The series Claude Chabrol, maître de suspense is showing on MUBI from October 6 – November 13, 2018 in the United States.
The career of Claude Chabrol is as slippery as it is prolific. He started as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, which catalyzed his legacy as a director of over fifty films. Throughout those decades, his works frequently received lukewarm reception with unpredictable highs and lows: one recurring adjective that appears in appraisals of his filmography is “uneven”1. Because he seemingly “lacked the formal experimentation of Godard, and his chilly, precise style was easily overshadowed by Truffaut’s delirious romanticism,”2 Chabrol became, in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum, the “most neglected filmmaker of the French New Wave.”3
Here, there are three domains of overlooking: There is the critical “neglect” of Claude Chabrol, shadowing his supply of rocky genre fare. Then, the thematic significance of ignorance in the Chabrolian world, where willful naivety defines the fate of the complacent middle class, and fans their inner chaos to destructive flames—usually murder. And orchestrating all this is Chabrol’s formal play with the concept of the periphery, the surroundings that, unbeknownst to the rich, swirl about these little microcosms.
Left: Crucified Lovers (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) / Right: Line of Demarcation (Claude Chabrol, 1966)
Chabrol draws the circles within which his characters struggle to escape (for some, however, escape is not even an option). Then he himself steps outside of the lines for brief ellipses at a time, and nods to an understanding that the world is not so small after all. In the 1966 Line of Demarcation, Pierre (Maurice Ronet), a French military captain, returns home from Nazi imprisonment to his British wife, the Countess Mary (Jean Seberg), and discovers that their riverside chateau has fallen under German control. Not only this, but Mary, a Brit free from Nazi rule, has taken it upon herself to aid the French Resistance by helping spies cross the titular line of demarcation between Vichy and German-occupied France. The valiance of the Resistance and its allies are countered by Chabrol’s suggestion that romantic heroism has its limits. Mary retrieves a boat for a group of spies and wishes them luck. She then returns to her bedroom and falls asleep, content with her contributions. But once the men leave, Chabrol cuts to a shot filmed through the trees, of the boat adrift in the river. Its suspension into a pitch-black nothingness recalls the films of Kenji Mizoguchi—especially Crucified Lovers, another tale of federal rule pushing detractors out and to the waters—which were largely admired by Cahiers. It is here that we see the undeniable risk of the cause, the fear that Mary will never know: immediately, the men are noticed, and one by one they try to escape, only to be shot down mercilessly by the Nazis.
Left: I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994) / Right: The Swindle (Claude Chabrol, 1997)
Sometimes, it is these asides that capture far more attention than the events ensuing on center stage. Far from a beloved classic, Chabrol’s 1997 The Swindle features Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault as two con artists traveling across Europe, who steal from drunken businessmen and bicker along the way. The woman relishes the thrill of the crime, disguising herself with various wigs and gowns; the old man cherishes the safety of getting away in one piece. But when the pair takes a flight to their next scam, Chabrol suddenly raises the volume of another conversation nearby. The camera slowly tracks away from the con artists, and stops at two black men discussing the various “half-truths, manipulation, red herrings, […] and lies” of everything they have learned—though from where, or about what, is obscured by diegetic sound, thus rendering parts of this conversation a secret—with the one example being the "polite" but systematic spread of colonialism. The momentary sequence in the film turns our eyes to an association of whiteness with deception. It soberly amplifies the silliness of Huppert and Serrault’s hijinks, since they themselves are white people, albeit lower middle class, who cheat their way to wealth and power. A similar cross-comparison between the sufferings of white and black people unfolds in Claire Denis’s I Can’t Sleep, in its overlapping grid of lives in metropolitan Paris. Chabrol’s tracking shot, however, physically forces the audience to move away from the dominant narrative and consider the weight of the sham. After this sequence, the film returns to the heist, but now with the solid implication that the white people's scams are a mere game, unlike the masks that the black men must employ in a racist France.
Left: La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000) / Right: The Bridesmaid (Claude Chabrol, 2004)
Roland Barthes’s 1959 critique of Chabrol’s debut, Le beau Serge, defines the “micro-realism”—a detail-oriented, “descriptive” aesthetic—of Claude Chabrol as innately right-wing for its moralistic lens, and its erasure of the role of politics in humanity’s fate.4 Barthes claims that as with all right-wing art, Le beau Serge dissipates its investigation of human misery with the conclusion that such a predicament is in human nature; this shift allows Chabrol to “dodge […] the real.”
But, in the case of the 2004 film The Bridesmaid, this “[dodging]” of reality is the subject of Claude Chabrol’s satire. A woman, Senta (Laura Smet), asks her partner Philippe (Benoît Magimel) to murder a man, just as she murders a woman, to confirm his devotion to her. They are both white and comfortably middle class, and share a lifestyle of anti-social behavior: Senta lives in a dark basement of furniture stashed away, and Philippe lives in a room in his mother’s (Aurore Clément) luxurious estate, where he separates himself from the rest of his family. There are no turns or shifts of the gaze in The Bridesmaid. Instead, Chabrol amplifies the claustrophobic insularity of the couple’s lifestyle, their rejection of their surroundings. Like Chantal Akerman’s La captive (which also features Clément), isolation from the world is linked to archaic hierarchies of patriarchy and class. Rather than leave his girlfriend, Philippe is provoked to prove himself as a man; meanwhile, Senta continues to assure him that they are “above laws [and] morality.” The delusion here is Senta’s belief that her pathological fetish for murder is an enactment of human nature rather than a myopic desire to be deserving of complete devotion. It derives from a cruel apathy towards everyone else deemed lesser beings, like the homeless man Senta claims to have murdered. Thus, theirs is a selective mutation of the real, a misguided view of a narrow universe.
Left: A Girl Cut in Two (Claude Chabrol, 2007) / Right: Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)
Occasionally, an outsider will cross into the circle of the bourgeoisie, and through their entrance, Chabrol points to the corrosive effects of this proximity to wealth. A Girl Cut in Two (2007) re-imagines the Stanford White shooting in 1906 as a contemporary love triangle between weathergirl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), married and famous author Charles (François Berléand), and millionaire heir Paul (Benoît Maginel, again as the spoiled man-child of a doting mother). Between the two men of old and new money, Gabrielle first chooses Charles, who sexually takes advantage of her eagerness to please and impress, treating her as a “little girl.” A later switch to the other option is no better: Paul, still envious of Charles, torments his lover for her past relationship, and then kills the man. Despite its erotic overtones—as one secondary character claims, “A woman’s worth is only the desire she arouses”—the destructive end to the triangle results from a fight between two forms of wealth over an innocent civilian of little means, each party trying to lure a new, poorer body to exploit for their pleasure. The final scene of A Girl Cut in Two finds Gabrielle working as a magician’s assistant, who is literally sawed in two—this time, a bodily line of demarcation—as she repeats her entrapment as a resource to be ravaged.
This engagement from the outside is echoed in Claude Chabrol’s final film, the cold and slow-simmering, blue-tinted Inspector Bellamy (2009). Gérard Depardieu stars as the titular celebrity detective, who skips out on a vacation to assist a nearby investigation connecting a car crash, a charred body, and reports of an insurance scam by a seedy broker who has adopted a "new face" and gone into hiding (Jacques Gamblin, playing three roles). Concurrently, the visit of Bellamy’s tormented half-brother, Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), provokes long-buried memories of violence. Though the convoluted case implicates the greed of a much richer, more powerful man, Chabrol only uses this as a means to pry into the mind of the inspector who claims to be "for the little guys"—but does a truth-seeking occupation, a "new face" of his own, absolve the man of his lies? Frequently, the camera moves and pans to open doors to reveal a vulnerable Bellamy in bed, as if hoping to catch him off guard, broken. As he breezes through casual interviews with witnesses and plows through tumultuous encounters with the aforementioned sibling, the inspector reaches not the end of the maze but a mirror: Both opening and end credits sequences take place in sight of demolished cars, dual scenes of death that draw the lines of a grander circle, nihilistically joining rich and poor as part of a selfish humanity in a cruelly classed world.
Notes
1. Dave Kehr, “Claude Chabrol, 80, Director, Dies,” 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/movies/13chabrol.html
2. Jim Hemphill, “DVD Playback: Le Beau Serge & Les Cousins (1958, 1959),” 2012, https://theasc.com/ac_magazine/January2012/DVDPlayback/page1.html
3. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Both Sides Now [The Ceremony],” 1997, https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/08/both-sides-now.
4. Philip Watts, Roland Barthes’ Cinema, 2016.