the Charpin-Vasseurs and the HLM inhabitants. Furthermore, Anne visits the HLMs under duress because Matthieu persuades her of its political importance, but Matthieu’s reaction to the young mother’s household reveals his snobbery. Anne asks him what he thinks. He replies: ‘That last one? I feel quite sick.’ Anne’s visit to the HLMs allows the film to connect contemporary social conditions, the corruption of local politics, the growing support for the FN and French history. At the political reception, the mayor tells Anne that she will be his replacement while making condescending remarks about the FN candidate, Brissot (Didier Bénureau). However, when Brissot and Anne talk, he convinces her that someone else wrote the leaflet, adding that he and Anne have a lot in common. The film later shows Brissot’s name on a poster in the HLMs and on Gérard’s voting card after he tears up his wife’s card. As Garbarz points out, ‘Chabrol subtly muddies the waters:  although only seen once in the film, the FN remains in the background and instead acts as a warning sign, an indication of the pervading social malaise’ (2003:  33). Garbarz is correct about the importance of politics to Chabrol’s project, for which the FN presence provides a context. Anne declares her political neutrality, but the film demonstrates that her neutrality is a defence of the status quo. The film’s dominant tone is melodramatic, but, as is often the case with Chabrol, there are elements of black comedy. As Chabrol comments: I try to be realistic and a bit ironic, but I’m never mean. But it’s true that when it comes to characters with double-barrelled names like Charpin-Vasseur who feel the need to visit people in council flats it’s obvious that the relationships have to be twisted. I’m also trying to be as genuine as possible and, undoubtedly, at least I hope so, I try to be above-average realistic, but over-the-top realistic. (Le Gall 2002)

One example of comedy occurs when Michèle and Aunt Line drag Gérard upstairs. After they almost drop him, they laugh. As they rest, they are presented from below, so that Gérard’s stomach hangs out of his shirt and trousers. The low-angle shot of Gérard’s stomach after they almost drop the corpse is a grotesque element, uncomfortable because it comes so soon after Aunt Line’s confession that she killed her father. The flash of grotesquerie assails conventional responses.

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In the film’s style, Chabrol foregrounds several elements, including settings, décor and camera framings. The film is set in and around Pessac in Bordeaux and the seaside resort of Pyla-sur-Mer (Gérard tells the actress that his chemist’s shop is on Avenue Jean Jaurès, a main road in Pessac). Chabrol explains his choice of setting: There are two reasons. It is true that there are a lot of cases of interbreeding in the region. When you have similar vines, the same ground, the same type of grape, you will almost have the same wine . . . In this context, you might as well have the same family . . . The second reason is more precise. Since we don’t see Aunt Line’s father, I wanted it understood what type of person we were dealing with. It made things easier to suggest that he could have been a type of [Maurice] Papon. (Alion 2003: 70)

Viewers familiar with French history will notice the film’s allusion to Maurice Papon, secretary general for police in Bordeaux, where he was responsible for deporting Jews during World War II.4 For Chabrol, the film presents a parable about French history: The idea was that this home in Bordeaux was like a little France. The dates are very precise. Aunt Line kills her father in 1945, after the Liberation. Her sister and her husband die in 1958, which is the start of the Fifth Republic. There are more deaths in 1981, which marks the coming to power of the left. Without overdoing it, I wanted to highlight the parallels between the history of this family and the history of the country. History is very important for the bourgeoisie. With their accumulation of property, they are forced to be interested. (PinçonCharlot and Pinçon 2003)

As Chabrol indicates, the Bordeaux setting suggests that the Charpin-Vasseurs are an old family with deep connections to the terroir. (Also relevant is their sale of the vineyard to the Japanese.) The major portion of the film takes place in the Charpin-Vasseurs’ large country house. This limited setting makes the film claustrophobic. The isolated upper class country house is the setting for what resembles a conventional murder mystery, with the dead man shown during the opening credit sequence. In several ways, La Fleur du mal adopts conventions from the psychological melodrama: tense family mealtimes, an isolated large house with a central staircase, expressionistic visual images, secrets from the past and a strong sense of decadence. But Chabrol transplants the conventions of psychological melodramas to contemporary France. La Fleur du mal shows how the characters value etiquette and self-presentation; the

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film uses mealtimes to reveal tensions underlying the family’s ritualistic social practices. One way of perceiving the film is as a series of mealtimes, drinks and meal preparations, as if this class do nothing except eat and drink. The film shows Anne’s brief bit of campaigning and Gérard’s afternoon activity, sleeping with young women in his office. Michèle is a psychology student, but the film never indicates François’s occupation. Social occasions centred around food and drink include François and Michèle’s dinner of oysters and sole, their breakfast in Pyla, the political reception, an aperitif before dinner with Matthieu, the family lunch of a leg of lamb, Gérard’s whisky drinking before Michèle kills him and Anne’s celebratory drinks party. Lunch on the day of François’s return is the film’s longest meal and, including the coffee in the conservatory, the film’s main expository scene, taking fifteen minutes of screen time and revealing the frictions within the family as they eat Aunt Line’s lamprey. The scene starts with Gérard and François arriving home to find Marthe and Aunt Line setting the table, the latter singing as she does so. Aunt Line comes out to the hall to greet François; the servant continues to set the table. When François reveals that Gérard has told him about the lamprey, she says ‘He can’t keep a secret’. Gérard responds, ‘It was a secret?’ She concludes, ‘Everything’s a secret here’. Lunch begins with a close-up of the lamprey, cooked with shallots and sauce, decorated with croutons. They are drinking Château Haut-Brion, a famous Bordeaux wine and an appropriate choice; it has a history of associations with nobility and its château is in Pessac, on the same road as Gérard’s chemists. Gérard has chosen a wine to impress his son after his return from America, a wine, as François comments, for special occasions. The house’s décor evokes luxury and heritage. The dining room, for example, contains blue and white china resting on top of a dark panelled dado, a large white marble fireplace, in front of which sits Gérard at the head of the table, an immaculate white table cloth, silver serving dishes, and a crystal decanter and glasses. The conservatory has French windows opening onto the garden. Large plants stand on the floor, medium-sized plants on small tables; green cane furniture fills the room: the décor suggests overheated decadence, a breeding ground for corruption. The conservatory also has a marble fireplace with a mirror above it. When Gérard stands up in front of the mirror, he says: ‘I hate politics’ and then, as if repeating a threat, ‘If you’d stayed out of this, we’d have all been spared this literary masterpiece’. His position by the mirror hints at his duplicity.

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However, the stairs are the central feature of the film’s set. Chabrol comments: The origin of everything is in the past, but it appears only as the present unfolds. It is by looking into the past that we can clarify the present. That’s why I used the stairs as a symbol of time. One can go up or down, but they are always there. (Rouyer and Vassé 2003: 34)

The stairs theatricalize the Charpin-Vasseur household, exaggerating entrances and exits, amplifying distinctions between public spaces downstairs and private spaces upstairs. Drawing on melodrama conventions, La Fleur du mal ’s stairs represent a passage to a private realm: upstairs in the bedrooms are the secrets, dead bodies and incest; downstairs in the dining room, drawing room and conservatory, semi-staged social events take place. Guests are received, etiquette is followed, people conform to roles and behave in a way that is appropriate for the milieu. Three characters in particular are associated with the stairs: François, Michèle and Aunt Line. Nobody else is seen upstairs, apart from Gérard, once he is dead, and Pierre Charpin’s corpse. Nobody else sets foot on the stairs or is photographed near them. Only the three who share the secret of Gérard’s death descend and ascend the stairs. The house’s main stairs feature in the following scenes: the credit sequence, when the camera travels upstairs to reveal the body in the bedroom; Michèle’s descent to greet François; their carrying his suitcase upstairs; their descent for lunch when Anne and Matthieu arrive; Aunt Line passing the staircase as she takes in the coffee; Michèle and Aunt Line hauling the body upstairs, talking as they do so; Michèle and François descending to join Anne’s party; and Line and Matthieu walking past the stairs in the final shot, which stops moving as they pass the stairs. Michèle first walks downstairs, wearing a sleeveless red top and with her hands behind her back. She descends the stairs like a young bride. As she kisses François on each cheek, the camera adjusts to frame them. In a piece of foreshadowing, Gérard complains, ‘And me? I didn’t get a kiss this morning’. Michèle asks François about his suitcase and as they carry it upstairs together, the film presents them from behind, ascending the stairs. The camera’s revelation of Pierre Charpin’s body parallels Gérard’s body being dragged upstairs. In addition, Michèle and François twice descend the stairs together to greet Anne and Matthieu when they arrive at the house, first when they come down for lunch on François’s first day, second when they come down after Anne’s electoral success. When Michèle and François first descend the stairs together, they look like

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a couple, an impression given in the way she looks at him and the way they both adjust their clothing as they descend. She puts on her cardigan and François pulls his cuffs from his sleeves; their adjustment of their clothes implies their consciousness about moving from a private to a public space. The final scene ends with the stairs. François tells Michèle: ‘Come on. Let’s put on a brave front.’ As Michèle, François and Aunt Line enter the living room, champagne corks pop and the credits commence, accompanied by the title music. The film’s final image is of the stairs. As Aunt Line and Matthieu walk off-screen, the camera stops following them and frames the stairs. Up these stairs, a short while ago, Aunt Line and Michèle dragged Gérard’s body. Here, as elsewhere, the film draws attention to the contrast between public mask and private secrets: downstairs, Anne celebrates her electoral success; upstairs, her husband’s body lies in the bedroom. As well as the stairs, the other prominent element of style is the use of the camera. The film uses few shot/reverse-shot patterns to present conversations and their absence is noticeable. Instead, camera movements and long takes create the impression that the film is examining the characters. The film keeps us at a distance from its characters. Conversing characters are framed in profile for a long take or presented in a two shot from further back, as happens when François sits on his bed and embraces Michèle. Just as the lack of shot/reverseshot cutting is noticeable so too are the slow camera movements and long takes. In the breakfast scene at Pyla, after Michèle and François have slept together, the camera curves around them to frame them at the table. Another example of the film’s flaunted camera movements comes from the post-lunch conversation between Michèle and François in his bedroom. This conversation, which ends with their departure for Pyla, is split into two sections, separated by the depiction of Gérard’s and Anne’s afternoon activities. Chabrol uses two shots to present the first part of their conversation. The first shot is of Michèle opening the door. The second shot presents the remainder of the scene. Within this shot, Michèle sits on the bed and the camera moves with François as he unpacks his case. In profile, he looks at her as he puts away his clothes and they joke about her present. The camera approaches her as she says: ‘I don’t know why you left.’ He sits down, re-entering the frame so that they are facing each other. ‘You were afraid of what you might do’, she says. He strokes her head and leans towards her. Then the film cuts to Anne and Matthieu. This shot, the scene’s second, is ninety-seven seconds long, but its sinuous movement makes it feel longer. After showing Anne and Matthieu campaigning, the film returns to

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François and Michèle. Another long take presents their conversation. Again, this shot continues for what feels like a long time (one minute and forty seconds), until François expresses reservations about their relationship. Both the duration and the flaunted movements of these shots generate tension. Two of the most obvious camera movements form a pair. The first is the credit sequence’s long take, which travels past the dining room in the 1940s before revealing Pierre Charpin’s body upstairs. The second is the camera movement through the door and into the hallway when François returns home. Chabrol says: When we enter the house for the first time, the camera pans towards the dining room where the servant is in the middle of setting the table. When we enter a second time with François and his father several minutes later, we again find this same camera movement, useless on its own, but which helps the spectator to understand that the film is constructed on the principle of reminiscences. (Rouyer and Vassé 2003: 35)

As Chabrol remarks, the repetition of the camera movement helps us understand that repetitions are central to the film; it also suggests the timelessness of the bourgeois household. Two examples of flaunted camera movements combined with distinctive framings are the final shot of the first lunch and the first shot of the conservatory scene. In the dining room, when Anne returns to the table after speaking to Matthieu on the telephone, the shot begins on the side of the room with the doorway, so that Anne walks into shot in profile, visible from head to thigh. She walks to her chair, while the camera pans and lowers with her; it then retreats to frame the family at the table. This elevated, angled perspective is held as Aunt Line and Michèle leave with the dishes. After Anne says, ‘Matthieu’s coming to show me something’, silence reigns between the three. François lights a cigarette. Anne suggests coffee in the conservatory. The shot ends with a dissolve to the next shot, which begins as a crane upwards from behind a large fern in the conservatory. This shot moves away from the fern until it looks down on the five family members, before moving across the room, so that for a second, as Matthieu enters from behind the camera, the characters all appear to be looking into the lens. They greet him; he steps into shot. The back of his head is centre frame within the symmetrical presentation of the seated family members; this striking framing ends a noticeable shot. However, both shots are distancing, the

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high-angled view that ends the dining room scene and the shot that begins behind the fern. The camera movements in both shots are noticeable adjustments and they increase the sense of unease in both scenes, highlighting family tensions as the shots distance us from the characters, so that we are looking down on them, studying them. In both shots, the organized formality of the photography and staging is flaunted, an example of Chabrol’s stylistic excess. To present Aunt Line’s reminiscence in the conservatory, Chabrol uses a long take and camera movement. As Anne reads the leaflet aloud, the camera keeps returning to Aunt Line; she closes her eyes as Anne says ‘honourable but jinxed’. When Anne says, ‘In 1958, it celebrated the Fifth Republic with a plane crash that killed our candidate’s mother’, the camera moves away from Aunt Line and retreats behind a plant. The shot continues, ascending above the plant, drifting across the room and the now empty sofa. Anne’s voice continues, but the images represent the conservatory and living room as they were in 1981. The décor is similar enough that the transformation feels indefinite, though some things differ; for example, a painting of a conservatory leans against the mirror on the mantelpiece, and some plants and objects are in different positions. The camera moves 360 degrees around the conservatory. As it does, Anne’s voice fades out, the music fades in and, off-screen, Aunt Line answers the phone, receiving the news that Michèle’s father and François’s mother have been killed. By this point, the camera has passed around and through the living room, revealing that the furniture and décor differ; green velvet armchairs have replaced the modern cream-coloured chairs, while the wallpaper has elaborate patterns of flowers and leaves, instead of being light brown as in the contemporary scenes. Otherwise, the pictures and table lamps are the same, as is the chest of drawers. The long take and camera movement merge past and present; a flashback begins without announcement, ending with a close-up of Aunt Line and Michèle’s offscreen voice asking if she’s all right. The primary asserted symbols in the film are three entrapment images, all of which feature Michèle and/or Aunt Line. There are two shots with characters behind banisters and one shot with characters behind a birdcage. Two of these images are further examples of Chabrol’s expressionistic use of stairs. The banisters in Pyla are the first example. When Michèle and François are tidying up downstairs at Pyla, she asks ‘What about the bedrooms? We need to clean them, make the beds’. The film then cuts to an overhead shot taken from the upstairs landing; the shot frames the characters behind the banisters from a high position. The remainder of their conversation, about him taking a shower, is filmed

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from behind the banister, after which the film dissolves to a shot of them walking across the beach. Nothing justifies the use of the banisters here. As a result, the overhead framing through the banisters registers as a visual interruption that distances us from the characters. This banister shot is partnered with the banister shot of Michèle and Aunt Line as they drag Gérard upstairs. When they rest for a moment on the stairs, Aunt Line looks at Michèle and confesses: I’ve never told anyone else this and no one will ever know. My father did some terrible things during the war. He worked for the Germans. He drew up lists of Jews for the camps, even children. He helped hunt down the Resistance. And when François, my brother, left to join them, he let him be killed as well. Yes, I murdered my father. The awful thing is I never regretted it. It’s a terrible thing to have done, but I’ve never regretted it.

The shot used for Line’s confession lasts for two minutes and fifteen seconds. It starts by following Gérard’s moving head as his body is pulled upstairs. They rest, then the camera tilts up from Gérard’s face, past Michèle’s ankle. The shot presents the characters through the banisters, which are blurry and unfocussed in the foreground of the image. The camera tilts upwards until it finds Aunt Line’s face. She rests back against the wall. The thick banister is in the middle of the image. Aunt Line looks up at Michèle, who is sitting on a higher step. Chabrol has decided to present her confession with the banisters in the foreground instead of, for example, presenting it from the front of the stairs, as when they drop the body. This position incorporates an obvious and flaunted obstruction in the image, one which is maintained as the camera moves forward for a closer framing of Aunt Line. In both banister shots, at Pyla and in the main house, the film offers a blatant image of entrapment, of the type that is used in the final shot of The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949). This asserted symbol implies that the characters behind the banisters are trapped. But these entrapment images cannot be taken at face value, in part because of their obviousness and in part because they repeat an earlier image. The banister shots repeat the birdcage shot of Michèle and Aunt Line. This birdcage shot is the last shot of the conservatory scene. Aunt Line offers to get more coffee, as if to relieve the tension. The film cuts to her in the kitchen with Marthe, the servant, who is washing up. When she returns with the coffee, the camera picks her up as she leaves the dining room. It then follows her as she crosses the hallway. She walks as if in a daze, her eyes emotionless. As she returns to the group, Gérard continues to complain about his wife’s politics.

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Before Anne and Matthieu leave, Anne asks her husband if he is going to attend the reception on Sunday: ‘There’ll be pretty girls.’ ‘I’ll be there, then’, he replies, before leaving for work. François then goes to unpack, which leaves Michèle and Aunt Line still sitting. The camera presents them in a two shot, then descends behind the birdcage on the other side of the room so that the pair are framed behind the cage. As an expressive device, the birdcage shot presents an image of two characters trapped. The birdcage shot relates to the final cover-up because it reinforces the similarity between Aunt Line and Michèle. They are positioned as mirror images of each other, doubles separated by sixty years, connected by names and deaths, both trapped by their actions. However, the image’s symbolism is so obvious that it promotes uneasiness; the blatancy of the symbol interrupts our concentration. The stylistic excess creates detachment from the characters. One result of this aesthetic distance is that the film encourages us to question our sympathy for the two killers and our lack of feeling for their victims. The film creates a tension between the narrative, which encourages empathy for the killers, and the style, which distances us from them. The film’s recounting of Pierre Charpin’s activities discourages sympathy for him while Chabrol’s staging of Gérard’s death discourages sympathy for him. The scene begins when Gérard enters his study from the garden and asks Michèle what her essay is about. She tells him: ‘The notion of guilt.’ He insists on giving her a drink and then starts touching her. Their exchange (‘Not again?’) implies he has tried this before. Pushed around by Gérard, Michèle says: ‘You’re behind that sick leaflet.’ He replies: ‘What are you talking about?’ and ‘Turns you on to think that does it?’ He tries to kiss her. She hits him on the head with the base of a lamp. He falls, hitting his head on the table as he goes down. The film never clarifies whether her blow with the lamp kills him or his head hitting the table does. The two killers are the most attractive and the kindest characters, Michèle and Aunt Line; the victims are the least sympathetic men, the fascist Pierre Charpin, who connived in his son’s death, and Gérard. The film encourages identification with Aunt Line and Michèle. When Aunt Line confesses to Michèle, as they drag Gérard upstairs, the film suggests that Aunt Line’s memories haunt her present. For a moment, the film succeeds in communicating her pain. However, any empathy we feel for Aunt Line increases the chances that we will condone her decision to take the blame for killing Gérard. The narrative encourages sympathy for the killers; the film’s style distances us from them. That contrast produces the tension in the viewing experience.

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That tension helps Chabrol expose the efficiency with which the family (and, by extension, this social class) close ranks to protect the family name. La Fleur du mal manipulates our readiness to sympathize with the two killers, but it also distances us so that we recognize how the power elite maintain the status quo to their advantage. If Michèle were convicted of killing Gérard, her relationship with François would be in doubt, as would Anne’s political career. Telling the truth about Gérard’s death would bring difficulties; keeping her involvement a secret protects her future and that of the family; Aunt Line takes responsibility for the killing to ensure the continuation of the family’s wealth and power. As Andrea Picard writes: Perfectly played by veteran Suzanne Flon, Aunt Line is chilling in her sweetness – there is no doubt that beneath the saccharine surface, she’s a flower of evil. Chabrol, of course, places her in the garden where seeds are sown, flowers bloom, and weeds will undoubtedly one day reappear. (2003: 71)

As Chabrol says: ‘For Aunt Line, everything is in the present. This allows her to be both endearing and completely cynical’ (Alion 2003: 71). Michèle and Aunt Line are both nice but to perpetuate their status they cover up a crime. Gérard is unpleasant, but his murder is undeserved. Michèle, François and Aunt Line share a tender intimacy; they are pleasant compared with Gérard. Yet the film exposes how they exercise their power. What makes the film so successful is the way that it convinces us that the two killers are charming and well-meaning. As Chabrol says: ‘The bourgeoisie has its charm, which is not all that discreet. And it is exactly this which makes it dangerous’ (Alion 2003: 70).5 Despite their charm, as a class they act to preserve their power and Chabrol’s film demonstrates the ease with which we accept this. The film concludes by combining Anne’s political success with Gérard’s death. The final scene depicts the impromptu party taking place to celebrate Anne’s electoral success. François, Michèle and Aunt Line join the party and the end credits play out while Anne celebrates her victory. Nobody appears to miss Gérard. Champagne is opened and everything is focussed on Anne’s success. The music accompanying the credit sequence is jovial, but the concluding irony is bitter. Anne has won her election; she will no doubt become mayor. Her affair with Matthieu will perhaps lead to their marriage; now that Gérard has been disposed of, nobody is going to miss him. François says he never loved his father and he helps Michèle cover up his death. The father desired Michèle, but the son had success with her. After three years away, François has returned home,

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his father has been killed and he will marry someone who may well be his halfsister. The film ends with him assuming his position at the head of the family. He will inherit the estate, the house and his father’s business. François tells Michèle that he found his home and the weight of expectations stifling, but whatever he did in America he has returned home to claim his inheritance. La Fleur du mal attacks entrenched traditional values, depicting upper-class decadence and the corrupt perpetuation of power; as well as the deaths of Gérard and Pierre Charpin, the film includes incest, intermarriage, Gérard’s illegal laboratory, his parking in a disabled space, Anne’s so-called neutral politics and her effortless succession to the mayoralty. As Joël Magny says, ‘La Fleur du mal is Chabrol’s most political film because it depicts the modern upper middleclass overwhelmingly maintaining the status quo and passing down crimes and secrets from one generation to the next’ (Magny 2003). The film manipulates us into sharing the viewpoint articulated by François and Aunt Line, yet at the same time it offers a lucid exposure of corruption. When Michèle protests about keeping secret from Anne their suspicions that Gérard wrote the leaflet, Aunt Line and François express more pragmatic views: Aunt Line: My dear, we’ve been living like hypocrites for years. François: Let’s be philosophical. People have lived like hypocrites since the dawn of time. That’s what you call civilisation.

These lines embody the cynicism that Chabrol’s film exposes. François’s final encouragement to Michèle is that she ‘put on a brave front’. Innocuous as they sound, his words fit with his remarks about hypocrisy being central to civilization. The ending conveys a sense of repetition and continuation. The film reveals the cover-up that enables the passing of power from one generation to the next, power that contributes to the divisions of wealth which the film reveals and of which the far right politicians take advantage. At the same time, the film ends with a party to celebrate Anne’s success, a party that is also a celebration of the family’s success in continuing the family line.

Notes 1 Garbarz describes Pierre Charpin sending his son, François, to his death: ‘This vile act opened a breach in the temporal continuum that links the generations and made

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of the Charpin-Vasseur a cursed line. As in Greek tragedy, because blood flowed yesterday, provoking chaos, it will be necessary for more blood to flow today so as to re-establish order in the world’ (2003: 32). However, Chabrol says: ‘I’d like this film to be jovial. I’d like to define it as a funny Greek tragedy, a merry Greek tragedy’ (Le Gall 2002). Grassin (2003: 44) also notes the use of doubles. Frappat notes: ‘La Fleur du mal is a film that is both clear and ambiguous, its duality central to the greatness of Claude Chabrol’s cinema’ (2003: 576). Frappat notes that the film is set ‘in the Bordeaux region where one of the obvious ghosts of the film, Maurice Papon, committed his first atrocities’ (2003: 79). Chabrol’s comments and his film evoke La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1938).

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La Demoiselle d’honneur (2004): Criss-Cross, Motives and Murder

La Demoiselle d’honneur (2004) is Chabrol’s adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s novel The Bridesmaid (1989). Almost the whole novel is presented from the hero Philip’s point of view. However, Rendell’s third-person description of Philip’s experiences discourages sympathy for him. Chabrol’s film does something similar. Almost the whole film is presented from Philippe’s (Benoît Magimel’s) point of view, with some brief exceptions:  for example, the mirror image of Senta (Laura Smet) in Philippe’s bathroom; Senta at home ignoring Philippe’s telephone call; the high-angled shot of Philippe as he is talking to Rita (Isolde Barth) and Pablo (Mazen Kiwan), which suggests that Senta is watching them from the top floor of her house where she has hidden the corpse; and the police station sequence, which informs us that the police are going to follow Philippe.1 Just as Rendell’s narration distances us from the hero’s perspective, so Chabrol’s exaggerated, quasi-expressionistic style creates a distance between the point of view of the hero, Philippe, and that of the film. The film foregrounds several stylistic elements. The primary asserted symbol is the statue; other prominent elements include long takes, camera movements, the music, décor and mirrors. As the film progresses, tension develops between the depiction of events from Philippe’s point of view and the stylistic excess. This enables us to comprehend that Philippe is ignoring Senta’s mental disturbance and is responsible for Senta’s second murder. The excessive conspicuousness of Chabrol’s quasi-expressionistic style reaches its peak in the police station sequence which flaunts its choreography of characters, camera, setting and music. That scene’s bravura style emphasizes the devastating effect the revelation has on Philippe, confronted as he is with the reality of Senta’s murderous personality. Like much crime fiction, La Demoiselle d’honneur begins with a crime scene, featuring police, media, onlookers and the victim’s relatives. However, instead of

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following the police investigation, the film ignores it until Philippe discovers the truth about Senta in the police station. Between the opening scene at the dead woman’s house and the police station sequence, the police investigation takes place, but off-screen. Meanwhile, the film explores the murderer’s personality, using Philippe’s point of view as a guide. He investigates the mysterious and desirable Senta, unaware, as he falls in love with her, that she is a murderer. In this sense, La Demoiselle d’honneur has the structure of a film noir: Philippe is the fall guy and Senta is the femme fatale. On a first viewing, however, this structure remains imperceptible because the film hides her status as a fatal woman, despite indicating her mental disturbance in a way that should make Philippe suspicious. La Demoiselle d’honneur begins by establishing a conventional film noir opposition between Philippe’s domestic routine and the mysterious, alluring Senta. The film’s opening indicates that Philippe lives in a lower middle-class milieu, neither rich nor poor. In her novel, Rendell uses suburban London; Chabrol uses Nantes.2 However, the film contains few establishing shots and those it uses contain limited information; the setting represents a typical French town, without obvious social problems. The scenes between Philippe and his boss, Monsieur Nadeau (Pierre-François Dumeniaud), imply Philippe’s ordinary life. When they breakfast together, they sit next to each other in identical costumes: tancoloured raincoats, glasses, ties, patterned shirts and zip-up cardigans. Apart from the boss’s hat, they appear as younger and older versions of each other. Further indication of Philippe’s potential to be a facsimile of his boss comes when the latter offers to make him a partner.3 The film uses Philippe’s small suburban house and Senta’s large dilapidated house to emphasize the differences between Philippe’s ordinary routine and Senta’s exotic lifestyle.4 The size of Senta’s house surprises Philippe when she shows it to him. She has inherited it from her dead mother and, like the gothic mansion of melodrama, it has its symbolic divisions: the top floor contains the corpse; Aunt Rita and her dancing partner occupy a middle floor; the ground floor is unused; the basement is Senta’s lair. Because Senta owns her house, she has no need to work or enter into the routines of petit bourgeois existence. Fantasies of social improvement accompany Philippe’s infatuation with Senta; she attracts him, but her lifestyle also promises something unusual and mysterious. The film exposes Philippe’s conformist dreams with a pungent irony. His marriage proposal prompts Senta to say:  ‘We can move upstairs. But it needs refurbishing.’ This leads to their tour of the top floor. He talks about renovation,

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though the smell of a rotting corpse permeates the room. While exploring the room, Philippe receives a phone call from the police; when he returns from the police station, Senta explains that before they create their love nest they need to remove the dead body. The ordinary Philippe meets the extraordinary Senta at his sister’s wedding, the epitome of normality, at which everyone is well dressed and on their best behaviour. While the photographer takes pictures in the garden, Senta stares straight at Philippe; she then takes the initiative and approaches him. After the wedding, she seduces him and he falls in love with her. Laura Smet’s Senta projects a convincing air of confidence. Rendell’s Senta is thin, willowy, with long hair dyed silver, unusual clothes and heavy make-up, someone whose appearance stands out. Laura Smet’s Senta is attractive, but conventional looking, with nothing unusual about her, apart from her behaviour. For Senta takes an active role and, as Mary Ann Doane notes, ‘There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon looking’ (1991: 27). Senta is the sexually active femme fatale and Philippe the wilfully blind fall guy. When Philippe first meets Senta at his sister’s wedding, he asks his other sister, Patricia (Anna Mihalcea), if she agrees that Senta looks like Flora, that is, the statue, thus connecting the statue with his object of desire. The statue is the film’s primary asserted symbol and, as with Chabrol’s other asserted elements, the statue’s symbolic functions are overdetermined. The film presents its events from Philippe’s perspective, but the conspicuousness of the style detaches the hero’s point of view from the film’s point of view, thus enabling an ambiguous irony. Chabrol took the statue from Rendell’s The Bridesmaid, but changed the statue’s form in a way that exaggerates its visual meanings.5 In Rendell’s novel, the statue is a miniature female body, its legs covered with carved leaves and flowers. In the film, the statue is a bust. The change from miniature to bust means that Philippe interacts with a life-size female head, named Flora. After stealing Flora back from his mother’s ex-boyfriend’s house, Philippe kisses it and sleeps with it next to him on his pillow, as if it embodies the absent Senta. When proposing to Senta, he gives the statue to her, just as his mother gave it to her temporary boyfriend Gérard (Bernard Le Coq). The film’s last shot connects Senta, Philippe and the statue; a close-up of Senta and Philippe in profile dissolves to a frontal shot of the statue. The names ‘Senta’ and ‘Flora’ also correspond: two syllables and five letters ending in ‘a’ (the names are the same in the novel). As in his other films, Chabrol plays with names; Senta’s surname is ‘Bellange’, that is, beautiful

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angel. In a further hint about Senta’s unstable identity, Chabrol gives her two names: Sophie (Solène Bouton) explains that Senta’s real name is Stephanie but that she changes her name ‘every six months’. In Rendell’s novel, Stephanie and Senta are two cousins; Stephanie is meant to be making Senta’s bridesmaid’s dress as well as her own (Rendell 1994a: 38). Increased in size from a miniature to a bust, the statue’s symbolic qualities are also increased, so that its function as a representation of a female face is foregrounded and obvious. The film’s statue presents an image of the desired woman as an image; it suggests male desire for an inanimate female object and it symbolizes the fantastical quality of Philippe’s obsession with Senta as he ignores the reality of her mental disorder. However, the film also associates the statue with Philippe’s mother, Christine (Aurore Clément), and with the disquieting closeness of mother and son.6 When they look at the statue in their garden, they hold hands as they approach it in the dark. Silhouetted, they resemble lovers. When Christine suggests giving the statue to Gérard, Sophie tells her: ‘It’s yours. Dad gave it to you.’ In the car, Christine says of Gérard: ‘He saw Flora and said she was gorgeous, that she looked like me.’ Philippe’s intimacy with his mother is noticeable during their scenes together; Fabien Baumann speaks of Philippe’s ‘devouring look’ at his mother (2004: 44). After bumping into Gérard, which reassures him that Senta’s murderous declarations were imaginary, Philippe talks to his mother at home. The scene ends with a dissolve from a shot of Christine touching her cheek where her son has just kissed it to a shot of Philippe coming into the hall with Flora in a bag, on his way to present it to Senta as a gift to accompany his marriage proposal. Chabrol added this. In Rendell’s novel, Philippe does not give the statue to Senta. By associating the statue with his mother and his lover, the film suggests that Philippe’s obsession with Senta is linked to the unresolved Oedipal dimensions of his relationship to his mother. He is shocked when Senta tells him that she has murdered his mother’s ex-lover, but the film has already made clear Philippe’s hostility to Gérard. Philippe’s relationship with Senta is a move away from his widowed mother and the statue represents Philippe’s confused feelings for both women in his life. Baumann suggests that Senta ‘will never know that the statue that Philippe offers her is a fetish for his incestuous desire for his mother’ (2004: 45).7 Baumann is correct; the statue is an obvious fetish for Philippe’s relationship with his mother, but it is also the fall guy’s fetish for Senta, as described by Elisabeth Bronfen: ‘The fact that he has been tragically caught in the femme fatale’s trap also indicates his desire to be deluded, which, put in other terms, means his desire – at all costs – not to look at

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her, to fixate on a substitute so as not to put himself in her presence’ (2004: 109). Chabrol’s film clarifies that Philippe treats the statue as a substitute for Senta. Besides the statue, La Demoiselle d’honneur flaunts other stylistic elements. As with the music in other Chabrol films, the tango music that accompanies Rita and her dancing partner comes from within the fictional world and functions tonally. For instance, when Philippe wakes up alone and explores Senta’s house, the dancers’ music accompanies his journey upstairs, emphasizing his pleasurable experience of the house as exotic. The tango music comes into its own in the final sequence as Philippe and Senta descend the stairs, the rhythmic music both dramatic and ironic as an accompaniment to Philippe’s eventual acceptance of his girlfriend’s mental disorder. The beach scene is a good example of a scene with noticeable long takes and foregrounded camera movements; it comprises seven shots, none of which establish the location of the beach. Another example of prominent camerawork occurs when Philippe returns home late at night, after stealing back the statue from Gérard’s garden. Chabrol uses a shot/reverse-shot pattern when Christine tells Philippe that Patricia is absent, but, when they talk about Gérard, a long take frames the pair by the doorway, holding them at a distance. The adjustment is minor, but it contributes to the tone of the interaction between mother and son; just under a minute long, the shot’s duration is noticeable because of the framing of the doorway which makes the sides of the image shadowy. The shot increases the uneasiness in Philippe’s concealment of the statue and the sense that the proximity of mother and son is unhealthy. Another notable long take shows Senta’s seduction of Philippe while he phones a client from his mother’s house. Over two minutes long, the shot’s duration and mobility combine with the décor to impede a transparent presentation of the action. The lovers kiss, then Philippe moves behind a glass door. The camera follows Senta as she follows him, panning right then left while he phones his client. The camera then frames the pair in profile behind the glass-panelled door, with both the reflective glass and the wooden bars obstructing the view. The stylistic intervention is again noticeable and it enables a more critical perspective on Philippe’s excitement. At other times, camera movements highlight the significance of something. In her basement, Senta says of Gérard, ‘Your mother didn’t want to tear his eyes out?’ Philippe replies: ‘That’s not exactly her style.’ The camera’s track forward to a close-up of Senta draws attention to her intensity, while its slow curl around Philippe emphasizes his bewilderment; their argument leads to his declaration of

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love and her suggestion that they each kill someone to prove their love. A similar effect is used for the shot that shows Philippe playing along with her suggestion that they each kill someone; as he lies to Senta about killing the tramp, the camera curves around his head as he speaks, underlining the momentousness of his actions. At several points in the film, Chabrol crosses the conventional 180-degree line and reverses the direction of movement from one shot to the next. For example, when Philippe asks Senta why she has no plays or books about acting, Chabrol crosses the line when cutting to Senta. The destabilization of fictional space underlines the tension in their conversation, echoing Senta’s vehement reaction to his remark. When Senta first brings Philippe home, an overhead shot shows them in her hallway, just before Philippe enters her living room. He walks out of the hall moving left to right, leaving Senta facing a full-length mirror image; inside the living room, Philippe moves from right to left. The effect destabilizes the spatial presentation. Chabrol repeats it twice in the police station sequence, first when Laval (Thomas Chabrol) takes Philippe through the offices and then when Philippe enters the captain’s (Philippe Duclos’s) office. As well as camerawork and editing, Chabrol asserts the symbolic use of décor, in particular mirrors. There are six mirrors in La Demoiselle d’honneur. The first is a table mirror which shows Sophie’s preparations for her wedding. When Senta dries her hair in Philippe’s bathroom, the film shows a mirror image of her split in half. The gold-coloured mirror frame divides her reflection, but the mirror also has a wide bevelled edge that provides an additional reflection of Senta. Senta’s large hall mirror shows her full-length reflection as Philippe enters her living room. Following this shot, inside the living room, a small wall mirror shows Philippe’s head in profile. The fifth is Philippe’s car mirror showing his eyes as he drives to his client’s house and the sixth is a mirror reflection of Senta and Philippe making love in her basement. As in the film noir or the gothic melodrama, the mirror images connote narcissism and psychic instability. The fragmented mirror image of Senta in Philippe’s bathroom encapsulates this. All the film’s mirrors evoke notions of self-involvement and duplicity, but the last one, a frame-within-a-frame representation of them making love, is a heightened means of suggesting that Philippe is living out a fantasy in his relationship with Senta.8 As in the novel, La Demoiselle d’honneur makes clear that Philippe deceives himself, his desire for Senta encouraging him to ignore her oddness and stifle his concerns. But Chabrol added two scenes that amplify the impression of

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Philippe’s wilful blindness and make it easier to perceive his culpability. The first is the scene in a shop where Philippe sees the grieving mother of Senta’s first victim. When selecting a bottle of Sancerre for his dinner with Senta, Philippe bumps into the murdered woman’s mother, whose shuffling, dishevelled appearance suggests a woman distraught with grief. The shopkeeper tells Philippe who she is, then mentions that a tramp has been killed on the docks. The shopkeeper’s gossip prompts Philippe to buy a newspaper and, one assumes, think of lying to Senta that he killed the dead tramp. Chabrol’s second addition is the candle-lit dinner, which follows the shop scene and during which Philippe plays along with Senta’s lethal game. When Philippe arrives in Senta’s candle-lit basement, the film depicts him entering a dream world. As he lies about having killed the tramp, he talks to Senta with an exaggerated grandiosity; presumably, he imagines that she recognizes his playful tone of voice. But she just thanks him. The scene ends with her saying: ‘Then, I’ll do the same thing for you.’ In bed that night, Senta justifies her actions in a quasi-Nietzschean speech about inferior and superior beings, about being above laws and morality: You don’t see things as they are yet. You still don’t see we’re very special people, that we’re above everything. Laws. Morality. But I know you’ll realise it. You’ll cut loose from all the pettiness wearing us down. You’ll see the world as it really is. As something mystical. Magical. You’ve taken a step towards that by killing for me. You realise that, don’t you, Philip? Yes. Do you understand what I said? Sure, I understand. Now go to sleep.

Her speech offers him an opportunity to confess his lies but neither its content nor her intensity alarms him; he ignores her comments, despite having seen her extreme reactions. The next morning, she tells him she has killed Gérard.9 Earlier, when they row about her murderous proposal that they kill to prove their love, Philippe asks, ‘Who should I kill?’ Senta responds ‘Anyone. It doesn’t matter. What counts is the gesture, a gesture that places us above ordinary people’.10 Crime fiction often indicates a character’s psychopathology by having that character refer to or quote from Nietzsche as a way of asserting their independence from laws and morals; paradigmatic examples are Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Hitchcock’s film versions of both

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these.11 When discussing this trope, Wood and Walker propose that Chabrolian psychopaths are disruptive ‘Id-figures’ (1970: 54), examples of Chabrol’s interest in revealing ‘the beast in man’ (1970: 132).12 Senta’s expressions of belief in inferior and superior beings continue this convention. Her speeches are longer in Rendell’s novel, but neither Rendell nor Chabrol engage with Nietzschean philosophy; novelist and filmmaker allude to Nietzsche to suggest Senta’s failure to recognize her immorality. The novel’s Philip discovers his own capacity for violence, despite the novel beginning with, ‘Violent death fascinates people. It upset Philip’ (1994: 7). After Philippe hits Senta, Rendell writes: ‘Her face was soft with love, as if the features had begun to melt. The blood marred a silverywhite perfection, made her human. All too human’ (1994:  255). Rendell and Chabrol share an intention to suggest that good and evil are never innate; they depend on socialization and psychological development within socio-historical circumstances. Novelist and filmmaker imply that, as Rendell writes, ‘we are all capable of almost anything’ (1994: 252). The scene with the grieving mother and the candle-lit dinner highlight Philippe’s responsibility for Senta’s second murder. Irony permeates the ordering of events; the shop scene comes just before Philippe lies to Senta about having killed someone, as if bumping into the mother of Senta’s first victim prompts Philippe to lie, which prompts Senta to fulfil her pledge and kill again. Philippe is unaware that he has bumped into the mother of the woman whom Senta has murdered, but filmmaker and viewer share the irony of the sequencing; we gain an insight into the consequences of Senta’s actions. Philippe emerges from his bubble of self-deception when the police captain holds up the glass dagger that Senta used to murder a man. Chabrol’s exaggerated, quasi-expressionistic style reaches its peak in the police station sequence. The sequence begins with Philippe’s sister arrested for shoplifting; Philippe’s initial demeanour suggests that he thinks of himself as the sensible son, able to resolve his sister’s problem and reassure his mother. As he sits with his arms around his mother and sister, he looks confident that he is comforting them with his masculine presence. The police lieutenant is called away, but soon returns and puts his hand on Philippe’s shoulder: ‘Monsieur Tardieu, the captain would like to see you. Follow me.’ Philippe exudes self-assurance when he replies to Laval and stands up, but as soon as he steps into the corridor, the film abandons its stable presentation of its fictional world. Inside Laval’s office, Chabrol uses shot/reverse-shots without accompanying music, but when Philippe leaves the office, the style changes. Once in the corridor, the camera tracks back as

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Laval marches towards it and Philippe hurries to keep up, the camera seeming to respond to the impending change in Philippe’s fortunes. As they mount the stairs, passing another policeman, Philippe asks:  ‘Can I  see my sister?’ The camera pans right with them as they go upstairs; Laval replies, ‘I don’t know’. The camera then pans from Laval and Philippe at the top of the stairs to a closed glass door. It pans as if uncontrolled while the two men move towards the door, which opens of its own accord. Inside the office, where another policeman sits at a desk, Chabrol reverses the direction of movement between shots: Laval and Philippe walk across the office towards the camera, from right to left, instead of continuing away from it, from left to right. This unsettling destabilization of spatial continuity gives an impression of the police hurrying Philippe into a trap. In the next shot, the camera moves forward through another corridor, in an approximation of a point-of-view shot. As the camera moves forward, it pans into the two offices it passes, evoking Philippe’s confusion at being rushed past unfamiliar spaces. When they arrive at the captain’s office, Chabrol again crosses the 180-degree line as he cuts from the corridor to the interior of the captain’s office, in adjacent shots shifting the captain from screen right to screen left. Once inside the captain’s office, Philippe stands by the door like a wayward schoolboy in front of his headmaster. Throughout Philippe’s journey to the captain’s office, the music and sounds increase the tension. In the background of the first corridor, a decorator scrapes peeling paint from the wall. He remains in view as Laval and Philippe pass by on the right. As they stride down the corridor, the decorator speeds up his scraping. His rapid abrasion makes a harsh, grating noise, the tempo of which matches the pulsating atonal music and the hurried footsteps. When Laval and Philippe turn into the stairwell, the strings rise and a clarinet plays a questioning four-note phrase. When they are upstairs, the piano repeats the phrase while the violins increase the tension with a high-pitched sound. The music finishes with a piano sounding two low notes, repeating the musical phrase and then stopping when the lieutenant opens the captain’s door and announces ‘Monsieur Tardieu’. The last piano phrase resembles a high-pitched bell without an echo; it stops dead as the captain’s door opens. The camera movements and the music endow Philippe’s walk through the police station with a powerful sense of acceleration, a giddy, overwhelming sensation of encroaching instability and unanticipated urgency. And yet the police station sequence also has an element of black comedy to it, achieved through Chabrol’s mixing of incongruous elements, such as Sophie holding her dog on

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her lap, and through the performances of Philippe Duclos as the captain and Thomas Chabrol as the lieutenant. Duclos has a thin face and his character wears a jacket, shirt, tie, light-brown, v-necked sweater and a brown scarf, all of which gives him a scholastic appearance.13 His office is decorated with cups and medals, prizes, one assumes, that he has won for his diligent work. Philippe and the captain talk about his sister and then, while Philippe is looking down, the captain asks: ‘What were you doing this morning on Green Lane?’ The question surprises Philippe and the captain has to repeat it three times before Philippe explains that he was visiting a client. When the captain reveals that Gérard’s cousin has been murdered, a close shot shows Philippe listening while off-screen a police siren sounds; his face seems to crumple when the captain holds up a glass blade covered in blood. While Duclos gives the police captain an assiduous air, Thomas Chabrol gives the lieutenant a dry humour and an imposing physical authority, in particular with his gestures. As he escorts Philippe out of the offices, Laval clicks his fingers once behind him, instructing a subordinate to follow Philippe, who fails to notice the gesture or the policeman following him. Then, as Philippe is about to descend the stairs, Laval grabs the shoulder of Philippe’s coat with a force that surprises Philippe, the action rhyming with the hand he places on Philippe’s shoulder in his office. The police station sequence is short but impressive. Effective in this scene is the way in which the film alerts us to the narrative viewpoint separate from Philippe’s. When the captain holds up the glass dagger, he wakes Philippe from a dream. The novel uses Philippe’s client to reveal the truth about Senta’s murder, but Chabrol’s use of the police captain has a greater impact. The captain’s revelation and Laval’s two gestures (his finger-clicking command and his grabbing of Philippe’s coat) distance us from Philippe’s point of view. From the policeman whispering in Laval’s ear to Laval clicking his fingers, time feels compressed; the sense of urgency increases, the rapidity of the sequence conveying the impression that Philippe’s life is spiralling out of control. The sequence depicts an accelerated reorientation of Philippe’s viewpoint. He drops his delusions about Senta and comes back to reality; in showing this process, the film returns to the crime with which it opened, the murder of Raphaëlle Plissier. The heightened, exaggerated style of the sequence gives a sense of Philippe being overwhelmed by his realization that Senta has killed someone. Enigmatic, seductive and lethal, Senta conforms to the traditional conception of the femme fatale. She is the fatal woman who motivates the plot by

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representing something unknown. She appropriates the gaze and takes the initiative in seducing Philippe. Her proclaimed profession is actress and model; she tells Philippe that she has posed for ‘les photos sexy’ with another woman, though the film never confirms the truth of her statements and Philippe later accuses her of living in a fantasy world. Making Senta an actress (as Rendell also does) is a way of hinting at her unstable identity. All this suggests that Chabrol’s film is misogynistic because, as in some traditional films noir, the transgressive woman is punished. Senta commits two murders but, in the classic arguments about the femme fatale outlined by Mary Ann Doane, Janey Place and Annette Kuhn, or in more recent interpretations by Helen Hanson and Elisabeth Bronfen, these are inevitable narrative and genre treatments of female characters who appropriate the gaze and are sexually active; they are symptoms of male fears of female independence.14 The film associates Senta’s sexual appetite with her murderous psychopathy and it concludes with the revelation of her crimes and her mental disorder. The film reveals that Senta is over-possessive, full of what Doane describes as the fatal woman’s ‘excessive desire’ (1991: 45). As Doane writes, the ‘[active female] gaze must be disassociated from mastery’ (1991: 27); the independent woman must be punished.15 However, Chabrol’s film offers several potential explanations for Senta’s actions and, in doing so, it challenges the misogynist stereotype. First of all, the film suggests that Senta grew up without boundaries. Laura Smet describes her character: It is as if she has created herself: it is unclear to what social class she belongs, her age is not known, she’s probably never been to school. I  understand her comments as something she has memorized from one of his books. She has no sense of either morality or the law. She could be 40 years old or 16. She cannot differentiate right from wrong. She does not see the harm in the killing . . . Senta recites things; she is an actress in her own fiction. (Lamone 2004: 92)

Senta is independent, but the film suggests this autonomy is responsible for her maladjustment, her ineffective socialization one possible cause of her mental disorder. However, Chabrol adduces other potential explanations of Senta’s instability; in particular, the film’s version of Senta’s family history differs from Rendell’s. In the novel, Senta’s mother is alive but neglectful.16 Senta’s father remarried and later divorced a second wife, Rita, who raised Senta as her stepdaughter. In the film, however, Rita is Senta’s aunt. During their beach visit, Senta tells

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Philippe ‘my mother died giving birth to me’. Senta’s cousin, Jacques, Philippe’s new brother-in-law, explains Senta as follows: My mother and hers were sisters, well, half-sisters . . . She often acts weird. But, you know, being motherless must mark you . . . My mother and Senta’s mother were born in Reykjavik. Mum came to France at an early age. Senta’s mother stayed. She died giving birth to Senta. My father went for her, but Aunt Rita raised her. She must have been two or three months old when she arrived . . . Some father! The bastard never recognised her. He was married with five kids. He just screwed her mother.

Philippe’s mother says ‘Poor Girl!’, responding sympathetically to this account of a mother and a daughter tossed aside by a married man. Here, the film differs from the novel. The addition of Senta’s mother’s death during childbirth and Senta’s father’s subsequent abandonment of his daughter increases the emphasis on past psychic trauma causing present mental instability. By increasing the extent to which Senta’s mother and Senta are victims of appalling male behaviour, Chabrol hints that the murderer’s failure to repress certain drives has merged with an ambition to seek vengeance against patriarchy.17 La Demoiselle d’honneur ends with Philippe’s return to Senta. A  mobile point-of-view shot moves into the cellar, Senta’s door opening on its own as if by magic; as Baumann comments, ‘like in fairy tales’ (2004:  45). Philippe passes the closed door of the tango dancers rehearsing, before entering the attic apartment, where he finds Senta waiting for him. She tells him about her exboyfriend, Martin Leroy. She then opens the wardrobe to reveal Raphaëlle’s rotting corpse wearing Senta’s discarded bridesmaid’s dress:  ‘She wanted to steal Martin.’18 When Senta talks to Philippe in the last scene, her behaviour suggests she is disturbed not duplicitous or cruel; her explanation of her murders is almost innocent in that she fails to recognize the immorality of her actions. In her madness, Senta meets Nietzsche’s criteria for whether an injury is done out of malice: ‘If one does not know how painful an action is, it cannot be malicious’ (1994: 73). Senta never realizes how painful her actions are, to her murder victims or their relatives, such as Raphaëlle’s mother, whom Philippe bumps into in the shop. Without absolving Senta of culpability, La Demoiselle d’honneur enables awareness of Philippe’s responsibility; it also provokes some sympathy for Senta. When Philippe comforts her, he acknowledges her mental disorder for the first time, accepting responsibility for her as he promises never to leave her. Chabrol’s assertive style and his presentation of multiple explanations of causes combine to form the core framework of the director’s aesthetic strategy.

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The film offers insights into Senta’s behaviour in a way that increases sympathy for her. Just as Merci pour le chocolat ’s Mika deserves more sympathy than her equivalent in Armstrong’s The Chocolate Cobweb, so La Demoiselle d’honneur’s Senta deserves more sympathy than Rendell’s Senta. Both female killers are caught and both are disturbed, yet neither film offers just one explanation for the women’s disturbances. Instead of creating a single narrative explanation for a mental disturbance, Merci pour le chocolat and La Demoiselle d’honneur suggest multiple potential causes, exploring the consequences of historical trauma. Instead of suggesting precise causal relations, Chabrol’s films suggest that the origins of the mental disturbance experienced by the female killers are numerous, and intertwined with social and cultural problems, for example, those pertaining to class, gender and familial relationships. Chabrol’s true focus is on the psychopathology’s consequences, which are most often violent. Crime fiction, in Chabrol’s hands, is the means to show the disastrous results when mental disorders such as those suffered by Mika and Senta are allowed to develop. The films treat these disturbed women with subversive sympathy while exposing the culpability of the societies in which they live. In Chabrol’s œuvre, the archetypal example of this method is his telling of the veteran’s story in Le Boucher. Without confirming the origins of the butcher’s psychopathology, that film hints at Popaul’s (Jean Yanne’s) historical trauma – brutalized by his father, taught how to kill by the army and sent to fight in France’s colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria. Senta’s mother’s death during childbirth and her father’s abandonment cast long shadows, but her freedom when growing up and her lack of integration into society played a part. Chabrol’s film reveals the seething rage that lies below the surface of Senta’s psychic identity. The lack of a full explanation for her motives distinguishes La Demoiselle d’honneur from the clichés of crime fiction that punishes the fatal woman, often with death. The exploration of Senta’s instability prevents the film from being misogynist. Senta is a fatal woman, but the film reveals Senta’s actions to be the result of psychological illness, as opposed to malice, confirming the extent of her mental disorder at the conclusion.

Notes 1 2

Armengol (2009: 19) also discusses the moments in La Demoiselle d’honneur when the film moves away from Philippe’s point of view. In the novel, Rendell describes the London locations with sufficient detail to specify subtle class distinctions. Philip lives with his mother and sisters in

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The Late Films of Claude Chabrol Cricklewood; Gerard lives in Buckhurst Hill, east on the Central Line, three stops from Epping: Rendell describes their two-hour journey from Cricklewood to Buckhurst Hill (1994a: 13). At the start of the novel, Philip is training to be an interior designer; Chabrol makes his work less interesting and presents him as a bathroom salesman. Chabrol also uses Philippe’s boss to deliver lines that suggest how violence lurks below the surface of everyday life, implying that anyone, in the right circumstances, might be capable of murder; for example, Nadeau tells Philippe to visit a complaining client: ‘If I go, I may murder her.’ In Rendell’s novel, Senta lives in a terrace house. Rendell describes the statue in words that anticipate Senta’s appearance: ‘There was a curiously glazed look on the face as if she were untroubled by normal human fears and doubts and inhibitions’ (1994: 17). Rendell also describes Philip’s interest in Flora: ‘She looked like no real woman Philip had ever seen, though he thought quite suddenly – and rather madly – that if he ever saw a real woman with that face he would at once fall in love with her’ (1994: 52). A few pages later, he meets Senta: ‘Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her to him, the most exciting thing, was her resemblance to Flora’ (Rendell 1994: 58). Later, Rendell describes Philip’s embrace of Senta: ‘Her skin felt like marble. But she was a marble girl that some god was in the process of changing from a statue to a live woman’ (1994: 213). The title of Dargis’s appreciative review is ‘A Mama’s Boy Meets a Femme Fatale’ (2006). Armengol also discusses this addition (2009: 27). Place discusses the way in which the femme fatale of film noir often has independence as a goal: ‘The independence which film noir women seek is often visually presented as self-absorbed narcissism: the woman gazes at her own reflection in the mirror, ignoring the man she will use to achieve her goals’ (1998: 57). Place also writes: ‘Another possible meaning of the many mirror shots in film noir is to indicate woman’s duplicitous nature. They are visually split, thus not to be trusted. Further, this motif contributes to the murky confusion of film noir: nothing and no one is what it seems’ (1998: 58). Armengol also attributes Chabrol’s use of mirrors to the influence of film noir (2009: 76). At this point in the novel, Philip perceives ‘madness staring out of her eyes’ (1994: 218), yet he still proposes marriage and starts making plans to live with her, after she has told him about killing Gerard. This exchange of murders alludes to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and the Hitchcock adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, with Guy Haines being the equivalent to Philippe and Bruno Anthony the equivalent to Senta. Guy plays

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along with Bruno’s suggestion and, as with Philippe’s playing along with Senta, the consequences are fatal. Rendell acknowledges Strangers on a Train when she writes: ‘This was the murder of a stranger by a stranger, the kind that is hardest to solve, the kind that has no reason behind it and no motive’ (1994: 272). Reader (2005: 41) also notes the film’s allusions to Hitchcock. For a discussion of this theme in Hitchcock’s films, see Walker (2005: 197). Wood and Walker divide Chabrol’s ‘beasts’ into three groups: ‘characters who suffer from an exaggeration of unpleasant (even sadistic) traits, but who cannot be called “insane” ’; ‘the “perverted child”, who verges on insanity, but who destroys as much out of childish petulance as from genuine obsession’; and ‘the “psychopath” ’ (1970: 133). They argue that the first character type remains in Chabrol’s films in 1970, but that the films do not show the characters developing any self-awareness; the second type, they argue, has disappeared from Chabrol’s work by 1970, but with the psychopath ‘there is a very definite growth of concern, of sympathy, from André [in Les Bonnes Femmes] to Popaul [in Le Boucher]. Equally important, there is a growing illumination of the forces behind the characters’ disturbed state’ (1970: 134). They add: ‘Chabrol shows their destructive impulses as resulting from their subjection to an intolerable pressure’ (1970: 134). After making La Demoiselle d’honneur, Philippe Duclos went on to become a star of the French television series, Engrenages (Spiral, 2005–2012), in which he plays Roban, a stern but kind juge d’instruction. As Doane writes: ‘The femme fatale is situated as evil and is frequently punished or killed. Her textual eradication involves a desperate reassertion of control on the part of the threatened male subject’ (1991: 2–3). Place describes the femme fatale: ‘In film noir we observe both the social action of myth which damns the sexual woman and all who become enmeshed by her, and a particularly potent stylistic presentation of the sexual strength of woman which man fears’ (1998: 48). For Kuhn, ‘it is often woman – as structure, character, or both – who constitutes the motivator of the narrative, the “trouble” that sets the plot in motion’ (1994: 34), while Neale notes how films noir like Double Indemnity and Human Desire ‘invoke the tropes of illegibility, deceit and enigmatic untrustworthiness associated with the figure of the femme fatale’ (2010: 194). Hanson and O’Rawe (2010), and Bronfen (2004) update debates about the femme fatale. Doane is discussing Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945). Gene Tierney’s Ellen is similar to Smet’s Senta in La Demoiselle d’honneur : possessive, jealous, intense and murderous. Philip’s sister says: ‘Her mother’s ten years older than Mum but she’s always having affairs. She’s got this new love, Darren was telling me, and he’s not thirty’ (Rendell 1994: 40).

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17 The film’s account of Senta’s mother, the story of a woman discarded by a man, recalls Vertigo. 18 The dress was Chabrol’s idea: ‘There was an idea that came to me at the last minute. It was very gratifying because I sent the script to Ruth Rendell and she replied that she was very pleased with it. I hope she wasn’t just being polite! She especially liked the idea I had, which was for the bridesmaid’s dress to be cleaned and returned to Senta, who uses it for a purpose I can’t tell you about without letting the whole thing out of the bag, but it was a genuinely good idea’ (Chabrol 2004: 5).

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L’Ivresse du pouvoir (2006): Not Following the Rules of the Game

In L’Ivresse du pouvoir, Isabelle Huppert plays Jeanne Charmant-Killman, a juge d’instruction preparing a case against company executives and civil servants whom she suspects of embezzling money from state-funded operations and facilitating backhanders to political leaders in former French colonies in Africa. The film is based on a real event, the trial of ELF (ELF Acquitaine), a French company investigated in 1994 in an enquiry led by the juge d’instruction, Eva Joly. Her enquiry uncovered widespread corruption. However, the topic of the film is power and corruption in general, as much as the ELF scandal. Chabrol says: I wanted to make a film about political absurdity. I was discussing this with my producer, Philippe Godeau, and he then lent me a book about the ELF affair. I read it and I asked myself ‘why not?’ Little by little, things fell into place. I had one main idea: not to make a film about the ELF affair or about the judge Eva Joly, but a story about a woman who was gradually affected by her own power. (Bruyn 2006: 18)

As co-screenwriter Odile Barski says, Jeanne’s investigation is one part of the story: ‘This film shows the real anarchy of the capitalist system. What is criticised here is an economic system. A  political system as well, but mainly economic’ (Gibert 2007). As Jean-Philippe Tessé observes, everything the film tells us was already known; instead, ‘the film continues the micro-history of France which was begun almost fifty years ago by the filmmaker, a history of social evil’ (2006: 28). Chabrol’s three films preceding L’Ivresse du pouvoir use overt quasiexpressionist techniques. Merci pour le chocolat, La Fleur du mal and La Demoiselle d’honneur are all variations of psychological melodrama which use as a central setting a large house, the décor of which provides Chabrol with opportunities for reviving the stylistic conventions of gothic melodrama. L’Ivresse du pouvoir differs from these films; it has a more neutral style. It makes limited use of stylistic excess and has fewer asserted elements. However, some

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of Chabrol’s familiar techniques are present; despite the limited space available in cramped rooms, the film contains several flaunted camera movements. For example, when Jeanne first arrives at the hospital and talks to Félix (Thomas Chabrol), the camera’s choreography is noticeable. A  long take presents the characters in profile as they move from left to right; it approaches them, releases them when they move, pans, then travels forwards and backwards, into and out of close framings. Also noteworthy is the travelling shot in the hospital that follows Jeanne as she looks at her husband (Robin Renucci) and then sees Humeau (François Berléand) in a wheelchair. Another good example of the film’s flaunted camera movements is the twominute shot used for the kitchen scene when Jeanne and Félix make tea. As they make tea and talk, the camera follows their movements at a speed that makes the camerawork noticeable. Another example is the overheard shot of Jeanne entering her office after the presiding judge Martino (Pierre Vernier) tells her to stop the investigation; the shot implies that she is cornered. The wide shot of Jeanne interviewing Humeau that includes Benoît (Yves Verhoeven) typing is also prominent. As Humeau’s solicitor looks at the photographs of the mistress dressed in Missoni, the film cuts to a wide shot behind Benoît at his desk. The shift in perspective is a surprise because the shot/reverse-shot cutting presents Jeanne and Humeau’s interview, until, without warning, the film moves to a new position, further away from Jeanne. It creates space to think about Jeanne’s behaviour as she reads out the bills Humeau paid for his mistress. The film enables a ‘light step backwards’, to use Chabrol’s phrase, one which allows us to scrutinize her behaviour from a distance. The last example of noticeable camerawork is the one-and-a-half minute scene in which Philippe wakes Jeanne on the sofa. This is a one-shot scene, which begins and ends on the printer. The symmetry is a familiar Chabrolian flourish, similar to the scene in Merci pour le chocolat that begins and ends on the computer game. One effect of the flaunted camera movements in L’Ivresse du pouvoir is that, as Deborah Thomas (2005) argues, the film invites complicity with the camera instead of the characters. The prominent camera movements increase the distance between the characters’ point of view and the film’s; they give the impression that the camera is creating scenes, rather than presenting them; they inhibit involvement with the characters at the same time as they invite complicity with the camera. They function as a form of signposting, as if the film is pointing out things for us; and they are expressionistic because they produce exaggerated, noticeable formal patterns.

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Chabrol wanted to make a film about political absurdity and the film contains absurdist elements; for example, the wordplay with names is a form of comic exaggeration in that the symbolism of the names is obvious and foregrounded.1 Huppert’s character is ‘Charmant-Killman’, nicknamed ‘the piranha’. The obviousness of her name is emphasized by the cut from Senator Descarts (Jacques Boudet) revealing her nickname to the tropical fish in a restaurant where Jeanne eats sushi. Jeanne Charmant-Killman’s counterpart in the ELF investigation was Eva Joly. Thus joli becomes charmant; as Sibaud (Patrick Bruel) jokes: ‘Did you send those flowers to charming Charmant?’ Meanwhile, Descarts’s name evokes the famous philosopher and suggests that he holds all the cards. Humeau’s solicitor is Parlebas (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) or ‘whispers’, Félix signifies happiness and Holéo (Philippe Duclos) is connected to oil; as Alain Masson observes, his surname has ‘a strong whiff of petrol’ (2006:  25).2 Masson also notes that Humeau evokes humus or hameau (hamlet); it also suggests humain or humeur. Sibaud, as Félix jokes, sounds like ‘si beau’, that is, ‘so handsome’. And the name of the unseen character is Delombre, or ‘de l’ombre’ suggesting he is in the shadows; both Benoît and Jeanne joke about his name (‘Delombre à l’ombre’ and ‘Delombre est au soleil’). Leblanc (Pierre-François Dumeniaud) is the white one, and the name of the company Jeanne is investigating is FMG, one letter away from ELF. These blatant gags imply political satire, as do the performances of the backstage manipulators. Jacques Boudet’s Descarts, a behind-the-scenes political kingpin, comes close to caricature. Descarts’s discussion with an advisor (Jean-Marie Winling) in his office emphasizes the comic grotesqueness of this pair of politicians trying to hamstring Jeanne by concocting ridiculous plans based on their misogynistic attitudes. The scene of comical villainy ends with an outrageous close-up of Descarts flicking his cigar ash into an ashtray, as if imagining Jeanne. The distinctive looking Dominique Daguier appears during the after-dinner scene where politicians and civil servants celebrate the end of Charmant-Killman’s enquiry. Masson suggests, ‘The accused are all in the form of caricatures’ (2006: 25). However, although the performances make the crooks almost caricatures, they retain plausibility. Chabrol says: Sometimes I make caricatures so the story will be sharper. But at the same time I also notice that one thinks they’re caricatures and then one day in the street one sees people who are much worse, who are caricatures of this caricature. Let’s say that these are people some of whose traits are more accentuated than others. (Yakir 1979: 6)

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Masson calls the film a ‘satire’ (2006: 25), but the film is almost a satire. Jeanne’s interviews with Holéo and with Boldi (Jean-François Balmer) are among the film’s funniest scenes, but the humour is awkward because their behaviour is all too believable. The film’s denunciation of corruption is scathing, but it presents it in a quasi-comic mode. It reveals the machinations of Descarts and his cronies as they thwart Jeanne’s investigation, but the film’s distancing devices make it hard to decide whether to laugh at these crooks. L’Ivresse du pouvoir exemplifies Chabrol’s incorporation of grotesque elements; its tone comes close to political satire, but it remains within the realms of mainstream political thrillers. As Clark says of Faulkner’s The Hamlet, the film portrays ‘the triumph of vice and folly’ (1991: 23). L’Ivresse du pouvoir ’s primary asserted symbol is a pair of red gloves worn by Jeanne in several scenes. The red gloves are in a visual relationship with other red items, including Jeanne’s handbag, the lettering for the title credits and the men’s red ribbons. All the men that Jeanne investigates and several other male characters in the film wear a ribbon on their jacket lapels. Humeau, Sibaud, Holéo and Boldi all wear the red ribbon that symbolizes they are Chevaliers of the Ordre national de la légion d’honneur. Descarts wears a tiny red rosette in his buttonhole, signifying that he is an Officier of the Légion d’honneur. Leblanc wears a grey ribbon and presiding judge Martino (Jeanne’s boss) has a blue ribbon which symbolizes his membership of the Ordre national du Mérite, a lower level order than the Légion d’honneur. These ribbons indicate that the men have received national honours, but they also symbolize their membership of an informal network, the establishment; at the same time, in this film, the display of the ribbons symbolizes pride and vanity as much as honour. Jeanne’s red gloves are set against the red ribbons. The gloves appear in several scenes. During Jeanne’s split-screen telephone conversation with Sibaud, Jeanne’s red-gloved hand is prominent. She wears them when she inspects Humeau’s house and when she arrests Sibaud in his office. At the end of her first meeting with Humeau and Parlebas, a close shot shows Jeanne dropping one of her red gloves on the floor. The film’s most striking image of the red gloves is the shot that starts Jeanne’s prison visit, a close-up of her red-gloved hand gripping the prison window bars. She is in control of Humeau’s imprisonment, but she is also inside, looking out through the bars. The red gloves also indicate Jeanne’s theatricality. As Huppert remarks, they express part of the character’s personality:

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It’s easier to imagine a well-dressed judge than a well-dressed cop: unlike the policeman, the judge has no need of anonymity, can afford to be easily identifiable. It’s an assertion of power and conviction. And of course a certain elegance gives Jeanne confidence as she faces the men she summons. (Huppert 2006: 7)

Like the red ribbons, the red gloves assert power in public; they signify status (they are expensive-looking leather gloves, worn for show not warmth). However, they are also the opposite of the ribbons because Jeanne bought them; nobody awarded them to her. On the ‘making-of ’ documentary, Eric de Montgolfier, a former chief prosecutor, asks Chabrol about Jeanne’s gloves: ‘One thing I didn’t understand was the red gloves. What did that mean? That her hands were covered in blood?’ (Gibert 2007). Chabrol remarks: ‘Isabelle even wanted us to call the film The Red Gloves, a title which had the advantage of conveying the fact that from the moment one exercises power against human beings, one’s hands grow red’ (Chabrol 2006: 4). At one level, Montgolfier’s interpretation is correct, but his interpretation highlights the blatancy of the symbolism. As in the previous examples discussed in this book, the obviousness of the red gloves’ symbolic meaning functions as a distancing device. The film’s genre is that of the political conspiracy thriller, seen in many films and television series. Tessé describes the film as ‘televisual’ (2006: 26) and the judicial setting of L’Ivresse du pouvoir resembles the French television series Engrenages (Spiral, 2005–12). Tessé’s remarks respond to the film’s lack of Chabrol’s usual expressionist features. Furthermore, two of the Engrenages actors feature in Chabrol’s film, Dominique Daguier and Philippe Duclos. In Engrenages, Daguier plays the unpleasant chief prosecuting judge, Machard. In L’Ivresse du pouvoir, he plays an unnamed powerful man. In Engrenages, Duclos plays a juge d’instruction, Roban. In L’Ivresse du pouvoir, Duclos plays Holéo. Both Engrenages and L’Ivresse du pouvoir expose corruption and backroom deals; both present the juges d’instruction as powerful, moralistic crusading figures who become intoxicated with their own power. However, the differences between the television series and the film are considerable. The former uses a conventional narrative structure with a readable style and a clear delineation of good and bad characters. Chabrol’s film has none of these things. L’Ivresse du pouvoir’s narrative structure combines conspiracy thriller conventions with art cinema ambiguity. For example, a marked turning point separates the film into two distinct halves; as Huppert says, ‘The movie derails, in a sense. It starts in one direction, but quickly moves in other directions and confuses us’ (Gibert 2007). L’Ivresse du pouvoir begins with a clear-cut opposition

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between protagonist (Jeanne, the investigating judge) and antagonist (Humeau, the embezzling company president). Their relationship and Jeanne’s investigation constitute the centre of the story for the first forty minutes. However, after Jeanne gives permission for Humeau’s hospitalization and once Jeanne’s car crashes, the film shifts away from Jeanne and Humeau. As Jeanne broadens her investigation to include Lange (Roger Dumas), Holéo, Boldi, Sibaud and Delombre, the film shows more of her relationship with her husband and the frustration of her enquiry by people more powerful than her. The narrative derailment takes place after Humeau breaks down in Jeanne’s office, saying ‘They all dumped me’. Jeanne agrees to Humeau’s hospitalization and the film marks this as the moment when the film changes direction. In a shot/reverse-shot sequence, Jeanne questions Humeau about his expenditure on his mistress. She asks him about René Lange; he replies: ‘He dumped me, like the others did.’ ‘What others?’ she asks. ‘Those I did favours for.’ She then holds up photographs as she says: ‘Delombre, Holéo, Boldi. They answered to you. They dumped you as well?’ ‘They all dumped me.’Jeanne responds: ‘c’est la règle du jeu’ (‘that’s how it goes’). In close-up, Humeau talks about prison and hearing the cries at night. He starts crying and she goes to the window. The film cuts to what looks like her point-of-view shot of a boat passing along the Seine. The music starts; the camera pulls back to include the back of her head as she gives permission for hospitalization. A close-up of Humeau shows him looking up; the film then cuts to a wide shot of the office. The camera pans left until it gets to the policeman sitting at the door fingering the handcuffs. He lowers them and the film fades to black. The film cuts to a cleaner coming into Jeanne’s office. Following this, Jeanne crashes her car; this begins the new chapter of the film and Jeanne’s life. Bodyguards are assigned to her and her relationship with her husband deteriorates. The narrative derailment is an example of the way that, unlike most political conspiracy thrillers, L’Ivresse du pouvoir lacks a strong cause-and-effect chain. The narrative tradition includes heroes, villains, causality and resolutions. Many mainstream films and television programmes channel emotion into individuals. Chabrol’s narrative films move the focus away from individuals and their actions. In L’Ivresse du pouvoir, as in many of Chabrol’s films, emotion is drained away from the representation of individuals. Most narrative films show individuals’ actions having predictable consequences. Crime fiction, in particular, offers multiple variations of individuals performing actions with foreseeable effects, doing things to resolve problems and solve mysteries. Unlike these, L’Ivresse du pouvoir’s narrative is unpredictable and its resolution ambiguous.

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Delorme (2006: 52) complains about the film’s uneven tone, but it is the narrative structure and the resulting ambiguity that are uneven rather than the tone. The film avoids establishing one position from which to judge Jeanne’s actions. It links scenes together, but in a mode that avoids creating a sense of cause and effect. Often a character in one scene mentions the name of a character who appears in the next scene, without explaining their role; when the film shows René Lange at home on the telephone, receiving news, we infer, of Jeanne’s accident, it comes after a scene in which Jeanne has shown Humeau a photograph of Lange and asked him if he knows him. In this, her last interview with Humeau, Jeanne’s mention of Lange and the other men who ‘dumped’ him introduces the second half of the film, during which Jeanne pursues Holéo, Boldi, Lange, Delombre and Sibaud. The last of these reintroduces Holéo when he tells his secretary that Holéo will stand in for him during the visit to the African country (‘He loves the heat’). Then, soon afterwards, Jeanne interviews Holéo, but his role remains unexplained. Another way that the film weakens causality is by withholding expected events; when Félix suggests to Jeanne that they spend his winnings on lunch, the film cuts to the shot of her red-gloved hand gripping the prison bars. When Jeanne suggests to Erika (Maryline Canto) that they inspect Humeau’s mistress’s apartment, the film cuts to Jeanne and Philippe in bed at night. The narrative structure of L’Ivresse du pouvoir comprises lots of short scenes, joined together in a way that blocks causality. One example is the meeting in a bar between Sibaud, Holéo and Boldi. Holéo reprimands Sibaud for staying in Paris, as opposed to going ‘down there’ himself, that is, to les pays francophone in Africa. They tell Sibaud that the CIA was there; ‘Everyone was down there, in fact.’ Sibaud replies: ‘Look, I know what to say. And I know what I’m doing.’ The scene then fades out. The bar scene invokes illegality, shows that the three men work together in some way and introduces Jeanne’s next interviewee, Boldi, played by Jean-François Balmer to resemble the violent, Tosca-loving criminal he plays in Chabrol’s Rien ne va plus. Dispersed throughout the film are three short scenes of Jeanne and Philippe in the middle of the night. In each scene Jeanne gets out of bed or is already out of bed. Each scene includes a track forward to the bed. The repetition of scene and camera movement highlights the escalation of the couple’s marital problems. The first bedroom scene takes place after Humeau has been arrested. Philippe wakes to find Jeanne watching footage from a Missoni fashion show. After Jeanne returns to bed, a wide two shot moves forward to a close two shot.

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She asks: ‘No kiss?’ and he leans forward to kiss her, but then pulls her closer to him. She rejects his approach, asking ‘Tonight? You want to? How about tomorrow? We’ll be less tired?’ They are silent, until she says: ‘I love you, you know.’ He says good night and they roll away from each other. The second bedroom scene depicts Jeanne going to the kitchen; as she leaves the bed, the camera tracks forward to her husband, who lifts his head but says nothing. In the kitchen, Jeanne swigs from a bottle of vodka. The third scene offers repetition with variation; this time Philippe gets out of bed first. Again, a track forward approaches the couple’s bed. Accompanied by melancholy music, Philippe wanders around his flat, speaks to the guard, gets angry, then returns to the bedroom and confronts Jeanne. They argue and she leaves, going to her office at 4 am and finding that it has been vandalized. From her office, the film cuts back to her apartment, where her husband takes out a pistol and holds it. Additional blocks on causality include the film’s vagueness about when events take place or how long the investigation lasts; Jeanne’s interviews run into each other and scenes often end after a question. For example, the short scene in Jeanne’s office after the office has been vandalized ends after Benoît asks whether she is looking for a new apartment and if the cafetière is his. One of Jeanne’s interviews with Humeau ends with her asking ‘How do you justify these expenses?’ The film then cuts to the television interview with Sibaud, Humeau’s replacement. Scenes often end abruptly, as when Jeanne inspects Humeau’s family home, which ends with Jeanne saying ‘Back to the Palais’. The film then cuts to her darkened office. The office’s dim light implies that she and Humeau have been talking for a long time, but the film withholds indications about how much time has passed, whether it is that evening or another day. This scene also ends after a question. Humeau becomes frustrated with Jeanne’s questioning and stands up: ‘Why are you hounding me?’ She replies: ‘To set an example, once and for all. You won’t come out too badly. And it will do the nation good.’ The film cuts to Humeau: ‘You know what I think?’ Jeanne says: ‘Tell me.’ However, the film conceals what Humeau thinks; instead, it cuts between them a few more times, the music begins to play and the film moves to the next scene, the second of Jeanne’s three sleepless nights with her husband. In many films, scenes that show people making decisions and giving orders connect with scenes that focus on a protagonist. This type of film offers all the information that is needed for the stories and characters to appear plausible. L’Ivresse du pouvoir appears as a typical investigative drama and the film’s narration appears to be omniscient, jumping around from scene to scene, character

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to character, but this false omniscience tricks us. Chabrol’s approach modifies familiar genre conventions. Most crime fiction answers its narrative questions. Art cinema or modernist cinema often has unanswered narrative questions. However, in those types of films the narratives themselves are often so loose that one is prepared to accept ellipses and absences.3L’Ivresse du pouvoir combines the ellipses and unanswered questions of art cinema with the conventions of the investigative crime genre. The film begins by giving us what looks like the commanding narrative overview of the conventional conspiracy thriller, but it turns into a narrational viewpoint that is closer to Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) or Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961). Instead of offering narrative omniscience, the film makes us feel that we are missing information. Tessé describes the film’s stylistic interventions as both ‘calculated and enigmatic’. The result, Tessé argues, is ‘a harmonious sensuality born of this soft mix of directorial pointillism and the flowing rhythm of the narrative’ (2006:  28). Tessé is right to point to Chabrol’s combination of foregrounded style and narrative ambiguity for the film leaves several questions unanswered. It never clarifies who tampered with the brakes in Jeanne’s car or if someone did this; in hospital, she says that Humeau arranged it, but her husband thinks she fell asleep at the wheel. The policeman does not follow up his question about why Philippe jumped from a window if he had a gun in the house and the film ends before Philippe regains consciousness. After the discovery of the break-in, nobody mentions an investigation into who vandalized her office, which appears clean and tidy in the next scene. The presentation of Jeanne’s investigation also elides connective material; the film never reveals, for example, whether Humeau betrays his colleagues, or Holéo does, or Boldi. Other questions are posed: Who is giving orders to the presiding judge? What is Lange’s role? How do Descarts and Leblanc fit in? Why does Benoît betray Jeanne? All remain unanswered. A clue to Chabrol’s intentions appears in the ‘making-of ’ documentary. Cowriter Odile Barski describes Jeanne’s character: She has a desire for vengeance, for all the humiliation that her mother had to deal with. Her mother was a cleaning lady for rich people and one day she fell off a ladder and broke something. She has real issues. She has issues with men. She has issues with society. (Gibert 2007)

Illustrating this explanatory didacticism, Barski speaks while a scene of Jeanne visiting her mother at work plays in the background. The scene depicts Jeanne’s mother working as a cleaner and, therefore, indicates Jeanne’s social background

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with stark clarity. But neither this scene nor any like it exist in the finished film. The absence of such a scene complicates Jeanne’s motives, prevents them being just a desire for social revenge. Instead, the character’s motivation is opaque and ambiguous. In his car, Descarts says Jeanne fails to understand ‘la règle du jeu’. His companion says: ‘As a student she boarded with the Charmant family.’ Descarts adds: ‘I heard she cleaned their house. Must have done all right since she married their son.’ The film presents this information about Jeanne as malicious, partial and unverified gossip from her enemies. It never confirms whether Jeanne boarded with the Charmants when she was a law student, or anything about Jeanne’s family background. The film maintains its ambiguity. L’Ivresse du pouvoir also uses unusual transitions to create other ambiguities. The first of these is the fade to black with Chabrol’s credit placed straight after Humeau drops his trousers. The placement mocks his credentials and indicates that tonal disruption will be part of this film. Another odd transition takes place when the film cuts from Félix lying on his bed after Jeanne orders pizzas to a shot of models wearing Missoni clothes. The transition is surprising because it cuts off exposition about Jeanne, Philippe and Félix’s domestic arrangements; the film moves on, rather than showing them eating or chatting about her case. The scene featuring Sibaud on television also ends oddly. While Sibaud is on television, Philippe is changing light bulbs. Félix enters and puts down a copy of Paris Match on top of a book that is on the television. A close-up reveals that the cover of Paris Match has a photograph of Jeanne on it, wearing her red gloves. Jeanne comes in and the scene plays out, with Jeanne picking up Paris Match and replacing it. The scene ends with Philippe moving the magazine to retrieve the book beneath it, Jean-Hugues Oppel’s French Tabloids. There are also many ellipses in the film.4 The film cuts, for instance, from Erika and Jeanne discussing Delombre to the office party where they celebrate his arrest and joke about him swallowing his SIM card. The ellipses, odd transitions, abrupt scene endings all produce the sensation that the film withholds something, a scene or information. The story uses the conventions of a recognizable genre, the political thriller, but with bits missing and, as Tessé observes, a foregrounded style that is far more prominent than in most mainstream thrillers. The film ends with Jeanne’s failure. The lead into the pessimistic conclusion begins with Humeau’s release from prison, after which Jeanne arrests Sibaud at FMG. Jeanne next appears at home, anxious and isolated. Following this, Jeanne and Erika discuss Delombre’s arrest, then celebrate it, joking about his

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swallowing the SIM card. The after-dinner garden scene that follows shows Descarts, Leblanc, Lange and two others celebrating their success in blocking Jeanne’s investigation. The two others are an older man (Dominique Daguier) and a younger man (Raphaël Neal). Following this scene, Jeanne’s boss, Martino, removes her from the case. The final scene is of Jeanne at the hospital with Erika and Félix, attending her husband, who has jumped from a window. Several things about this concluding sequence suggest the story’s circularity and the continuation of the system that Jeanne has been investigating. The circularity is emphasized through the arrest of two chief executives at FMG. At the start, Humeau is imprisoned; at the end, Humeau is released just before his replacement is arrested. The film dissolves from a close-up of Humeau scratching his neck to a shot of the tall building that was once his headquarters. At the start, Humeau walks out of his office, takes the lift to the ground floor and walks from foreground to background across the foyer. The film presents his arrest from inside. When Jeanne comes to arrest Sibaud, she walks from background to foreground across the foyer. The camera set-up is the same, but the camera movement is reversed so that the camera travels backwards when Jeanne goes to the lifts. The garden scene signifies the persistence of power. Five men drink brandy and smoke cigars to celebrate their blocking of Jeanne’s investigation. Descarts says: ‘We’re all in the same boat, and we’ve hit a storm. But the wind is dropping, and the ship has held up rather well’, later adding:  ‘The group may have been gobbled up, but our structure is intact.’ The men look unconcerned; the scene implies that their power continues operating beyond Jeanne’s reach. The film has already shown Descarts, Leblanc and Lange, but the two others are anonymous men of power. Daguier’s comments and his memorable appearance are so full of self-satisfaction that they border on the satirical; the young man, meanwhile, symbolizes the transmission of power to the next generation. Jeanne’s investigation gets nowhere near Descarts, and the five scenes featuring him symbolize his power. The civil servants, politicians and businessmen who appear includes those whose role and identity the film obscures. Descarts is a senator and Leblanc seems to be a lower-level politician or civil servant, but the film never explains the precise jobs of Holéo, Boldi and Lange nor does it identify the cigar-smoking bald middle-aged man, with whom Descarts cooks up a scheme to give Jeanne an assistant, while Daguier and Neal’s characters in the garden scene remain anonymous and undetected by Jeanne. Others who remain

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unidentified are the two men in the car (John Arnold and Michel Scourneau) with Descarts and Leblanc and the unseen man in the lift with Sibaud. These men indicate the backstage negotiations that are taking place as various people try to stop Jeanne’s investigation. When the film cuts to these men, they are like gods on Mount Olympus; they represent corrupt power in the abstract. Jeanne’s boss removes her from the case. When this happens, Jeanne realizes that the people Martino describes as ‘vipers and scorpions’ have blocked her investigation; though she is a juge d’instruction, Jeanne stops because she is trapped and the film ends with her defeat. The film shows Jeanne becoming intoxicated with her own power. The title was translated for a UK release as A Comedy of Power. The generality of that title is a good substitute for the more literal intoxication or drunkenness of power. The title refers to the power wielded by the politicians, civil servants and businessmen, but also to that wielded by Jeanne. This was Chabrol’s aim: The film’s title applies equally to Jeanne: she pursues an idealised justice, but the power she embodies intoxicates her. Doesn’t she say exultingly that the examining judge is the most powerful figure in France? Conversely, I wanted Humeau to be rather pathetic, above all when we see him stuck in his chair in the hospital. For me, the ideal was that at the end of the film these two characters would feel pity for each other. At that moment, she realises the futility of the whole affair. (Chabrol 2006: 4)

The interviewer states: ‘You link the love of power to money, but it must be recognized that for some people power first brings first of all a kind of erotic intoxication that transforms them deeply’. Chabrol replies: ‘It’s true. What’s terrible with power is that it effectively intoxicates those who become attached to it. This means that it quickly becomes impossible for them to see things as they are. The mechanics are quite childish. (Alion 2006a: 78). For the real juge d’instruction who led the ELF enquiry, Eva Joly, this was a problem with Chabrol’s film. On 16 March 2006, three weeks after the film’s release, Le Monde published an article by Joly in which she criticizes Chabrol for producing a film that shows everyone as guilty of something, writing, ‘That’s exactly what a part of the establishment wanted to see’ (Joly 2006). Joly criticizes the film for implying that Jeanne becomes intoxicated with her own power, despite fighting corruption. Elisabeth Lequeret similarly writes: Chabrol’s latest opus is a theoretical fable on power and its abuses. The intoxication of power in question is less a matter of a bunch of corrupt businessmen operating with complete impunity than the hubris of one little judge. (2006: 14)

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To an extent, Lequeret is correct. Jeanne comes across as arrogant and cold. She is hostile to Sibaud when she seizes his computer and files, and she appears to revel in her power when she searches Humeau’s house, sarcastic with him as if enjoying her power over this wealthy man. Nothing suggests that jealousy motivates her intoxication, but she is hostile when she interviews suspects. When she asks Boldi, who is chewing gum, if he can talk with his mouth full, her tone is that of a sarcastic school principal reprimanding a wayward pupil. These things suggest Joly is right: Jeanne becomes intoxicated with power, sacrifices her marriage and fails to reach the political puppet masters after catching middlemen like Boldi and Holéo or executives like Humeau and Sibaud. She tells her husband ‘they won’t get away with this believe me’, but they do get away with it. However, the film refrains from portraying Jeanne as a ‘Robespierre in petticoats’, as one interviewer suggests (Chabrol 2006: 4).5 The film shows the personal cost for Jeanne. The alterations in her appearance and behaviour come after the car crash. For Tessé, the changes in Jeanne’s appearance mark the narrative derailment:  ‘The real coup de théâtre of the film is not the indictment, the search or the judge’s husband’s depression, but the judge’s sudden change of hairstyle, which cuts the narrative in two’ (Tessé 2006:  28). Her interviews with Humeau begin with her telling him that he cannot smoke in her office, but when she questions him about his Swiss bank accounts she herself is smoking. When she interviews Holéo, Jeanne looks tired and run down. She also appears as vulnerable at times; for example, when she leaves home at four o’clock in the morning after arguing with her husband, and in two brief scenes in the concluding sequence of her alone in her new flat: first, when the lights go out when she is in the shower; then when she is at home eating yoghurt on the sofa. By the time, Jeanne meets Humeau in the hospital corridor, they both look like victims of the process in which they have been involved. They have reached a point where they recognize each other as equals as much as antagonists. Their encounter provides a satisfying ending without a full resolution.6 Félix (Thomas Chabrol) prevents Chabrol’s film from being depressing. Félix’s friendship softens Jeanne and provides another perspective on her. He has a humorous, accepting attitude and, like her husband, he comes from the upper classes, that is, the class of people she is investigating. In the hospital, Félix says: ‘I’ve had a feeling all along. I hate to say it, but I know them. The big scams are elsewhere.’ A good friend to Jeanne, Félix understands the value of her work and, unlike her husband, he is uninvolved. Their relationship is ambiguous; Jeanne and Félix almost flirt, but Félix’s loyalty to Jeanne offers reassurance

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about Jeanne’s character. Félix is also realistic in the advice he offers Jeanne when her bravado implies her intoxication. The film offers an example of her bravado in her new flat when she tells Félix that she has had Boldi arrested and aims to uncover the Swiss bank accounts. Félix responds: ‘They’ll never let you poke around. Too risky.’ She replies: ‘I have certain powers you know.’ He offers her more advice: ‘The powers you’re granted.’ ‘I don’t care’, she says. Earlier, in the kitchen, he tells Jeanne: ‘That group has often been accused of bankrolling friendly heads of state or opposition leaders, sometimes both. That’s the real scandal.’ Félix comes from the upper class, but has abandoned his civil servant training at ENA, the ‘Ecole Nationale d’Administration’, a school for senior civil servants. Félix’s decision to quit the prestigious civil servant training and his contempt for what they do there indicates his scepticism about the class to which the men whom Jeanne questions belong. Instead, he writes crossword puzzles and plays poker with the rich. His poker playing is indicative of his relaxed attitude and it provides material for an effective coda. His comments to Jeanne when they first talk guide her eventual decision to accept removal from the case: ‘Nothing is serious. Everything is tragic. But I can still love life.’7 The film closes on their conversation. He explains that he won the car with ‘three Jacks against two pairs, aces high’. She exclaims ‘What a world!’ He asks what she is going to do, praising her first: ‘You cleaned up good.’ But she responds: ‘You’re naïve nephew. There’s still a lot of dirt, left and right.’ He asks, ‘Will you keep going?’ She answers, ‘To hell with them’. Like La Fleur du mal , L’Ivresse du pouvoir criticizes economic and political elites, but it uses different means. Showing the upper classes at home, La Fleur du mal tricks us into sympathizing with two female murderers, whose cover-ups preserve the status quo. L’Ivresse du pouvoir confronts the political and industrial elite; however, it represents a recent case mythologically, rather than presenting a historical record, hence the wordplay with the names or the cutting away to Descarts and his cronies as if they are gods playing with mortals, hence also the differences between Joly and Jeanne. Joly is Norwegian and worked as an au pair ; Huppert’s Jeanne is French and the film contains nothing to indicate her social background, except Descarts’s malicious gossip. The cool elegance associated with Huppert’s star persona helps characterize Jeanne. At one level, the circularity of the film suggests stalemate:  nothing has changed, power is maintained, Jeanne is defeated, yet L’Ivresse du pouvoir offers a lucid insight into the way that power is maintained.8 It embodies

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Robin Wood’s comments about Fritz Lang’s American films: ‘If the protagonist is trapped, the spectator is set free’ (Wood 1988: 91). Chabrol’s film shows Jeanne’s moral compromises, placing her in an ambiguous position between the pursuit of justice and vengeance; it shows how power comes to intoxicate her, but, for all her faults, Jeanne never becomes unjust in her pursuit of justice.

Notes 1 Delorme (2006: 52) also notes this. 2 Blottière (2006: 30) also notes the connection between Holéo and oil. 3 Wilson discusses this in Narration in Light, writing of modernist films, ‘In these instances, although standard aspects of a classical narrative apparatus are invoked, the apparatus is either shown to break down (Persona) or it is never really assembled in the first place (Last Year at Marienbad )’ (Wilson 1986: 42). 4 Masson (2006: 25) also notes this. 5 Lequeret (2006: 15) also describes Jeanne as a ‘Robespierre in skirts’. 6 Chabrol says that the Jeanne/Humeau relationship ‘was founded on the relation between Eva Joly and Loïk Le Floch-Prigent. Their relationship was not good, but it ended up with both of them having regrets’ (Alion 2006: 77). 7 As Bégaudeau (2006: 89) observes, Félix’s attitude, epitomized in these comments, makes him a stand-in for Chabrol, and not just because Chabrol’s son, Thomas, plays Félix. 8 Romney describes it as ‘a lose-lose outcome’ which is ‘defiantly un-Hollywoodien’ (2008: 58).

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La Fille coupée en deux (2007): Killing the Beast

La Fille coupée en deux is based on a 1906 crime in which millionaire playboy Harry K. Thaw shot architect Stanford White in Madison Square Garden. Thaw was married to White’s former mistress, the model, chorus girl and, later, film actress, Evelyn Nesbit. As Chabrol (2009) acknowledges, these events had been depicted in two previous films: The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955, Richard Fleischer) and Ragtime (1981, Milos Forman).1 In the 1955 film, Farley Granger plays the rich disturbed husband and Ray Milland plays the attractive older man. La Fille coupée en deux stays close to the plot, theme and sentiment of Fleischer’s film, but, when asked if he considers his film a remake, Chabrol replies: ‘Not at all. If I hadn’t talked about it, most people would probably not have made the connection with The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing’ (Eisenreich and Valens 2007: 13). Chabrol and co-writer Cécile Maistre transpose the storyline from 1906 New York to 2007 Lyon: I wanted a city which had a certain status. Lyon has a status: in the past, with the silk manufacturers; now, with the pharmaceutical products. It makes things believable. As I wanted to play on the difference between appearances and reality, in the mealtime scenes, I chose never to show people actually eating. I really wanted that. Likewise, at the swingers’ club, we never actually see any sex take place. (Eisenreich and Valens 2007: 13)

Chabrol and Maistre (who also plays Cécile, the quick-witted barmaid who works in the swingers’ club) change the character of the young woman. In Fleischer’s film, she is a model, dancer and actress, as the real Evelyn Nesbit was; in La Fille coupée en deux, she is a weather announcer on a local television channel. Like Joan Collins’s Evelyn Nesbit, Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier) is well known, but in a smaller, more provincial setting. Furthermore, Sagnier’s Gabrielle is neither as young nor as naïve as Collins’s Nesbit. Gabrielle is twentyeight, whereas Nesbit was seventeen or sixteen when she met White. Unlike Collins’s Nesbit, Gabrielle is sharp and clever.

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Chabrol’s colleague at Cahiers du cinéma, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, reviewed Fleischer’s film for its French release in 1957. Doniol-Valcroze comments on the fates of Stanford White, Harry K. Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit: ‘Everything in this story had the air of ambiguity and scandal’ (Doniol-Valcroze 1957: 59). He suggests that the victim of the affair was White (1957: 59). Fleischer’s film gives this impression; Milland portrays White as a serial philanderer who falls in love with Evelyn Nesbit, yet who also loves his wife. As Doniol-Valcroze points out, Nesbit is credited with having collaborated on the production, so presumably the film represents something resembling her point of view. Yet Doniol-Valcroze defends Fleischer’s treatment of a bowdlerized script: Fleischer, who is no fool (and he proved that with The Narrow Margin and Violent Saturday), has resigned himself to the rose-tinted version given to him by [producer and co-writer] Charles Brackett. He has dealt with the film using discretion, ellipses and insinuations. It is good work, trim, conscientious, sober and elegant. The fact remains that the strong points of the film are those scenes where, despite everything, a certain audacity emerges and, especially, in two scenes with the swing:  that in which Evelyn sits in it for the first time and that at the end in the music hall in Atlantic City. (DoniolValcroze 1957: 60).

Doniol-Valcroze is right to point to the efficacy of the two swing scenes:  the first hints at the decadence of White’s private rooms and the second exposes the exploitation of Evelyn as an objectified spectacle in a theatrical recreation of their affair. In this, Fleischer’s film has some similarities to Lola Montes (1955, Max Ophuls), in that it shows the process by which a woman’s sexuality becomes objectified and exploited by wealthy older lovers and a public willing to see a titillating reconstruction of her affairs. Chabrol’s version of the story places more emphasis on themes of illusionmaking, performance and representation. The film introduces Gabrielle on a screen-within-a-screen as she presents the weather report, looking straight at us. When the film cuts from a close-up of Gabrielle to a medium long shot of her in profile, it reveals her standing in front of a green screen, with lighting and camera equipment around her, one of several motifs that relate to the blurring of boundaries between illusion and reality. As Chabrol says, ‘What interested me is that this is a world of trickery and illusion that absolutely reflects the world of appearances and pretences in which these characters move’ (Chabrol 2009: 6).2 Of the characters, Chabrol says:

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They see themselves through a distorting lens, as most of the time they are terribly self-indulgent. This is even truer in the case of Benoît Magimel’s character, who is crazier than the others: he’s genuinely schizophrenic, torn between innocence and guilt. Did he kill his brother in the bath when he was a child? We will never know. (Chabrol 2009: 6)

Television is just one of a range of references to representations and illusions, real and fake identities, double lives and social performances; parts of the film imply that everything is fake. The film’s tone is neither ironic nor tragic; the music contributes to the ambivalent tone. Chabrol comments: Above all, I  didn’t want any lyrical or romantic outbursts during the film, [I wanted] the exact opposite of the aria at the beginning. Thus he [composer Matthieu Chabrol] had to start with serial, atonal rhythms that establish a rather cold atmosphere. In fact, I  hoped to appeal to the viewer’s head rather than heart. (Chabrol 2009: 8)

Kate Stables echoes actor Philippe Duclos’s comment about Chabrol’s films going back and forth between ‘scary and funny’ when she admits that Le Fille coupée en deux prompts an uneasy hesitation between responses: ‘So mercilessly detached is the film’s initial tone, with its sculptured dialogue and stereotypescraping characters, that you’re unsure whether it’s a comedy or thriller’ (2009: 66). Instead of emotional involvement, the film’s uneasy tone encourages ambiguous responses. La Fille coupée en deux produces its distancing by asserting several elements of style. The film also contains several ellipses, the most obvious of which concerns what happens in the swingers’ club. These ellipses speed up the narrative and create ambiguity. Chabrol comments: The film is called La Fille coupée en deux, so I wanted the idea of rupture to be present at all times. Very often, scenes end before their natural conclusion, or, on the other hand, go on longer than you would expect. (2009: 7)

As well as ellipses, the film contains overt narrative intertwining such as its presentation of Paul’s (Benoît Magimel’s) courtship of Gabrielle and Charles’s (François Berléand) courtship; for example, the film dissolves from Gabrielle taking Charles’s book out at the restaurant to Charles going to the swingers’ club. It then cuts from Charles in the club back to Gabrielle and Paul leaving the restaurant. To highlight the intertwining, the film uses coincidences such

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as Gabrielle receiving two bunches of flowers in her dressing room at the same time, one from Paul and one from Charles. Both men use the flowers to apologize, Paul for hurting her physically and Charles for hurting her emotionally. By intertwining the two men’s relationships with Gabrielle, the film compares their treatment of her. The intertwining accelerates with the conjoined lunch scenes. The film moves from alternating between Paul and Charles’s courtships of Gabrielle to a comparison of Gabrielle’s lunch with her mother (Marie Bunel) and Charles’s lunch with Dona (Valéria Cavalli) and Capucine (Mathilda May). The move from one lunch to another is achieved by cutting from one menu to another:  Gabrielle opens her large blue menu so that it covers her face, almost filling the frame; the film then cuts to a large white menu, which Charles is holding in front of his face. The matching of menus is a discernible intervention, an obvious device, and, at first glance, it looks as if Chabrol is drawing attention to the apparent contrast between what Charles tells Gabrielle and what he tells his wife. The cut from one lunch to another also proposes a comparison between what Gabrielle tells her mother and what we see, which is that Charles appears to have no intention of leaving his wife. This combination appears to suggest that Charles has lied to Gabrielle. However, the film avoids confirming Charles’s deception of her. It never shows Gabrielle and Charles discussing their future, which she describes to her mother, nor does it show Charles and Dona discussing their marriage. The film never reveals what Dona knows about Charles’s affair with Gabrielle or his attendance at the swingers’ club. It leaves her attitude to him ambiguous. Nor does the film confirm Charles’s plans. He begins as an experienced seducer, but evidence suggests he falls in love with Gabrielle. The film invites speculations about what takes place, but without confirming any one interpretation. The film puts us in the position of a television viewer or newspaper reader, excluded from the privacy of intimate relationships. Another form of distancing in La Fille coupée en deux is achieved using doubles. As Philippe Rouyer points out, ‘we are familiar with Chabrol’s taste for games of symmetry and mirror effects’ (2007: 7). Several characters lead a double life, respectable in their professional lives yet members of a swingers’ club, which, when publicized on the regional news, prompts a snigger from the newsreader. Charles signs his novels ‘Saint-Denis’, though his real name is ‘Denis’. Charles and Paul are doubles, in that both are Gabrielle’s lovers and the film hints without confirming that both Charles and Paul treat Gabrielle as a

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sexual object. The film also hints that Charles and Paul have both had childhood experiences of abuse. In the television studio’s dressing room, Bernard, an old school friend, jokes with Charles about their teacher ‘Grégoriot’, and Charles implies that this teacher abused him. At lunch with his mother (Caroline Silhol) and sisters, Paul says: ‘Remember Mr Philipott?’, before implying that his tutor abused him. Capucine and Dona are doubles. In the scenes in which they appear together, Capucine wears black and Dona wears white. This extends to the sunbathing scene in which Capucine wears a black swimming costume and Dona wears a white bikini. The opposition of colours is most conspicuous when Capucine arrives at Charles and Dona’s modern house (the opposite of the Gaudens’s family home). Charles is also doubled with Gabrielle’s uncle; the latter’s first name is the same as Charles’s surname: Denis. Saint-Denis and Uncle Denis (Etienne Chicot) are doubles in their names and as older men who take an interest in Gabrielle. Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze observes that Uncle Denis escorting Gabrielle upstairs at his hotel echoes Charles Saint-Denis escorting Gabrielle upstairs at the swingers’ club; both scenes include a bantering conversation with a female receptionist; drinks are offered in both scenes; stairs are climbed in both scenes. Denis and Saint-Denis, Dousteyssier-Khoze argues, constitute ‘a Chabrolian version of Jekyll and Hyde’ (2013: 53). The use of mirrors highlights the doubling. Charles and Gabrielle’s first conversation takes place via a mirror, when she enters his dressing room. After Bernard enters, Gabrielle remains visible in the mirror, positioned between the real Charles and the reflected Charles. The camera pans left with Bernard, but includes Gabrielle’s reflection; she looks at Charles as she leaves. Mirror reflections are used when Paul invites Gabrielle for dinner outside the television studio. The scene is staged in front of a wall faced with polished metal that reflects their images. Mirrors are also the foremost piece of décor in the wedding dress shop scene, when they present additional figurations of the characters; at points in this scene, there are three mirror reflections of Gabrielle and Charles.3 This scene foregrounds the anguish that Gabrielle and Charles express, the mirrors visualizing the ways in which Gabrielle is torn between Paul and Charles, and Charles torn between Gabrielle and Dona. Names are also used for puns, wordplay and as allusions to other fictions, including Chabrol’s films; as in other Chabrol films, the play with names is both amusing and distancing. La Fille coupée en deux is the last of Chabrol’s films in which a character called Paul kills a character called Charles, the first being

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Les Cousins. Paul and Charles are Chabrol’s long-standing doubles and he uses them to express the tension between liberty and violence, with the liberal man of culture positioned against the disturbed right-winger; as Agnès Goute says, the original model, Paul Gégauff, was Chabrol’s ‘evil twin’ (Gibert 2011). La Fille coupée en deux hints that Charles is a stand-in for Chabrol when Capucine tells the bookseller: ‘That’s his biggest stroke of genius. The gourmet reputation. Wherever he goes, everyone bends over backwards and brings out that extraspecial bottle of wine.’ Gabrielle’s surname, ‘Deneige’, permits several bits of wordplay, for example, when characters comment on her being ‘blanc comme la neige’. In addition, when Charles tells Capucine and Dona about Paul’s kidnapping of a girl some years earlier he uses the same phrase: ‘Le jeune Gaudens s’en est sorti blanc comme la neige’, or ‘he came out of it as white as snow’. Along with Gabrielle Deneige referring to Snow White, the film refers to another fairytale. As Capucine follows Charles into his house, she says that he is ‘quite the local lord’. He jokes that he is the ‘Marquis de Carabas’; she quips, ‘Marquis de Sade, more like’. The Marquis de Carabas is the fictional nobleman, invented by the eponymous cat in Charles Perraut’s Puss in Boots. By naming himself after a non-existent nobleman in a fairytale, Charles indicates the limits of his power. Lorbach, the surname of the solicitor played by the director’s son Thomas Chabrol, is an anagrammatic inversion of Chabrol.4 Lorbach has a directorial function because he manipulates Gabrielle, directs her appearance at the trial and thus contributes to the story’s outcome. The priest’s name, Monsignor Godeau, evokes the producer’s name, Patrick Godeau. Other asserted elements include striking shots and prominent sound design. Chabrol uses striking shots to introduce a vague sensation of something being off-kilter or to alert us to something. One example is the shot of Gabrielle in the hotel room in Lisbon after she tells Paul that she will marry him. He says: ‘I’ve got to call mother. I’m calling her.’ He then walks out of shot. The film cuts to a shot behind Gabrielle, which cranes up above her. The shot conveys the oddness of Paul’s behaviour and Gabrielle’s unease. Another striking shot is that which presents Paul’s approach to the stage at the association banquet, just before he shoots Charles. Halfway across the floor, he walks behind a table while the camera goes in front, separating from him, then swooping around to pick him up again; the swooping accelerated movement transmits a strong sense of instability in the presentation of Paul’s actions. A good example of prominent sound design occurs in the scene of Charles and Gabrielle kissing in bed. The scene is constructed so that it appears as if

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the first chime of a church bell intrudes on Charles’s thoughts, prompting him to move away from her. The church bells evoke time pressures: on her to get to work and on him because he is older than her. The church bells also allude to his marriage and social and religious conventions. At the same time, thunder rumbles, the thunder contradicting Gabrielle’s first two weather reports, which predicted warm weather. By the time she gets to work, the rain pours down; her third report comes after a shot of rain outside the studio: ‘And this unexpected weather may be with us all day tomorrow and even Monday.’ The church bells and thunder are obvious as symbols, yet their symbolic function is exaggerated. They are contrivances yet effective because the sound design is more than foreshadowing; it offers a sly nod to the audience. The sound design’s obviousness is another of Chabrol’s light steps back from the material. Another piece of ironic distancing occurs at the film’s start. The opening sequence uses the last two minutes of Leonie Rysanek singing ‘In questa reggia’ from Puccini’s Turandot.5 However, the aria is interrupted before it ends by the car radio being switched off. Chabrol’s director’s credit appears on-screen as a hand reaches for the radio. The film opens, therefore, with a romantic sound and an assertion of Chabrol’s control, as if the on-screen hand belongs to the off-screen director. For Chabrol, the aria intimates romantic tragedy, then interrupts it: I wanted to set the audience off on the wrong track: right away we are plunged into the very romantic world of Puccini, and then we leave it just as suddenly as the music on the car radio is switched off. Visually, it’s expressed by the abrupt transition from the blood-red to reality – a reality stripped of all romanticism. (Chabrol 2009: 5)

Chabrol’s description of the credit sequence’s combination of the red filter, the opera and its abrupt interruption summarizes well the director’s disruptive aesthetic strategies. Like the other films studied for this book, La Fille coupée en deux interrupts spectatorial involvement. The primary asserted symbol in La Fille coupée en deux is the magic trick of Gabrielle being cut in two with which the film ends. Chabrol adapts his theatrical finale from Fleischer’s The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, in which Evelyn Nesbit performs on stage in a red velvet swing. Like Fleischer, Chabrol ends his film with a symbolic theatrical performance, a magic show, in which Gabrielle plays the magician’s assistant, sawn in half on stage. In the lead-up to the finale, the film shows: the exterior of the court; the smirking newsreader on television;

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Gabrielle’s mother turning off the television; the newspaper headline; the newsreader again and then the solicitor on television; Paul in prison; his mother, Madame Gaudens, dismissing Gabrielle. The film then builds towards its finale with Gabrielle meeting her uncle outside the theatre. Two scenes in this sequence merit brief remarks. Both reveal the Gaudens family and their solicitor manipulating Gabrielle. The first shows Paul treating Gabrielle in a way that emphasizes his rationality. It begins with Gabrielle driving along a country road in her red sports car. She arrives outside the prison and joins a queue of eight other visitors, seven of whom are women. The film cuts to inside a cell. A shot begins on a rough plastered wall in shadows. The cell door opens off-screen, allowing light in and creating the shadow of a guard’s head on the wall. His voice says: ‘Gaudens, your wife is in the visiting room.’ At this point, the camera pans left and down, past Paul’s pictures and paraphernalia, to find him on his bed, one arm behind his head. When the pan downwards reaches Paul, it moves forward into a big close-up. Paul turns his head, so that it looks as if he is staring at us:  ‘I don’t want to see her any more.’ This shot reveals Paul’s cold-blooded refusal to see his wife and it does so expressionistically with the shadow of the guard’s head, the slow pan to Paul and the spots of light which illuminate him. The dispersal of the spots of light on his face and body is regular, suggesting their origin is a grill in the wall opposite. But, as the camera gets closer, it reveals that one spot of light is on his right eye, one is on half of his mouth and one is on his right forehead. The effect is to divide his face in two, with one blue eye looking up and the other a dark shadow. The divided image symbolizes a split personality, but the film complicates its symbolism; the imagery is so obvious that it encourages doubt about how to interpret it. Furthermore, it comes at a moment when Paul appears to be rational. The next scene reveals how calculated Madame Gaudens has been; it begins with Gabrielle driving to the Gaudens’s mansion. The second shot of this scene is a medium shot which advances towards Madame Gaudens in the garden. She is wearing white trousers, a pink shirt, a red jumper and leather gardening gloves. However, the most striking part of her costume is the wide-brimmed straw hat which hides her face as she prunes her roses. The medium shot develops into a close-up of the hat and, as with the shot of Paul in the cell, the camera’s movement creates a sense of predestination. Before the film cuts to the reverse-shot of Gabrielle standing in front of her mother-in-law, the camera’s approach towards the straw hat makes it feel as if this shot represents Gabrielle’s point-of-view. The hat hides her mother-in-law’s face; the shot represents Gabrielle’s position,

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excluded from this family and its life. The straw hat symbolizes the family’s success in pulling up its drawbridge and defeating Gabrielle. Time is elided in the editing together of the shot of Gabrielle driving and the shot of Madame Gaudens. The film cuts from Gabrielle in the car looking over the windscreen, as if she has seen Madame Gaudens in the garden. Most films would then cut to a point-of-view shot from Gabrielle’s perspective, or something resembling it, perhaps a quick long shot that establishes the space of the house and garden, and Madame Gaudens’s position within that space. Chabrol, however, cuts to Gabrielle’s approximate point of view as she approaches her mother-in-law on foot. The elision intensifies the pacing and creates an unnerving surprise because it presents a heightened version of what Gabrielle is thinking as much as seeing. The elision also creates the eerie sensation of the camera as a guiding presence, as if present in our perception of the fictional world, though there is no camera in the fictional world. This disorientating strategy is typical of Chabrol’s aesthetics. The presentation of Madame Gaudens and Gabrielle’s conversation combines revelation with humour. The scene is constructed on a principle of shot/reverseshot alternation, but in a modified form, for it maintains an elevated angle on the mother. After the shot of Gabrielle in her car comes the shot of the mother. Then the film cuts to the reverse-shot of Gabrielle, then back to a close-up of the mother’s hat. The mother tilts her head up, as if agreeing to speak to a servant. The movement is negligible; nothing else changes. The film cuts back to Gabrielle; she explains that Paul refused to see her. The next shot shows the mother smiling and raising her eyebrows: ‘It’s one of his few remaining liberties. Are you surprised?’ In the reverse-shot, Gabrielle says: ‘I testified. His sentence was reduced. It’s a strange show of thanks.’ The mother, after the cut back to her, speaks without looking up: ‘You only told the truth.’ Then she looks up, almost smiling as she says: ‘It’s time to grow up child.’ The film cuts to Gabrielle while Madame Gaudens continues: ‘You’ll get a letter from Paul tomorrow asking for a divorce. Paul is under guardianship until further notice.’ Chabrol then returns to the mother, who looks down as she says: ‘Believe me, you’re not about to get a cent out of us.’ The film cuts back to Gabrielle; there is a pause. Then the mother tells her from off-screen, ‘You’re dismissed’. Gabrielle replies, ‘I see’, before she adds, with some verve, ‘Forgive me, but I’m keeping the car. I need it’. She turns, walks to the car and the scene fades to black. The scene is masterful, sophisticated and comic, though the point it makes about the Gaudens family is blunt. The mother’s malevolence emerges as she

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talks to Gabrielle; she almost smiles, as if enjoying her triumph in using her familial power to manipulate Gabrielle into testifying, thus reducing Paul’s sentence. The straw hat is a salient part of the scene. It begins and ends the presentation of Madame Gaudens; the film’s last image of the mother shows her behind her hat, looking down at the roses. During the frequent shots of the mother with her head tilted down, the hat fills a large part of the frame, obscuring her face. Madame Gaudens remains bent over the roses throughout the scene; she never straightens up to face Gabrielle. Her hands remain out of sight during the scene and the inference one makes from her postures and moving arms is that she continues to prune the roses as she talks to Gabrielle. The bent posture and the hat obscuring her face emblematize Madame Gaudens’s contempt for her daughterin-law; she considers Gabrielle unworthy of her full attention. Her contemptuous attitude here reveals the previous attitude (when she told Gabrielle the story about Paul’s drowned brother, Thibault) to have been a performance, enacted to persuade Gabrielle to testify. Once they have used Gabrielle, neither Paul nor his mother show gratitude for Gabrielle’s testimony.6 The scene in which Madame Gaudens persuades Gabrielle to testify begins with the solicitor telling her: ‘I’d like to remind you of your interests here. I spoke to Paul yesterday. He loves you sincerely and devotedly.’ He adds: ‘Your in-laws intend to be very generous toward you.’ Both these statements turn out to be lies. Madame Gaudens convinces Gabrielle to testify at Paul’s trial by telling a tale about her son’s drowning; to do this, she sits on the desk as if about to faint, saying to Gabrielle: ‘I’m in complete despair.’ Her account of Paul’s childhood experience convinces Gabrielle to regard Paul as ill, instead of a cold-blooded murderer. Gabrielle’s premature sympathy for her mother-in-law confirms the efficacy of Madame Gaudens’s performance; as she leaves, Gabrielle touches her on the shoulder and says ‘Things aren’t so simple are they?’ After the trial, Gabriele meets her benevolent uncle, the magician Denis Merlin, outside his theatre. The scene of their meeting includes a shot which shows that his hotel is named ‘La Renaissance’. The sign is made of faded gold lettering, with a big ‘R’. Red-leafed ivy has been stuck to the wall near the letters so that the red leaves and the gold lettering interact with the other reds of the film. As well as the red filter in the credit sequence, red is present in several scenes; examples include Gabrielle’s red dress, the red carpet at the association banquet, the café with red seats where Capucine and Gabrielle talk, Gabrielle’s red car and the red lights in the film’s last shot.7 The hotel sign also evokes faded glamour, while its name, ‘La Renaissance’, tips a wink about the Uncle’s positive

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intent. Also suggestive is the man whom Gabrielle and Denis walk past. He is sitting on a doorstep watching the world pass by, relaxed, wearing jeans, t-shirt and slippers, an indication of a world beyond the Gaudens. The hotel receptionist’s humour indicates that there are people who neither know nor care about the Gaudens. Gabrielle’s rebirth begins with her imperturbable uncle, who can make people around him relax. The scene with the hotel receptionist amuses and reassures; she calls him ‘Monsieur Merlin’; he jokes with her as he insists that Gabrielle is his niece. Yet, as Dousteyssier-Khoze (2013) suggests, the film hints at a possible doubling of the hotel receptionist and the receptionist in the swingers’ club, played by the film’s co-writer and coproducer, Cécile Maistre, in partnership with the doubling of Uncle Denis and Charles Saint-Denis. The magic show itself begins with five shots of lights projected on buildings: a statue, Lyons cathedral, a bridge, Lyons cathedral again, a palace. These images are extracts from Lyons’ annual festival of lights, named in the end credits. Denis’s voice speaks over the light show and, during the close-up of his introduction, he looks straight out at us (at his theatre audience, at the camera), just as the television newsreader does, as Gabrielle does when delivering the weather reports and as Paul does in his cell. The film returns to a view of the stage, which allows us to see the set’s Arabian Nights theme. Denis introduces his ‘charming assistant Gabrielle’, who is helped onto the table. He then looks at the saw blade and hits it with his ring. The camera pans left to a medium close-up of Gabrielle, whose hair and costume are ruffled by the wind from the whirring blade. The film shows the saw and then shows Gabrielle turning to look at the camera. Sawdust flies around her as tears run down her cheek. A quick fade to black and two black wipes follow, evoking a stage curtain’s opening. After this, lights appear in the shape of ascending birds and angels, projected onto Lyons cathedral. These images appear behind the saw. They fade on stage; lights burst and Gabrielle appears where the saw was. A  curtain suffused with red light is lowered behind her and the camera advances towards her. Again, visible in the light projections behind her is the front of Lyons Cathedral, bathed in red light, with white angels and birds flying upwards. Gabrielle turns to look at the camera and smiles. The shot freezes on this image of her smiling and the credits roll at the side of her face. The most prominent images among the light show extracts are those of Lyons Cathedral. Paul and Gabrielle get married in this cathedral and the film shows it twice. It first appears in the film’s one establishing shot of Lyons, which is used

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when Paul phones his mother from Lisbon to tell her of the engagement. Filmed from a hill above the city, this long shot of Lyons has the cathedral visible on the left. The shot also includes the rivers in the background and a boulevard running through the city centre. The cathedral’s distinctive façade is visible: three large doors, three arches, a round central window and niches with figures in them. The wedding itself comes straight after the scene in the dress shop. However, all the film shows of the wedding is one exterior shot of the cathedral, a slow track towards the open middle doors. On the threshold, the shot fades to black and the film cuts to the honeymoon. During this shot, the priest reads out the vows, the same priest who helps himself to more brandy at the Gaudens house. The film’s ending invites three interpretations. First, the way that the film uses extracts from Lyons’ festival of lights blurs the boundaries between on-stage and off-stage spaces. Placed at the end of the film, as part of the light show, the magic show and Gabrielle’s rebirth, the cathedral façade is turned into a piece of the set, an acknowledged piece of artifice. The magic show’s introduction uses images of Lyons cathedral. Then, after the trick, the cathedral’s distinctive arch and crosses appear behind Gabrielle. A closer version of this image comprises the film’s final shot, the whole thing projected behind Gabrielle, who stands with open arms, facing out and smiling. During the trick’s introduction, the extracts look like projections that belong to the magic show, but they are incorporated into the film as exterior shots of light effects on real buildings. When they are used after the trick, the clarity of the spatial organization situates them as part of Denis’s show. This blurring of boundaries between on-stage and off-stage spaces helps merge the finale of the magic show with the finale of the film. (The music also helps to produce this effect.)8 Second, the on-stage illusion alludes to illusionism elsewhere in the film, for example, that concerning film and television. Gabrielle is involved in an onstage illusion, as she was when she presented the weather on television. When Gabrielle reads the weather, the film shows the green-screen fakery involved. Fleischer’s film shows Evelyn Nesbitt’s theatrical performance recreating on stage the scene of her seduction by Stanford White. Chabrol’s film shows Gabrielle’s theatrical performance alluding to the scene of her marriage and her previous performances on television (and the phoniness of both these things, also exposed in the contrast between the newsreader’s sneering on-screen remarks about Gabrielle during Paul’s trial and this married man’s earlier off-screen attempt to seduce her). Rouyer suggests that whereas the opening sequence deconstructs the artifice of cinema (by removing the red tint and switching off the Turandot

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music), the final sequence reverses this, with Gabrielle at the centre of a staging of nothing: ‘This move between the illusion of representation to the representation of an illusion refers to the journey of the young girl of the title’ (2007: 7). The ending implies that the magic show’s obviousness about its fakery is more honest than either the religious rituals that the upper-class family perform or the television performances. Third, as a symbol of Gabrielle being torn between two men, the magic trick is obvious but convincing. The symbolic re-enactment of Gabrielle cut in two is asserted, but not to the extent that it becomes an absolute distancing device. Its effect is similar to that of the other primary asserted symbols discussed so far, obvious as a symbol of Gabrielle’s plight, yet satisfying as a conclusion. Knowingness tempers the blatancy of the symbolism and this works in partnership with a convincing sense of her rebirth. As Richard Lippe notes: The shot [of Gabrielle on stage] is followed with a freeze frame on Gabrielle’s smiling face, providing the film with an unexpectedly (and, for Chabrol, an uncharacteristic) upbeat ending. Gabrielle survives being sawed in half and she survives her off-stage experience that threatened to destroy her. (Lippe 2008: 65)

As Chabrol says: I cut her in two, it’s true, but Gabrielle appears at the finale complete and triumphant, even if it is in a more restricted milieu. Of course, she has not become a TV star. (Eisenreich and Valens 2007: 9)

The girl cut in two is obvious as a device, but satisfying because the film prepares for it so well. Despite the obviousness, Gabrielle’s rebirth is convincing. The Gaudens family manipulate Gabrielle, but the magic show ends the film with a redemptive flourish. When she lies on the table being sawn in two, her tears and her expression as she turns her head suggest she is grieving. The film has been showing Gabrielle torn between two men; then it shows her helping her uncle perform ‘the girl cut in two’, thereby fulfilling the promise of the title, a title which names the film and the magic trick. We know that Gabrielle performs being cut in two; the charm of the trick is its combination of belief and disbelief. The sad tale has an optimistic ending, offering redemption after grief. As Lippe suggests, when Gabrielle looks towards us before the freeze-frame, her smile feels genuine. Unlike Evelyn in Fleischer’s film, Gabrielle is reborn with optimism. When Evelyn swings over the audience in the Atlantic City theatre, her new employer exploits the public’s desire to be titillated by Evelyn’s performance

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of an episode from her life. The girl in the red velvet swing is the main draw at the theatre; Evelyn’s notoriety brings a male audience eager to gawp at the young woman swinging above their heads. Evelyn’s looks have been exploited all her life; as a commercial model, as a painter’s model, as a chorus girl and as a titillating spectacle in the Atlantic City theatre. Gabrielle’s notoriety will boost her uncle’s ticket sales, but he is a kindlier version of the theatre owner; unlike The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, there’s no on-stage introduction recounting the star’s notoriety. Denis wants to help Gabrielle refind happiness. Nevertheless, in common with Evelyn in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, Gabrielle’s appearance has defined her and Kate Stables argues that Chabrol’s film objectifies women and exploits Sagnier’s Gabrielle as a passive sex object: Handled possessively by every male in the movie, from slavering station bosses and lovers right up to her magician uncle’s final illusionary coup de grâce, she’s a desirable, eminently desecratable object, the Sadean woman to the life. Chabrol isn’t just laying bare the rapacious realms of old money and nouveau riche media for our delectation. His heroine is stylishly sacrificed by the camera for every spectator, on and off screen. (2009: 67)9

In this interpretation, the film depicts a misogynist male fantasy. However, Lippe is correct: as with other Chabrol films, La Fille coupée en deux portrays its heroine with sympathy. It treats the exploitation of women as a theme (the Fleischer version does this also); it exposes the way the men treat Gabrielle as an object, including her boss (Didier Bénureau), who strokes her cheek and calls her pet names. As Lippe writes: In the Chabrol-Maistre version the story serves as a means to critically address the contemporary state of television and the publishing business. Television, in particular, is shown to be promoting an illusion of reality – a world of mindlessness that is packaged to please the eye and induce fantasy. (Lippe 2008: 64)

Furthermore, the film shows consensual behaviour, mature adults making independent decisions. The question that the film dramatizes is whether the sexual decadence of Charles and his friends is worse than the corruption and hypocrisy of the Gaudens. Without answering this question, the film draws our sympathies to the murder victim, Charles, whom Gabrielle loves. In the end, La Fille coupée en deux shows the upper-class man getting away with cold-blooded murder, his mother and his solicitor manipulating Gabrielle so that her testimony enhances Paul’s defence. However, as usual, Chabrol leaves motives and causes ambiguous, including the precise explanation for Paul’s

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murder of Charles. The film contains some evidence that he is disturbed, as when he manhandles Gabrielle on the street or when Franck escorts him from the restaurant. Paul’s murder of Charles in plain view implies both insanity and sanity; Paul is confident that his wealth and the publicizing of what he knows about Gabrielle’s relationship with Charles will lead to a reduced sentence. There is evidence that he kills Charles because of jealousy and egotism. He believes (and the reduced sentence proves him right) that he has the power to act with impunity. As a result of Paul’s father’s successes as a chemist, Paul is due to inherit the fortune of Laboratoires Gaudens, named, one imagines, to allude to the cosmetics company Laboratoires Garnier. The Gaudens family have access to the best solicitors and their clever solicitor (with the director’s name in anagram) works with Madame Gaudens to persuade Gabrielle to testify. Paul is disturbed, but he is also a spoilt child, used to getting his own way, a close relative of Robert Stack’s Kyle Hadley in Written on the Wind (1956, Douglas Sirk) and an update on Charles Régnier (Jean-Claude Drouot) in Chabrol’s La Rupture (1970). When Paul apologizes to Gabrielle for manhandling her (‘I acted like a fool’), she replies:  ‘More like a spoilt child.’ Chabrol then cuts to a close-up of Paul sulking: ‘Don’t say that.’ His face suggests she has touched a nerve, as she does in the restaurant when she speaks of his inheritance. Magimel’s performance makes it believable, as if the character is self-aware and able to exaggerate his childishness to amuse Gabrielle. The film shows that Paul is disturbed; anger, jealousy and resentment mix with his instability to spur him on. However, his murder conforms to patterns of antisocial behaviour that pre-exist his jealousy. He knows what he is doing and the depiction of him in the cell refusing to see Gabrielle confirms his rationality. La Fille coupée en deux shows the power of the media and the publishing business coming up against the more established power of the family who own a brand, as well as a large estate. Old money has deep connections with politics and religion, extended by the mother’s charity work for ‘the association’. That organization invites Charles to speak at their dinner because to them he is just a performer. This is what Chabrol’s film exposes. Despite Gabrielle’s symbolic rebirth, La Fille coupée en deux ends with her defeat and Charles’s elimination by the establishment.

Notes 1 Several reviewers note the connections to Fleischer’s film and to historical events: Sarris (2010: 15), Dawson (2009: 11), Stables (2009: 66).

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2 Dousteyssier-Khoze (2013: 52) also discusses motifs of theatricalization. 3 Dousteyssier-Khoze’s discussion of the mirror motif (2013: 54–6) is a central part of her discussion of Deleuze’s ‘crystal-image’. Dousteyssier-Khoze argues that the mirrors prompt the spectator ‘to ask which is the reflection and which is the reflected object’ (2013: 55). 4 Burdeau (2009: 22) also notes this. 5 Dousteyssier-Khoze (2013: 51) suggests that there may be thematic links between Puccini’s Turandot and Chabrol’s film. 6 Ragtime contains a similar scene, in which Harry K. Thaw’s lawyer persuades Evelyn Nesbitt to testify on Thaw’s behalf. The lawyer tells Evelyn: ‘You know, Evelyn, Mrs Thaw is a very generous woman.’ 7 Dousteyssier-Khoze also notes the use of the red in the opening sequence, writing: ‘nothing in the diegetic world explains it’ (2013: 51). Red is also a motif of Fleischer’s film. 8 Dousteyssier-Khoze suggests that the ending is ‘an apotheosis where the real and the virtual are mixed together’ (2013: 56). 9 Rouyer says of the scene in which Gabrielle pads into Charles’s living room on all fours with a peacock feather attached to her: ‘This scene also represents the peak of crudity in the film, the filmmaker taking a perverse pleasure in playing with the ellipses and off-screen space (for example, in the swingers club) to evoke the characters’ perversions’ (2007: 8).

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Bellamy (2009): More than Meets the Eye

Claude Chabrol derived inspiration for Bellamy from a 1987 case: It was in the newspapers. We were inspired by a real event. The story of Emile Leullet/Noël Gentil comes from the Dandonneau affair. Yves Dandonneau was an insurer who wanted to steal from his own company. He took the body of a homeless man and tried to use it to impersonate him. The swindle didn’t work. Dandonneau was arrested and charged for, amongst other things, murder. For the summing up, the barrister adapted the tune of a Brassens song, not ‘Quand les cons sont braves’, but another, ‘Les Copains d’abord’. (Burdeau and Renzi 2009b: 15)

However, as co-writer Odile Barski says, the film is distanced from the real event: We added the story of whether it was murder or suicide. On the other hand, the detail of the homeless man being obsessed with Brassens came straight from the Dandonneau affair. In the real story also, the homeless man was the son of a judge. He hated the judiciary. He had fallen very low, very low, as the songs of George Brassens say. (Burdeau and Renzi 2009b: 15)

For Chabrol, the true subject is the protagonist, Paul Bellamy (Gérard Depardieu): The main intrigue, which is the insurance swindle, quickly becomes secondary. At one moment, Bellamy descends the stairs, almost leaving the frame, and declares: ‘I think that I have been taken for a ride’. That is almost the subject of the film, because he is in the same situation as the spectator. (Alion 2008: 102) The subject is Bellamy. And anyway all the external elements are related to him. I also played on the fact that it was interesting to reverse the perception of reality and imagination. What we could consider as being true in the film (the couple’s rapport) is completely imaginary [that is, not based on a warm relationship between the actors], while the intrigue (the swindle), which seems rather preposterous is based on a real event. (Alion 2008: 101–2)1

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Emmanuel Burdeau describes Bellamy as ‘portraiture and self-portraiture’ (2009:  22)  because it blends a self-portrait of Chabrol with a portrait of Depardieu: ‘Under the cover of a disguised Maigret re-named Paul Bellamy, it is clear that Depardieu paints a portrait of Chabrol, and Chabrol does a portrait of Depardieu’ (Burdeau and Renzi 2009a: 9).2 Chabrol admits: ‘A little bit of our vision of Gérard, a bit of what we knew about him, a bit of what we guessed about him and what we expected from him. Fifty-fifty. And for the relationship with his wife, there is some connection to my wife and me’ (Gibert 2009). The film contains at least one autobiographical reference. When Bellamy visits Claire (Adrienne Pauly) in her flat, she explains that the microscope belonged to ‘Denis, from his pharmacy days – he wanted to be an entomologist’. Her comment alludes to Chabrol’s study of pharmacology and to his reputation as an ‘entomologist’. Furthermore, the name Paul and the self-destructive characters of Jacques (Clovis Cornillac) and Denis acknowledge, one last time, the influence of Chabrol’s close friend Paul Gégauff. At the same time, Chabrol took inspiration from Georges Simenon’s famous detective, Maigret: It is a phoney Simenon novel. One might think that it’s an adaptation, but it is an original script. One of the characters is inspired by a guy who made believe he was dead to get the insurance money. But it is not a pastiche either: rather than adapting Simenon, we’ve written the story of a cop on holiday with his wife, who could be Maigret. (Eisenreich and Valens 2007: 13)

Depardieu’s performance evokes Simenon’s description of the police inspector: Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn’t have a moustache and he didn’t wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues. It was something more than self-confidence but less than pride. He would turn up and stand like a rock with his feet wide apart. On that rock all would shatter, whether Maigret moved forward or stayed exactly where he was. (Simenon 2013: 10)

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Depardieu’s performance of the celebrated detective has some similarities to Jean Gabin’s performance as Maigret in Maigret voit rouge (1963, Gilles Grangier), but Simenon’s ideas interested Chabrol: Simenon said that he was interested in ‘naked humanity’ [l’homme nu]. Bellamy is an attempt to reveal this nakedness. Therefore, for me, it is a film that is purely simenonien. Furthermore, and more anecdotally, I had fun creating a contemporary portrait of Maigret and his wife, in the way that Simenon’s novels present them. (Alion 2008: 101)

The Cahiers interviewers remark that Simenon’s interest in naked humanity, man stripped of all social habits, finds a parallel in Bellamy’s curiosity about Leullet and Leprince. Chabrol agrees: Absolutely. We have here a man who is deliberately stripped – he has gone even further, he has changed his face – and who is now suspended between two identities, that of the insurer Noël Gentil and that of the womaniser Emile Leullet. Three, if we add the homeless man Denis Leprince, who is also played by Jacques Gamblin. Bellamy necessarily has things in common with this guy who interests him so much. He approaches the criminal because it is a means of worrying about, thinking about himself. This is eminently simenonien. (Burdeau and Renzi 2009b: 12)

As Chabrol indicates, the link between Bellamy and Leullet contributes to the film’s portrait of Bellamy. The film restricts its narrative viewpoint to Bellamy’s perspective. The film follows him as he moves from room to room, investigates Leullet and deals with his brother. Burdeau notes: The movement of the film follows the movement of Bellamy’s appetite, the instinct that leads him to visit people in their dingy hotel room, their massage parlour, their sad house and the room lined with Brassens mementoes inhabited by Mademoiselle Bonheur. The film carries a ‘tragic weight’, says Depardieu, but it consists, and perhaps above all, of a series of meetings. And all have the irresistible joy, the depth of the actor when he is at his best. (Burdeau 2009: 23)

Bellamy is in every scene except five. These are: Françoise (Marie Bunel) speaking to Leullet at the front door (Bellamy is in the adjacent room); Jacques arriving in a taxi and speaking to the driver about the music (Bellamy is awake in his bedroom with Françoise); Jacques, Françoise and her pupil in the kitchen (Bellamy is in the living room watching a film of Leullet and Nadia [Vahina Giocante] dancing);

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Claire seeing the television news about Leullet turning himself in (after which she phones Bellamy); and Leullet’s trial (the result of which Bellamy sees on television). Besides these scenes, the film follows Bellamy, often with the camera close to him as he speaks to people in their homes, places of work or hotel rooms. The preponderance of scenes set in small rooms enhances the sensation of closeness to Bellamy; in many scenes, the policeman occupies a large amount of space in a small room, whether Leullet’s hotel room or his own home. The film’s point of view is restricted to what Bellamy observes, yet he fails to see everything that is relevant. The film increases the impression that attachment to Bellamy is a limitation when it introduces two adjacent surprises: first, Bellamy’s discovery of the dead Madame Leullet (Marie Matheron); then, his discovery that Leullet has moved out of his hotel. The film also creates doubts about several events: what Leullet and Nadia planned, Gamblin’s triple role, and Jacques and Denis’s accidents/suicides. Bellamy’s doubts extend to Jacques and Françoise. His wife is sensible and loves Bellamy, but his brother, Jacques, has a roguish charm and several scenes demonstrate the affection that Bellamy’s wife and brother share. Jacques’s kissing of Françoise’s hand surprises Bellamy so much that he drops a bottle of wine and snaps at Jacques in the car afterwards. As Jean A. Gili writes: Bellamy will progressively disentangle the threads of a web, of which each knot untied reveals others, even tighter. In fact, the film plays constantly with false appearances, unpredictable characters, on the nuances which it is necessary to puzzle out. (2009: 44)

Burdeau describes the film as both ‘transparent and cryptic’ (2009: 22), Chabrol says: ‘I wanted to give the film a feeling of being lost in a sort of fog, which just got thicker and thicker as the story unfolded’ (Alion 2008: 102). Bellamy never knows for certain whether the homeless man wanted to die, whether his death was an accident, a suicide or murder; nor can he ever know whether Jacques’s car crash was an accident or a suicide. One example of things left obscure is the degree to which Leullet and Nadia dupe Bellamy. The latter suspects that he has missed something when he sees them embrace on television after the trial, but the film foreshadows this during the shot that shows Leullet arriving at his hotel in a taxi. The shot begins as an establishing shot of Leullet’s hotel car park. The hotel sign is visible, although Bellamy’s car fills half the frame. A  taxi arrives; the camera pans left with it. Leullet gets out; the camera pans right with him as he walks over to Bellamy.

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To find its position, the camera tracks left while panning right and approaches the two actors until it frames their heads in profile. At the same time, a couple walk arm in arm in the background, framed between Leullet and Bellamy. In the foreground, Leullet describes his upsetting visit to Nadia; in the background, the couple turn left and disappear. Leullet breaks down and starts crying: ‘What’ll become of me without her?’ The mobility of the camera introduces a sense of self-consciousness about the staging; one notices the symmetrical framing of the two men facing each other and the driveway lined with hedges and plant pots. These things lead the eye towards the couple between Leullet and Bellamy. Instead of random extras populating the background, an embracing couple appear between the two men, in a shot that flaunts its movements. The film contrasts this passing couple with Leullet’s account of his unhappy meeting with Nadia. On a second viewing, when one knows that Nadia and Leullet embrace outside the court, the embracing couple function as an ironic, teasing prompt to treat Leullet’s account with scepticism, something that Bellamy does after he realizes that Nadia and Leullet have duped him. The moment evokes the presence of an invisible guide saying ‘look again, consider another side of this story’. Despite this foreshadowing, for the most part the film sticks to Bellamy’s point of view, to the extent that the apparent flashbacks are visualizations of what he imagines. The film features six short visualizations of four people’s accounts of the past:  Madame Leullet’s, Nadia’s, Leullet’s and Claire’s. These visualizations represent Bellamy’s imaginative response to his interviewee’s accounts, rather than flashbacks representing their view of events. As Chabrol comments: I wasn’t looking to create suspense. On the other hand, what’s amusing, taking into account the plot’s collapse, is that the flashbacks are not flashbacks. They are images which reflect what Bellamy understands of the account being told to him . . . It is because I wanted to film mental imagery that Gamblin’s character is tripled. It is because he obsesses Bellamy that the latter has the feeling of seeing him on the corner of the street. And it is a way of showing the duality of beings, their Jekyll and Hyde side. (Alion 2008: 102)

As Chabrol notes, the visualizations represent what Paul imagines as he listens to people’s accounts, hence the repetition of Gamblin in three roles. His performances as Gentil, Leullet and Leprince imply that Bellamy is imagining Gentil as he was before plastic surgery and Leprince as someone who resembles Leullet. When Bellamy watches the film of Leullet dancing with Nadia, he tells his wife

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that Gentil and Leullet are the same person, yet Gamblin’s reappearances remain ambiguous. Interspersed within Madame Leullet’s account of her husband’s infidelity are the visualizations of Leullet sneaking out in his wife’s slippers, and Leullet and Nadia dancing in a garage, watched by Madame Leullet. She explains her husband’s affair to Bellamy, who asks her if she met Nadia. She then explains that they rehearsed in their garage. This prompts a cut to the dancers practising their tango. But although Madame Leullet has identified it as her garage, it looks more like an imagined space than a real space, inasmuch as it resembles a darkened studio interior. Interspersed in Nadia’s account is a visualization of her and Leullet picking up Denis from the small square. Nadia comes out of her cupboard, from behind the beaded curtain and begins to explain how she and Leullet recruited Denis. As she talks, the camera retreats from her: ‘I spotted him camping out front.’ The camera retreats until the film cuts to a shot of the exterior of the little square nearby. Nadia’s voice speaks over the initial images, which show someone who looks like Leullet. That these are Bellamy’s visualizations justifies the decision to have Gamblin play both Leullet and Leprince. It creates ambiguity about the plot. However, the Gamblin casting also ties in with the film’s strategy of doubling. During Nadia’s account of her relationship with Leullet, the film offers another hint that Bellamy is missing something. After the visualization of her and Leullet picking up Denis, the film returns to a two shot of Bellamy and Nadia facing each other in profile. There is then a cut to a shot of Nadia in the car, as she and Leullet drive towards Sète with Denis asleep in the back seat. Nadia tells Leullet that she wants to get out. Bellamy asks, ‘You changed your mind?’ and she replies, ‘I didn’t feel up to it’. The sequence shifts to a shot/reverse-shot pattern, but Nadia has her back to Bellamy. She tells him that she left Leullet because she felt afraid and she did not want to be an accomplice. Nothing in their interaction or in his visualizations confirms that she is lying to him, but the staging of the scene, with Nadia turned away from Bellamy, provokes doubts about her account. Interspersed in Leullet’s account is the visualization of Denis insisting on driving (Nadia is already out of the car). Paul says, ‘Tell me about your little outing’ and the film cuts to an empty road. Inside the car, Leprince shouts ‘Let me drive!’ Afterwards, Leullet tells Bellamy that when he came back Denis and the car were gone. Interspersed in Claire’s account is the visualization of her giving her scarf to Denis in the small square. (This rhymes with Jacques’s attempted theft of a scarf and Françoise’s question to Bellamy about whether a scarf suits her.) The music

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starts when Claire walks along the street near the square. The camera moves with her as she gives Denis her scarf, wrapping it around his neck with tenderness. The film presents Bellamy’s point of view and indicates that he fails to see everything. Confirmation of this comes after Leullet’s trial. In the dentist’s waiting room, Bellamy paces up and down. On television, a newsreader announces that Leullet has been acquitted. The news report shows the solicitor (Rodolphe Pauly) and Claire walking down the wide steps, where a reporter interviews them about the trial. Meanwhile, behind them, to their left, Leullet comes out of the court, stops on the first step, looks right then left, as if expecting someone to meet him. He sees Nadia, walks towards her and they embrace. The television’s camera gets closer to the solicitor, but Chabrol is careful to keep Leullet and Nadia visible on the right side of the frame. In the reverse-shot of Bellamy, he is squinting at the television with a puzzled look on his face. Behind him, a small doll sits on a bookshelf, looking like a little laughing devil sitting on his shoulder. Then, Françoise and her dentist come out. When Bellamy and Françoise walk downstairs, he says to her that he thinks Leullet and ‘princess Nadia’ have taken him for a ride. The warmth of Leullet and Nadia’s embrace suggests that they planned their meeting and that they have deceived him. Besides showing Bellamy’s perspective on events, the film uses other elements to reveal his character through comparison with others. Distancing strategies increase the visibility of these comparisons. They include noticeable shots, framings and camera movements. One example is the shot discussed above of Leullet meeting Bellamy in the hotel car park. Another example occurs just before Bellamy’s confession to his wife. The scene begins with a medium long shot of them in bed. Chabrol uses a fifty-three second take and one notices the shot’s high angle and distance from the characters because of the shot’s duration, which ends when Françoise leans across Bellamy to switch off the light. This shot represents the view of someone studying the characters, as an entomologist inspects insects under a microscope. However, rather than remaining detached from the characters, the film balances this shot’s distance by following it with a close two shot of Bellamy and his wife. Bellamy asks Françoise to turn on the light. When she does so, Bellamy, in the two shot, begins his confession about almost strangling his younger brother when he was a child. His wife asks how he lived with the guilt for years. Bellamy replies: ‘I found a kind of dignity in despising myself.’ After this, Elgar’s music begins. Another form of ironic distancing is the wordplay with names and phrases. The film connects its first two scenes with Bellamy’s crossword clue and

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answer: ‘félicite’ and ‘bonheur’. Claire’s surname is Bonheur and Bellamy greets her in Bricomarché with ‘Quelle félicite’. Furthermore, the name Claire Bonheur, or Claire happiness, resembles Leullet’s pseudonym, Noël Gentil, or Noël kindness, while Jacques Lebas (Bellamy’s half-brother) is ‘le bas’ or ‘the bottom’, as in au bas de l’échelle sociale (at the bottom of the social ladder); his name also evoke ‘frère Jacques’. Opposed to Lebas are Leprince, the dead homeless man, who, according to Claire, was kind and generous, and Leullet, or le let, as in a let played in tennis, a man who is taking another chance. Leblanc, the white one, is the name of the local police inspector whom the film never shows, but whom Bellamy describes as ‘the dumbest cop in the land’. In his waiting room, after commenting on the solicitor’s singing, the dentist turns to a waiting client and says, ‘Be right with you, Madame Chantemerle [or Madame Singing Blackbird]’. Burdeau comments:  ‘The names openly mock themselves, in that each character has the quality named by his or her name. In its torpor, provincial life resembles a sweet dessert or a harmless puzzle’ (2009: 22). He writes: ‘The echoes between characters and cast are instead carried to a dizzying height, to a huge joke. Just out of their Asterix and Obelix costumes, Clovis Cornillac and Gérard Depardieu are again two companions, one thin and one fat, true or false brothers, accomplices and rivals’ (2009:  22).3 Furthermore, Claire says of the solicitor: ‘He’s a childhood friend. He’s a solicitor. He’s like my brother’; attentive viewers will know that the actor who plays the solicitor is the brother of the actress who plays Claire. As Burdeau notes: Claire Bonheur is played by Adrienne Pauly whose brother Rodolphe portrays the singing solicitor, and both are the children of [co-writer] Odile Barski. Copies, half-brothers, false friends or true friends [amis faux ou bels]: the little Chabrolian world looks like it is a family. Its inhabitants are all related, avatars of each other. The investigation advances straight through the middle of this hall of mirrors, the poetic art emerges through a glass, darkly. (2009: 22)

As well as names, the film uses phrases for ironic effects. When Alain (Yves Verhoeven) leaves Bellamy and Françoise after dinner, he promises to keep quiet about Bellamy’s presence in Nîmes, saying ‘I’ll be as silent as a grave’, a noteworthy phrase because of the views of Sète cemetery at the film’s start. When Bellamy takes his drunken brother out for some fresh air late one evening, thunderclaps resound, prompting Bellamy to say, ‘Let’s get you back before you catch your death’. The film’s title is a play on words, with ‘bel ami’ meaning ‘beautiful friend’; Cahiers du cinéma names its article on Chabrol and Depardieu’s

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collaboration ‘Beaux amis’. Paul Bellamy is also Chabrol’s last homage to Paul Gégauff, Chabrol’s bel ami. The film’s title also alludes to Bel-Ami, a novel (1885) by Guy de Maupassant.4 To illuminate Bellamy, the film sets up several doubles. These enable various comparisons. The doubling is a way of exploring Bellamy’s character, his guilt about his brother, his frustrations, his talents and his personality. As Jacobowitz and Lippe write: Chabrol thus sets up the mystery but also the thematic the film pursues:  the bourgeois is confronted by a double, a mirror who will act as a catalyst to expose the embedded tensions and problems of the protagonist. The problem of happiness is explored through the stranger who may or may not have caused a man to die, yet as the narrative develops, the focus of the mystery is reflected in Bellamy’s personal life – his troubled relationship with his brother and his insecurities regarding his wife’s infidelity. (Jacobowitz and Lippe 2011: 43)5

Bellamy and Leullet are the principle pair. For example, Bellamy wakes up at night saying ‘I’m a bastard’, after which Jacques staggers in with a bottle in his hand. The next scene begins with Leullet saying ‘I’m a bastard’ while a close-up of Bellamy comes into focus. The film then cuts to a shot of Leullet staring into a mirror, where he repeats the line. The film later connects the two men when it moves from Leullet telling Bellamy ‘I want to be a decent guy’ to Bellamy asking Françoise as he looks into a mirror ‘Do you think I’m a decent guy?’ When Leullet asks Bellamy in his cell why Bellamy is helping him, Bellamy replies in a close-up, with shadows obscuring his face, ‘None of your business’. However, the film suggests an answer to Leullet’s question by cutting from this shot of Bellamy to a mobile point-of-view shot of Bellamy looking in Jacques’s bedroom. The shot begins with the door opening as if on its own. The light is on in the bedroom and music plays as the camera pans left and up to the wardrobe then tilts down and across the floor as Bellamy walks into shot. The camera retreats along the corridor as Bellamy pronounces, ‘I’ve seen too many empty rooms lately’. Downstairs, Bellamy enters the kitchen but the camera stays outside. The film then cuts to a shot of the kitchen drawer being opened, revealing that Bellamy’s gun is missing. Jacques, it turns out, has already left, on a drunken car journey that echoes Denis’s drunken drive. The film positions Jacques and Denis Leprince as doubles in that both are depressed, suicidal men who die in car crashes. The film then compares Bellamy

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and Jacques’s relationship with Claire and Denis’s relationship. The scene in which Claire and Paul talk about Leprince in a café connects her feelings about Denis with his feelings about Jacques. It begins with a close shot of her, which pans left to frame them both in a two shot. They discuss her ex-boyfriend, Denis, whom Bellamy clarifies was found ‘at the foot of Sète cemetery’. She replies: ‘Yes, where George Brassens is buried. Denis wanted to visit his grave. He worshipped him.’ The waitress brings their coffees and, with a quick movement, the camera tracks forward into a close-up of Bellamy with Claire included on the right in profile. ‘Was your friend Denis suicidal?’ She replies: ‘He was dreadfully ill, really. But he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t believe he was still around. That didn’t stop him from being sweet and smart. He thought the world was a mess.’ ‘He was right’, soothes Bellamy. ‘Being right doesn’t make you happy’, she replies. ‘It’s often the opposite’, he says. ‘Did he try to find out why? Did he want to change things?’ In a close-up, Claire says: ‘Just talking about it makes it hurt even more.’ Bellamy replies: ‘I know. Airing bad memories doesn’t help. That’s nonsense.’ The scene ends with the camera retreating to frame them both. In their three scenes together, Bellamy and Claire interact in a way that suggests they understand each other. The film implies that the gracefulness of their interactions is based on unarticulated yet similar experiences of loss stemming from a failure to save someone from depression. Both have tried to help someone and have reached the limits of their abilities, Claire with Denis and Bellamy with Jacques. As a result, both feel responsible for someone else. The sensitivity and sympathy in their conversations suggests both feel frustrated: Claire regrets her inability to help Leprince overcome his depression; Bellamy regrets his inability to help Jacques overcome his problems. However, while Bellamy feels compassion for his younger brother and guilt about the childhood incident, the film also doubles him and Jacques. As Chabrol comments: The border between the two men is not clear. At one point, it is noted that Bellamy resembles the other. He responds: ‘Worse than that, he is me’. There is a certain fascination, especially as Cornillac’s character is troubled, a little thuggish. Whereas Bellamy, who is a cop, is also a bit troubled, even fascinated by the disorders that he is supposed to fight. (Alion 2008: 104)

Complementing the parallel between the two brothers are the two parallel investigations. The first concerns the degree of responsibility that Leullet has for Denis’s death. The second concerns the degree of responsibility that Bellamy has for Jacques’s

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depression and death. While Bellamy investigates Leullet, the film investigates Bellamy, after Jacques’s arrival prompts Bellamy to re-evaluate his relationship with his brother. The two investigations motivate the film’s linking of the two car crashes and the two stories with which Bellamy becomes involved, that of the defrauding insurance agent and that of his half-brother Jacques. Claire absolves Leullet; as her solicitor tells Bellamy, ‘We’ve decided not to press charges’. The solicitor explains: ‘Leprince wanted to die, and Leullet threw him a line, even if he had another plan. It’s not a murder but an exchange of favours.’ This must convince Paul because in the next scene he instructs Leullet in prison to use Claire’s solicitor and tells him why Denis Leprince wanted to die near Sète. In court, the solicitor summarizes his case by singing Brassens’ ‘Quand les cons sont braves’, which implies that the judge should not punish stupidity. The judge smiles; outside the courtroom a passing court official (Thomas Chabrol) expresses his annoyance at the singing. Just as Claire forgives Leullet and the court finds him innocent, so Jacques absolves Bellamy. Bellamy judges Leullet innocent of Denis’s death; the film judges Bellamy innocent of Jacques’s death. Despite Jacques’s resentment of Bellamy, he acknowledges his brother’s efforts to help him. Just before he does this, the film reveals Bellamy at his most fragile. In a square, he and Françoise walk past a large statue of a head, discussing his brother: ‘You could be nicer to him’, she says, adding, ‘I think you’re being a bit murky’. He replies ‘Really? Why? Because I happen to face reality from time to time?’ At that moment, he almost falls into an open manhole which he failed to see; Françoise saves him. In a close shot, she has her hand on his shoulder, pulling his jacket, exposing his braces. He cries a little: ‘Why am I so lucky?’ From there, the film cuts to Bellamy entering his brother’s bedroom. Jacques is lying in his bed in the dark. Here, Jacques forgives Bellamy: ‘Don’t go. I need to talk. You’re right to let me fend for myself. I’m sick of always needing help. It’s humiliating.’ The ending, with Jacques’s death, is the closing part of a visible and formal structure. As Jacobowitz and Lippe write: The opening is both elegiac and oneiric, setting the tone for the film. Bellamy uses the style of narrative realism selectively, setting up an artificial world that invites identification with life and human experience, but in a controlled, highly stylised manner that is deftly handled by the director. (2011: 43)

The two crashed cars, Denis’s in the opening and Jacques’s in the ending, assert the doubling of the two men. Bellamy’s primary asserted symbol is the matching

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of the opening and ending of the film, with the two crashed cars. As with the ending of La Fille coupée en deux, the artificial structure of Bellamy’s ending is flaunted. Nevertheless, Bellamy, like the preceding film, ends movingly. This achievement is helped but not guaranteed by the incorporation of four and half minutes of the first movement of Elgar’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, op.85, in E minor. The Elgar music begins after Bellamy’s confession about almost strangling Jacques when he was a child. There is a dissolve to a road and field, but the shot is angled so that the frame is split from bottom left to top right by the road. As Elgar’s music plays, there is a close shot of Jacques driving, then shots of the trees above the road. The music continues as the film cuts back to Bellamy, at breakfast, pouring hot water into the two bowls named as belonging to Paul and Jacques. The camera tilts up to him as the phone rings and Françoise answers it. ‘An accident?’ asks Bellamy; the camera pulls back. She goes to Bellamy as he says, ‘He had the last word.’ She replies: ‘He was drunk. It was an accident.’ Bellamy stumbles, knocking the tray with his and his brother’s bowls onto the floor as he does so. A close-up shows them breaking and Bellamy stepping back.6 The film cuts from the broken bowls to an overhead shot approaching the cliff of a rocky landscape. Elgar’s music continues. The camera approaches the car, then tilts up to the sea, while the sound of waves comes onto the soundtrack. The Auden quotation appears, from ‘At Last the Secret Is Out’: ‘There is always another story/There is more than meets the eye.’ The camera tilts up to the sea and horizon, after which the credits begin. Auden and Elgar are matched by Brassens, whose music is first heard during the opening credit sequence before being used in the courtroom. The opening shot shows Brassens’ memorial in Sète, where Brassens was born and whose sailor’s cemetery he celebrated in ‘Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète’. That song’s melancholic tone pervades the film, though the song itself is never sung. Instead, the film uses the whistled ‘Les Copains d’abord’, the solicitor’s rendition of ‘Quand les cons sont braves’ and a snippet of ‘Dans l’eau de la claire fontaine’. When Bellamy first meets Claire in Bricomarché, she is whistling ‘Dans l’eau de la claire fontaine’. He describes her as whistling ‘like a nightingale’, then sings two lines to her as they approach the till. Bellamy achieves its successful conclusion with help from Brassens, Elgar and Auden, but the captivating blend of heartfelt elegy with aesthetic distance is Chabrol’s accomplishment, helped, of course, by convincing performances from Depardieu, Cornillac, Gamblin, Bunel, the Pauly siblings and other cast

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members. The film begins and ends with deaths. In between, it explores what leads a man to kill himself, both Denis and Jacques, for, without confirming this, the film suggests that both men committed suicide. Yet the film’s success derives from its balancing of a tragic subject with rhymes, doubles, wordplay, patterns and an assertive visual style. As Jacobowitz and Lippe remark, narrative realism and identification with human experience are balanced with a ‘highly stylised manner’ (2011: 43). The melancholic story is achieved, but set against a visible formal structure.

Notes 1 The ‘making-of ’ documentary (Gibert 2009) reveals that Marie Bunel found working with Gérard Depardieu challenging. 2 Bellamy incorporates Depardieu’s star persona. For a superb discussion of Depardieu (in comparison with Robert De Niro) see Russell (2000). He writes: ‘To talk of Depardieu, as both man and actor, in terms that emphasise the largerthan-life dimensions of all that he portrays – sensuality, sexuality, appetite for life, generosity, trust, enthusiasm, extroversion, temperament – is now something of a cliché’ (2000: 36). 3 Cornillac and Depardieu appeared together in Astérix aux jeux olympiques (2008, Frédéric Forestier and Thomas Langmann). 4 Lane (2010) also notes the title’s play on ‘bel ami’ and Gili (2009: 44) also notes the title’s allusions to Maupassant. In 2007 and 2008, Chabrol directed two episodes of a French television series based on Maupassant’s work, Chez Maupassant (2007–11). He also directed two episodes for the series Au siècle de Maupassant: Contes et nouvelles du XIXème siècle (2009–10). 5 Scott (2010) also notes how the Leullet plot provides a counterpoint to Bellamy’s life. 6 The film emphasizes the link between brothers with the two broken coffee bowls. Just before Bellamy and Jacques argue at breakfast one morning (their argument prompted by a telephone call that reveals that Jacques has stolen 2000 Euros from Alain and Bernard), Jacques comments on his and Bellamy’s named coffee bowls: ‘I thought they were broken.’

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Northrop Frye writes of Shakespeare’s late plays:  ‘As a result of expressing the inner forms of drama with increasing force and intensity, Shakespeare arrived in his last period at the bedrock of drama’ (1971: 117). Edward Said discusses the different ways that old age and the increasing nearness of death enter various forms of art, suggesting that near the end of an artist’s life ‘their work and thought acquires a new idiom’ (2006: 6). Said distinguishes between ‘late works that reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity’ (6), late works that ‘crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavour’ (7) and late works that express ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’ (7), that is, ‘the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and, above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against’ (7). Said takes the phrase ‘late style’ from Adorno’s remarks about Beethoven’s last works. Adorno writes: The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As a rule, these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured. They are apt to lack sweetness, fending off with prickly tartness those interested merely in sampling them. They lack all harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from the work of art, showing more traces of history than of growth. The accepted explanation is that they are products of a subjectivity or, still better, of a ‘personality’ ruthlessly proclaiming itself, which breaks through the roundedness of form for the sake of expression. (Adorno 1998: 123)

Said interprets Adorno’s work on Beethoven as itself being an example of late style: As Adorno said about Beethoven, late style does not admit the definitive cadences of death; instead, death appears in a refracted mode, as irony. But with the kind of opulent, fractured, and somehow inconsistent solemnity of a work such a Missa Solemnis, or in Adorno’s own essays, the irony is how often lateness as theme and as style keeps reminding us of death. (Said 2006: 24)

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These words resonate with Chabrol’s late works: opulent, fractured, solemn and ironic, ‘showing more traces of history than of growth’. The description suits Chabrol’s late films, with their repeated use of exaggeration, disharmony and assertion. Biographical speculation tempts one to suggest that La Cérémonie’s success increased Chabrol’s confidence as a filmmaker during the last fifteen years of his life, in which period he made the nine films studied in this book. But it is difficult to make such claims convincing. Therefore, whatever the biographical temptations, I have tried to heed Adorno’s warning about psychological explanations and follow his advice about studying the form, conventions and style of works: ‘No interpretation of Beethoven, and probably of any late style, would be adequate if it were able to provide only a psychological motivation for the disintegration of convention, without regard to the actual phenomena’ (1998: 125). Instead of offering psychological explanations, this book presents the results of studying the ‘actual phenomena’. Late style does not mean an incoherent hodgepodge of old ideas. Chabrol’s late films recycle plot devices, return to favoured themes and refer to previous works, but they avoid being pastiches of his earlier films. They do, however, assert symbols, motifs and visual metaphors with what Adorno calls ‘an unconcealed, untransformed bareness’ (1998: 124). The trompe-l’œil in Au Cœur du mensonge or the ‘chocolate cobweb’ in Merci pour le chocolat may test viewers’ patience, but extended study of Chabrol’s last nine films reveals that what appears blatant and obtrusive is purposeful, fused with a powerful overall aesthetic. The stylistic excess may repel some viewers, but those familiar with Chabrol’s films will enjoy the heightening of rhetorical effect in his last nine films. It may be inevitable that as a career develops the artist refines their specialism; the nine films studied for this book return to familiar themes, but they avoid decadence and indulgence. They incorporate autobiographical elements, as with the relationship between director and star in Rien ne va plus, Paul and Charles in La Fille coupée en deux or the reference to Chabrol’s training in pharmacy in Bellamy. They are also self-conscious about the medium and the director’s style. Referring to Barbara Harris’s wink at the camera at the end of Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot (1976), William Rothman calls it ‘a medium’s salute to a medium’ (2012: 355): For all its apparent slightness, Family Plot affirms Hitchcock’s lifetime of dedication to his beloved ‘art of pure cinema’. I think of Family Plot as a curtain call: light, assured, intended for pleasure, it is an acknowledgement that the body of the concert is over. What could be a more satisfying farewell than the wink Blanche (Barbara Harris) gives to the camera that closes Hitchcock’s film? (2012: 354)

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Chabrol’s late films function in a self-conscious aesthetic mode; they refer to precedents in the history of cinema and they refer to Chabrol’s own films and history, as in La Cérémonie, when the murder victims watch an earlier Chabrol film on television. Chabrol’s style in his late films is concentrated, controlled and assured; traces of the grotesque and absurd exist, but without dominating. At the same time, Chabrol’s sociopolitical critique sharpens. La Cérémonie, Merci pour le chocolat and La Fleur du mal present politicized critiques of the upper classes. La Demoiselle d’honneur uses the femme fatale cliché to mount a critique of patriarchy. L’Ivresse du pouvoir and La Fille coupée en deux present full-blown exposés of corruption and power, while Bellamy shows a celebrated detective failing to solve a mystery and failing to stop his younger brother commit suicide. Stylistic assertiveness is the key characteristic of Chabrol’s late films, particularly with the use of a primary asserted symbol. Neither pure art cinema nor pure genre films, Chabrol’s films are hybrids, with an assertive style, overt symmetries, flaunted formal patterns and some genre conventions. They present stories and characters, but make it hard to identify with the characters and preserve unanswered questions and ambiguities, undermining expectations we take for granted. He is far from unique among filmmakers to do this, but Chabrol creates his own distinctive form. Chabrol’s success derives from his combination of narrative engagement and formalist play. His late films combine his unusual style and tone with conventions from popular crime fiction, a means to reach as large an audience as possible. Part of the pleasure of Chabrol’s films is the way they immerse one in a force field of tone, where one perceives and follows a guiding sensibility. Notable gestures, flaunted camera movements and asserted symbols provoke wry smiles. The film engages us with the story and its characters, yet we perceive Chabrol’s ‘light step backwards’ from the material. As the films manoeuvre around their characters, they foreground a distanced point of view and forestall total immersion in their world. Indecision about how to interpret asserted stylistic devices makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience because we are aware of the perspective embodied in the film’s style and narration. One may reject that perspective, yet to do so is not to deny the total stylistic confidence in these late films or their clarity of perspective. Chabrol’s films maintain an aesthetic distance from the characters to analyse social function, rather than explore inner life. Some viewers may perceive the lack of emotional involvement as a limit. Some may ask, as Henry James does of Flaubert, whether Chabrol is ‘condemned to

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irony’ (James 1981: 232), whether aesthetic distance limits his work. As Raymond Durgnat writes of Buñuel, his ‘detachment debars him from the deeply tragic. Often, he seems to slide into the derisive, the grotesque, or the ironic, to indicate tragedy without indulging it fully’ (1967: 16). Viewers of Chabrol’s films may say the same. However, for this viewer, James’s conclusion about Madame Bovary applies to Chabrol’s films: ‘Emotion is just sufficiently present to take off the chill’ (James 1981:  148). In his last nine films, emotion offsets the aesthetic distance or ‘chill’. As Jacobowitz and Lippe write of Bellamy, the film ‘invites identification with life and human experience, but in a controlled, highly stylised manner’ (2011: 43). Merci pour le chocolat, La Fille coupée en deux and Bellamy achieve a tragic quality. La Cérémonie, La Fleur du mal, La Demoiselle d’honneur and L’Ivresse du pouvoir combine black comedy, the grotesque and suspenseful melodrama. Au Cœur du mensonge combines irony and melancholy in one of Chabrol’s bleakest films since Juste avant la nuit, while Rien ne va plus offers a hugely enjoyable self-reflexive study of the Chabrol/Huppert, director/star relationship. The conclusion of this book is that Chabrol’s last nine films are rich, complex works that push at the limits of his art while reformulating earlier devices. As with other artists’ late works, Chabrol’s last films are sophisticated reflexive creations, aesthetic constructs that unabashedly flaunt their artifice. Without being decadent, they offer the characteristic pleasures of late works and display an immense artistic confidence. Tonally ambivalent, rigorously constructed, with an aesthetic flair that offers many stimulations, Chabrol’s late films are tales of woe and venality, told with a cool precision of artistry so that the pleasures of viewing and re-viewing them derive from his handling of the material. They are narrative films, but with an expressionistic style that breaks down the norms of most narrative fiction films. They disrupt without destroying narrative verisimilitude; the result is an uneasy yet compelling combination of assertion and ellipsis, obviousness and ambiguity. Chabrol’s late films contain absurdist wordplay with names, fragmented plotting, intrusive camerawork, exaggerated characterization, quotations and allusions to earlier films (including his own), multiple failures by his protagonists and a huge piling up of foregrounded imagery and asserted symbolism, in general, a superabundance of effects that makes interpretation and evaluation challenging yet fascinating because the whole time it is clear that Chabrol knew exactly what he was doing.

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Index Adorno, Theodor W. 181, 182 aesthetic distance 21–6, 45, 46, 47, 53, 115, 153–4, 157, 173, 183–4 aesthetic suspense 15 Alexandre, Wilfrid 1 All that Heaven Allows (Sirk) 17 ambiguity/ambiguous causality 28, 61, 72, 77, 81, 89, 94, 99, 104–5, 139, 141, 143, 144, 153 Anger, Cédric 25–6 Armengol, Damien 30 n. 4, 33, 131 n. 1, 132 n. 8 Armstrong, Charlotte 33–4, 87, 91–2, 93, 95, 101 n. 6 art cinema 8–9, 143 asserted symbolism 15, 16–17, 18, 19, 21, 28, 33, 38–41, 47, 54, 57, 71, 72–3, 91, 92, 105, 113, 119, 121, 135–6, 138, 153, 156, 157–8, 177–8, 183, 184 Au Coeur du mensonge 11, 69–85, 184 Austin, Guy 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 26, 27, 28, 31 n. 13, 33, 48, 50 n. 3, 101 n. 8 Balmer, Jean-François 66 Barksi, Odile 85 n. 7, 135, 143–4, 167 Barlow, John D. 2 Bart, B. F. 22 Barthes, Roland 8 Battersby, Martin 72–3, 73–4 Baumann, Fabien 122, 130 Bazin, André 8–9 Beauvillard, Ariane 51 n. 8 Bégaudeau, François 149 n. 7 Bel-Ami (de Maupassant) 175 Bellamy 167–79, 183, 184 Bell, Dorian 31 n. 12 Bell, Melanie 101 n. 6 Belton, John 19 Bigger than Life (Ray) 14 black comedy 107, 127, 184

Blanchet, Christian 1, 3, 26 Bonnaud, Frédéric 2, 56, 68 n. 6 Booth, Wayne 22, 31 n. 17 Bordwell, David 8, 9 Bouquet, Michel 11 Bridesmaid, The (Rendell) 3, 34, 119, 122, 131–2 nn.2 Bridge of Spies (Spielberg) 16 Bringing Up Baby (Hawks) 15–16 Bronfen, Elisabeth 25, 122–3, 129 Brown, Royal S. 51 n. 12 Buñuel, Luis 25, 26 Burdeau, Emmanuel 26, 168, 174 Buss, Robin 6, 26–7, 95–6, 96–7 Cadiou, Henri 79–80 Cahiers du cinéma 2, 12, 174 Cain, James M. 5 camera movements 12, 21, 24, 48–9, 60–1, 77, 87–8, 89–90, 111–13, 123–4, 127, 136, 145, 156, 158, 171, 178 Cameron, Ian 19 caricature 10 Casablanca (Curtiz) 16 Casetti, Francesco 8 causal ambiguity 28 Cavell, Stanley 16 ceremonial or ritualistic tone 44–5 Ceremony, The (Harvey) 44 chance, Nietzsche on 50 Charade (Donen) 68 n. 6 Chez Maupassant (Maupassant) 179 n. 4 Chocolate Cobweb, The (Armstrong) 33, 87, 91–2, 93, 95, 101 n. 9 Cinéma, de notre temps 21 cinematic excess 7–8. see also stylistic excess Citron, Marcia J. 11, 12, 33, 45–6, 51 nn.9 Clark, John R. 9–10, 138 Clash by Night (Lang) 8, 29, 30

198

198

Index

Claude Chabrol: l’entomologiste 21 Clayton, Alex 15 Colour of Lies, The 70 Combs, Richard 70 Comedy of Power, A 146 comic tone 57 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) 5 crime fiction 3–7 classic category 5 hard-boiled hero tradition category 5 psychologically disturbed character 5 cross-cutting 48 Cypert, Rick 101–2 n. 9, 101 n. 6 dark comedy 10 de Baecque, Antoine 71, 84 Debruge, Peter 16 de Bruyn, Olivier 70–1 de Caunes, Antoine 85 n. 6 de Givray, Claude 3 Delorme, Gérard 141 de Maupassant, Guy 175 Derry, Charles 4, 27, 31 n. 10, 100 n. 2 disruptive aesthetic strategies 157 Doane, Mary Ann 6, 15, 121, 129, 133 nn.14 Don Giovanni 43–4 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques 152 doubles/doubling 97–8, 104, 154–5, 175 Dousteyssier-Khoze, Catherine 5, 7, 8, 161, 166 nn.3 dramatic irony 47 Duclos, Philippe 11, 133 n. 13 Dumeniaud, Pierre-François 55 Durgnat, Raymond 184 editing 39–40 Eisenreich, Pierre 50 n. 4 Eliacheff, Caroline 33, 34, 47, 87 Elsaesser, Thomas 7, 17, 20 exaggeration 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 19, 55, 94, 110, 119, 121, 125, 126, 128, 136–7, 157, 165, 182, 184 expressionism 2–3, 6, 13, 17, 18, 26, 84 n. 4, 108, 113, 119, 126, 135, 139, 158, 184 Family Plot (Hitchcock) 182 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 25, 26

femme fatale 128–9, 132 n. 8, 133 n. 14, 183 Fieschi, Jean- André 24 Film as Film 17 film noir 4–5, 6–7, 16, 29, 91, 99, 120, 129, 132 n. 8, 133 n. 14 Flaubert, Gustave 22 Fleischer, Richard 151–2 Ford, John 18 framing 17, 21, 26, 40, 41–2, 76–7, 78, 88, 90, 94, 97, 112, 114, 123, 171, 173 Frappat, Hélène 4, 118 nn.3 Frenzy (Hitchcock) 11–12 From Doon with Death (Rendell) 101 n. 6 Frye, Northrop 181 Furness, R. S. 2 Fury (Lang) 17 Gamblin, Jacques 70 Garbarz, Frank 104, 117–18 n. 1 Gergely, Gabor 4 Gili, Jean A. 53, 67 n. 5, 68 n. 9, 170, 179 n. 4 Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, The (Fleischer) 151 Gishiki (Nagisa Oshima) 44 Gledhill, Christine 6 Goute, Agnès 3, 156 Grassin, Sophie 68 n. 6 grotesque 9–12, 13, 30 n. 6, 64, 107, 137, 138, 183, 184 Gunning, Tom 17 Hahn, Reynaldo 75 Hamilton, Patrick 125 Hanson, Helen 129 Harris, Barbara 182 Harvey, Laurence 44 Heath, Stephen 7 Highsmith, Patricia 5, 96, 125 Hirsch, Foster 5 Hitchcock, Alfred 5, 17–18, 25, 93, 101 n. 6 Hollywood 16 Horsley, Lee 4, 5, 6 Huppert, Isabelle 22, 24, 26, 36, 55, 65, 67 n. 4, 68 n. 7, 89, 98–9, 100 n. 2, 138–9 hybridity 13, 183

199

Index Il deserto rosso (Antonioni) 14 Imitation of Life (Sirk) 17 ironic tradition 46–7 Jacobowitz, Florence 4, 33, 48, 50–1 n. 4, 175, 177, 184 James, Henry 22–3, 183 James, Nick 12 Joly, Eva 146 Jonasz, Michel 68 n. 9 Jousse, Thierry 2, 54, 67 nn.1, 68 n. 6 Judgement in Stone, A (Rendell) 33 Juste avant la nuit 70 Karmitz, Marin 30–1 n. 8 Killers, The (Siodmak) 16 killer’s point of view, in crime fiction 5, 6, 119 King Lear (Shakespeare) 29 Kitchen Shelf (Cardiou) 79–80 Kuhn, Annette 129, 133 n. 14 Labarthe, André 21 La Cérémonie 2, 25, 28, 33–51, 182, 183, 184 La Demoiselle d’honneur 119–34, 183, 184 Lady Eve, The (Sturges) 16, 65 La Femme Infidèle 101 n. 8 La Fille coupée en deux 13, 21, 151–66, 183, 184 La Fleur du mal 12–13, 103–18, 183, 184 L’Amour, l’après-midi (Rohmer) 85 n. 8 Lane, Anthony 179 n. 4 Lang, Fritz 5, 17, 25, 29, 93 L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais) 143 La Nuit du Carrefour (Renoir) 93 La Règle du jeu (Renoir) 15 La Rupture 2, 3 late style 181–3 law of absurdity 50 Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl) 7, 133 n. 15 Le Beau Serge 21 Le Boucher 6, 20, 26, 31 n. 12, 95, 101 n. 8 L’Eclisse (Antonioni) 143 LeFanu, Mark 20 Le Mariage de Figaro 47

Lequeret, Elisabeth 146 Les Bonnes Femmes 12, 21 Le Scandale 22 Les Cousins 19 Les Godelureaux 22 Les Liens du sang 2 Les Noces rouges 43 l’expressionnism chabrolien 3 Lippe, Richard 163, 164, 175, 177, 184 L’Ivresse du pouvoir 11, 13, 135–49, 183, 184 Lola Montes (Ophuls) 152 Lyotard, Jean-François 8 MacDougall, Ranald 101 n. 6 Madame Bovary 22 Magny, Joël 1, 10–11, 24, 26 Maigret voit rouge (Grangier) 169 Maistre, Cécile 24, 151 Make Death Love Me (Rendell) 33 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (Ford) 18 Marnie (Hitchcock) 17–18 Masson, Alain 137 Mast, Gerald 46 McElroy, Bernard 10, 11, 30 n. 6 McKibbin, Tony 94, 99, 100 n. 2, 102 n. 10 melodramas 7–8, 53, 57 Merci pour le chocolat 13, 33, 87–102, 183, 184 Milman, Miriam 72, 74, 79 mise en scène 83 Mitchell, Mark D. 73, 80 Monogram 20 Morice, Jacques 67 n. 3 Morrey, Douglas 22, 30 n. 7, 31 n. 19 Movie 20 Mulvey, Laura 17 Murat, Pierre 69–70, 84 n. 5 Naremore, James 4 narrational ambiguity. see ambiguity/ ambiguous causality Neale, Steve 133 n. 14 Neupert, Richard 5, 18–19, 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich 50, 51 n. 14, 83, 96 Notorious (Hitchcock) 93

199

200

200

Index

obviousness 15–16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 27, 56–7, 64, 87, 90, 91, 92, 112, 114–15, 122, 137, 139, 153, 154, 157, 163, 184 opacity 22, 26–8, 40, 44–5, 46–8, 87, 89 Paisà (Rossellini) 8 Palmer, R. Barton 99 Perkins, V. F. 13–14, 15, 17, 39 Picard, Andréa 13, 100 n. 3 Place, Janey 4–5, 91, 129, 132 n. 8, 133 n. 14 Polack, Jean-Claude 33, 47 Polanski, Roman 25, 26 Positif 12 Pugh, Anthony R. 47 Pye, Douglas 8, 18, 29–30 Ragtime (Forman) 151, 166 n. 6 Rancho Notorious (Lang) 17, 29, 30 Reckless Moment, The (Ophuls) 114 Rendell, Ruth 5–6, 33, 34–6, 45, 50 n. 1, 101 n. 6, 119, 126, 131–2 n. 2, 132 n. 5, 133 n. 10 Renoir, Jean 93 Renzi, Eugenio 26 repetitions 42, 54, 62, 103–4, 112, 117, 141–2, 171 Rien ne va plus 2, 11, 12, 53–68, 184 Rohmer, Eric 19, 85 n. 8 Romney, Jonathan 12, 149 n. 8 Rope (Hamilton) 5, 125 Rothman, William 182 Rouyer, Philippe 154, 162–3, 166 n. 9 Rowland, Susan 6, 35–6 Russell, David 179 n. 2 Said, Edward 181 Sanders, Steven M. 7 Sarris, Andrew 18 satire 10, 137–8 schadenfreude 11 Schatz, Thomas 30 n. 3 Schindler’s List (Spielberg) 16 Schönberg, Arnold 57, 58, 63 Scott, A. O. 179 Secret beyond the Door (Lang) 93 Serrault, Michel 65 settings 87–8, 93, 97, 101 n. 8, 108

Shadoian, Jack 16–17 Shivas, Mark 24–5 Sight and Sound 12 Simenon, Georges 168, 169 Siodmak, Robert 16 Sirk, Douglas 17 Sister My Sister (Meckler) 48 Smith, Susan 25 sociopolitical critique, in crime fictions 6, 36, 99, 183 spectatorial detachment 15, 25, 43, 44–5, 47, 48–9, 111, 115 spectatorial identification 24–5, 47, 48, 49, 57, 67 n. 1, 115 Stables, Kate 164 Strangers on a Train (Highsmith) 132 n. 10 Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock) 18, 125 Strauss, Frédéric 2, 38, 46 stylistic excess 7–8, 12–15, 19, 26, 115, 119, 182 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder) 91 Suspicion (Hitchcock) 93 symbolism 15, 16–17, 19, 20–1, 76, 115. see also asserted symbolism Telotte, J. P. 6, 7–8, 29 Terrio, Susan J. 33 Tessé, Jean-Philippe 135, 139, 143, 144, 147 Thomas, Deborah 25, 26, 28, 33, 37, 45, 48–50, 51 n. 13, 91, 136 Thompson, Jim 5 Thompson, Kristin 8 Thomson, Philip 10 tonal disruption 25–6 Tosca 63–4, 66–7 Toubiana, Serge 26 Transfigured Night (Schönberg) 57, 58, 63 Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch) 65, 68 n. 6 Unsuspected, The (Curtiz) 9, 101 nn.6 Variety 16 Vassé, Claire 51 n. 12 Vincendeau, Ginette 70, 73 Violette Nozière 27 Walker, Michael 1, 5, 7, 9, 12, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28, 93, 98, 101 nn.6, 126, 133 n. 12

201

Index Warshow, Robert 30 n. 3 Wild River (Kazan) 18 Willemen, Paul 17 Williams, Tennessee 10 Wilson, George 9, 30 n. 5, 149 n. 3

201

Wood, Robin 1, 9, 12, 14, 18, 19, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 98, 101 nn.8, 126, 133 n. 12, 149 Woolfolk, Alan 7, 29

202