Jean-Claude Guiguet's Les Belles Manières | Fine Manners (1978)

Jean-Claude Guiguet is a new name to me, and this is the first of only four films he ever made: he had difficulties raising money for them. This is an austere, almost Bressonian, work of significance, and I regret that Guiguet is a very little known name, and that his films are so hard to find – in fact this seems to be the only one freely available.

Yonng Camille (Emmanuel Lemoine) comes to Paris for the first time to work with the divorced bourgeois Hélène Courtray (Hélène Surgère), helping out with household tasks and caring in so far as he can for her son Pierre (Hervé Duhamel), about the same age but just living in his room as he has done for two entire years, never venturing out.

When Hélène leaves for a day and night he talks briefly with Pierre, who makes it clear that he's dependent on him and in a sense seems to see Camille as a kind of saviour. Camille finds the emotions too complicated. He has watched Hélène masterfully play the piano, and in her absence tries it out, only to emit a few repetitive notes. He sets fire to the bedsheets hanging to dry, and is next found in prison for arson. Hélène wants to free him, but that night he is homosexually attacked by one of the inmates in the same cell, and is found to have hanged himself by the wardens the next morning.

These are the bones of the story, although for Guiguet problems are invisible, and he compares his film to Chabrol's Marxist Cérémonie. The comparisons with this film are evident: the working-class, partly literate Camille moves into a middle-class home and it surrounded by the trappings of that existence: classical music, books, a world of learning.

On one of his quite rare walks in Paris, Camille bumps into his sister Domino (Martine Simonet), who having earned very little as a punch card operator now makes a living as a prostitute in Montmartre.  And on leaving, Camille gets beaten up by yobs.

Hélène is sugar-sweet and just as poisonous. Is it really so surprising to learn that Camille has without doubt been harbouring frustrations which could explode at any time? Rhetorical question. Brilliant film.