Cinema
Vintage Chabrol
Mark Le Fanu
Claude Chabrol is a prolific enough filmmaker at the best of times. The release in London over the last year of four of his films should have provided Academy audiences with ample opportunities to familiarise themselves with this most ' difficult ' of French directors.
Difficult? It's partly a question of how one ' takes ' Chabrol. English reviewers on the whole have been content to accept him at face value, either concentrating on the slickness with which he unwinds the thriller elements of the plot, or remarking on the excellent observation with which he delineates the ' human condition ' (reviews of Le Boucher tended to say this.) Consequently, there's been a slight embarrassment about what I take to be a central facet of these late films: namely (apart from a somewhat hysterical violence) a series of long metaphysical disquisitions on guilt and Christianity which characterise the protagonists' musings on the fruits of their crimes, and which tend to 'slow up ' the film at certain key points. I'd say immediately that Chabrol's protagonists are less sympathetic than some reviewers take them to be: and that if anything the clue to understanding what Chabrol is really getting at in these theological fables of murder and retribution is a pervasive spirit of mischief and irony.
Just Before Nightfall (' X Academy 1) is no exception. The plot is vintage Chabrol: an advertising consultant murders his mistress, and after a perfunctory police investigation, looks as if he'll get away with it. Gradually however he becomes obsessed by guilt and a need for expiation, confesses to his wife and best friend, who make matters worse by being blandly understanding. In the last resort there is no way out but death. So far, so moral. The plot is a variation on a previous film Femme lnfidele where a rich bourgeois is seen to con, secrate his failing marriage by,' likewise, bumping off his mistress, after which he and his wife are drawn together more strongly than ever. In both these films Chabrol presents us not with some measured statement on the ' tragedy ' of human existence, but, on the contrary, a wry dissection of the morality of a certain type of bourgeois set-up. Not to labour the point, the atmosphere throughout is one of chilling hypocrisy. Under all circumstances, in this society, 'forms ' must be kept up: the sacred certainties of family life must on no account be ruffled. Chabrol manages to suggest that the psychological correlative of all this is a masochistic need for punishment on the part of his heroes to ratify the compact between them and their creator which exists in this patriarchal and reactionary society. The point is enforced by having Michel Bouquet play the husband in both films. There can never have been an actor more suited to play the part of an aggrieved and misunderstood family man. Sleek, plump, polished, complacent and greedy, he manages to evoke to perfection an image of bourgeois self-righteousness that gets better from film to film. Similarly, as always in Chabrol, the ' settings ' are perfect — the clothes, cars, possessions and table manners of his principal characters. In Just Before Nightfall the family home is a marvel of opulent comfort, architect designed, in which the characteristic surfaces, glass, alu minium, are as hard and empty, as 'lost,' as the victims — wives, children, au-pairs — of family life they enclose. It's with a malicious eye that Chabrol focuses on the images of conspicuous con sumption — chocolate cakes, plentiful champagne, bulky Christmas presents — which sus tain this life and give it identity. In this context one's a little sur prised in conversation to find how generally admired Stephane Audran invariably is in her role as rich sophisticate. Surely it can't need saying that she's also a victim.
This missing the point about Audran (where the audience 'takes 'her entirely on the level of chic) might be planned by Chabrol as a last touch of irony. More plausibly it points to an unresolved ambiguity: one can talk as long as one likes about his films being an attack on bourgeois society (and certainly he is consistently less indulgent than Rohmer's portrait of a similar milieu in the recent Love in the Afternoon). Ultimately however Chabrol is seen to be a shade too complicit in the world he condemns. That house, for instance, which the film uses so ironically. Much space is given in the credits to announcing that it is the work of one of Paris's most distinguished architects who has obviously collaborated closely with Chabrol throughout. Does Chabrol really dislike the society he anatomises so minutely?
A bright new musical adapted from Tom Sawyer (' U ', Dominion) can be recommended as an antidote to all this gloom about family life.
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