Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher | The Butcher (1970)

Le Boucher is set in the village of Trémolat, Dordogne, where Hélène David (Stéphane Audran), aged thirty, runs the village school. During the marriage ceremony of fellow teacher Léon Hamel (Mario Beccaria) she sits next to butcher Paul (or 'Popaul') Thomas (Jean Yanne), who many years earlier left his violent father to partake in more violence in the wars in Indo-China and Algeria. The improbable friendship continues with Paul joining Hélène for meals at her place in the school, going to the cinema, for walks, etc. Paul, who asks about her relationships, is told by Hélène about a relationship she has has some years before and which to some extent traumatised her: Paul says not having sex can send a person mad, Hélène says having sex can send a person mad too, and doesn't want him to kiss her.

There's a murder of a young girl by stabbing, then the murder of Léon's new wife that Hélène is the first to discover, although a cigarette lighter dropped by the body, which is identical to one she has given Paul on his birthday she picks up and puts in her pocket, as if colluding in the murder. She doesn't mention this to a police investigator, although she later asks Paul for a light and is relieved to see him produce her lighter. But she later discovers, on looking for the lighter she took from the scene of the murder, that Paul has taken it, and therefore must be the murderer.

In a long scene previously, Hélène is in the classroom dictating a passage from Balzac's Une femme de trente ans, which in part concerns a woman named Hélène who murders her brother and runs away with a murderer. During this scene Paul appears at the window. The influence of Balzac, as well as Fritz Lang and Hitchcock, on Chabrol is important.

Paul eventually gets his kiss from Hélène, but only as he is dying and on the way to his death in the operating room after stabbing himself in the gut.