Claude Chabrol's Une affaire de femmes | Story of Women (1988)

Made ten years after Violette Nozière, this, along with the previous film, can be seen as a kind of diptych. Both are inspired by real-life criminal cases. The main differences lies in the historical and political backcloth within which they were set, and this is occupied France in 1943.

Class is also a difference, and here we have the barely literate Marie Latour – Isabelle Huppert again, this time representing Marie-Louise Giraud – determined to make as much money as she can for her family. She's married to Paul (François Cluzet), and although she has two young children her relationship with him is clearly sinking and she avoids sex.

One way she can earn extra money is by letting a room out to her friend the prostitute Lucie (Marie Trintignant), although her real earnings are coming from her business performing illegal abortions – she's a faiseuse d'anges – and for a time she's able to keep the knowledge of these activities from Paul.

But it's not long before Paul realises that Marie has a lover, Lucien (Nils Tavernier), and in fact she becomes not too secretive about the fact: with the result that Paul makes a letter to the authorities made out of cut-out letters from newspapers, and soon Marie is arrested. And not only that: as a measure of the gravity of her offence she's sent to Paris.

As this is Paris during the Vichy régime, and Pétain's portrait adorns one of the rooms where Marie has a talk to her lawyer, and as abortion is seen not just as a crime but a crime against the state, justice is extremely harsh with Marie: she receives the death sentence, which will never be commuted to life imprisonment. It is evident what Chabrol thinks about this gruesome farce of a verdict.

Claude Chabrol's Violette Nozière (1978)

Violette Nozière is one of Chabrol's films concerning women and is set in the early thirties at the time of increasing fascism. It is inspired by a fait divers, about an eighteen-year-old woman (Isabelle Huppert acting for Chabrol for the first time) still at school who regularly secretly leaves the petit bourgeois parental home at night to prostitute herself. When the doctor diagnoses her as having syphilis, she somehow manages to convince her parents (Jean Carmet as Baptiste and Stéphane Audran as Germaine) that she has inherited it from them.

Then she falls in love with Jean Gabin (Jean-François Garreaud), an opportunist for whom she hands over the profits from her (occasional) prostitution and money she steals from her parents. She forges doctor's prescriptions and poisons her parents, although, 'respecting' her mother, she gives her a lower dose and Germaine survives.

Violette Nozière claimed that her father has repeatedly raped her, although she was nevertheless given the death sentence. This was later commuted to a life sentence, and in August 1945 de Gaulle pardoned her, she married the prison clerk, had five children by him, and died in 1963 a fully pardoned woman.

Claude Chabrol's Les Godelureaux | Wise Guys (1961)

This is a little known Chabrol, and not a much appreciated one. The rich Ronald (Jean-Claude Brialy) parks his car in front of the café Le Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and in his absence the young bourgeois Arthur (Charles Belmont) has his mates lift the car from its place so he can put his there instead. On his return, Ronald is jeered at by those on the terrasse. The humiliated Ronald decides to get his revenge by using Amboisine (Bernadette Lafont).

In the book Claude Chabrol, Guy Austin points out that this film shows another of the contrasts between Chabrol himself and his friend Paul Gégauff, with the Arthur character as a version of the young Chabrol ('innocent, reserved, repressed') and the Ronald character as Gégauff ('cynical, charismatic, provocative').

Various: Paris vu par (1965)

 

It was Barbet Schroeder's idea to give a bit of pep to the Nouvelle Vague by having a number of players – we can hardly call them 'members' as this was never a movement – make a movie. And the result was six shorts by noted directors, each taking a part of Paris in which Paris vu par was made: Saint-Germain des Prés (Jean Douchet); Gare du Nord (Jean Rouch); Rue Saint-Denis (Jean-Daniel Pollet); Place de l'Etoile (Eric Rohmer); Montparnasse and Levallois (Jean-Luc Godard); and Pharmacie la Muette (Claude Chabrol). In all, the six films last 95 minutes and are an excellent display of the cinematic talent of the time.

Two of the shorts end in death, two in broken relationships, two prominently show street scenes, and two essentially men at work. Douchet shows a one-night-stand in which the man says he's going to Mexico, although he's in fact a model in a life class; Rouch has a woman arguing with her partner about changing their lives, although when she's presented with the opportunity she turns it down: oddly, this seems very Rohmerian, concerning an essentially philosophical issue; Pollet again turns to Claude Malki as a shy person reluctant to enjoy the pleasures of the prostitute he's paid; Rohmer, with his paranoid shirt salesman, seems to be suggesting a man-to-man confrontation is to be avoided, whereas man-to-woman handle accidents in a very civil fashion; in Godard's short, as in Montparnasse where the metal sculptor throws his fickle girlfriend out, in Levallois her car bodywork lover does the same; and finally Chabrol's film has the son of an endlessly arguing couple (Chabrol himself and his own wife (and actrice fétiche) Stéphane Audran) wearing ear plugs to silence the rowing and so not hear his mother's cries when she falls down the stairs and cracks her skull – when the son leaves the house, ironically he stands by Pharmacie la Muette – La Muette is an area of Paris, the silence ear plugs give, and the permanent state of his mother.

Brilliant stuff, but was it impossible to find a female director, such as Agnès Varda?

Claude Chabrol's Landru (1963)

This is one of Chabrol's earlier films and from a fait divers, starring a very heavily made-up (in fact so much so as to look rather ridiculous) Charles Denner as Henri Landru, the man who during World War I took advantage of the scarcity of men to woo, rob and incinerate a number of vulnerable women. He continued to claim his innocence right up to and beyond his death sentence.

Woman follows woman, met at Luxembourg through small ads or discreetly chased in the street, only to end in his oven, the smell of which appalls the English neighbours, but inexplicably they don't make a fuss about it. The number of women and the shots of the smoking chimney tended to bore me, although the trial scenes – in which Landru continued to proclaim his innocence and make fun of the court – are very interesting in a macabre kind of way. Very far from Chabrol's best, but still watchable: once.

Claude Chabrol's Juste avant la nuit | Just Before Nightfall (1971)

Juste avant la nuit  is based on the novel The Thin Line (1951) by Edward Atiyah, and on the face of it can be considered as a kind of retake of La Femme Infidèle. This is the final of the Hélène series, with Hélène (Stéphane Audran) married to Charles (Michel Bouquet), whose best friend is François (François Tellier) – not called Paul in this film.

The film begins with a masochistic episode, Charles killing his masochistic lover, getting rid of evidence, having a few whiskies in a bar, being sick in the toilet, and meeting François in the bar. Visibly, he is psychologically troubled.

His trouble will continue, after the body is discovered, investigation has taken place, and the police are still no closer to finding the answer. Charles feels as though he's having a nervous breakdown, has to tell someone of his troubles, so tells Hélène of his affair with Laura. And later, of his (almost accidental) murder of her. Hélène continues to support Charles: what else can she do, as she's financially and familiarly tied to him. But (religious? moral?) guilt hounds Charles.

He tells François and asks if he should confess to the police, but François is stoical: he loves Charles, and then there's the scandal, why disturb the (bourgeois) universe? Because, of course, Charles wants to give himself up, purge himself, but he's the only person who wants this.

The solution to a suicidal Charles? Well, suicide, or is it euthanasia? Anyway, his kids soon forget the business.

Claude Chabrol's Que la bête meure | The Beast Must Die (1969)

Que la bête meure is based on a novel by Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die (1938), which was translated into French under the same title as the film. Homer's Illiad is mentioned in this film, and both of course are stories of revenge.

This film is part of the 'Hélène' series, starring Caroline Cellier as Hélène Lanson and a Chabrolian figure Charles Thénier (Michel Duchaussoy), who is a children's book writer and a widower, and the Gégauffian figure Paul Decourt (Jean Yanne). The police appearing to be next to useless on the hit-and-run crash in a village in Brittany that caused the death of Charles's son, Charles decides to find the criminal involved and kill him. Charles finds out that a Ford Mustang with a dented left front wing was stuck in the mud the same day, and that the son of an agricultural worker who helped the driver out recognised the passenger as the female actor as Hélène Lanson. So Charles seeks her out in Paris.

Charles and Hélène become lovers, he asks her questions about her family and learns of her garage owner brother-in-law Paul in Brittany (with whom she has had an affair), and they go there for a few days. Paul is a highly objectionable, uncouth middle-aged yob who delights in demeaning people as a cover for his cowardice and insecurity, although he allows Charles to his workshop, where Charles discovers that he is selling his Mustang for an unknown reason.

Soon, Paul reveals to Charles that he has read his notebook about his ostensible new book, in which Charles makes it patently clear that he intends to kill Paul. Charles leaves, and there is an almost surreal sequence in which Charles and Hélène watch a TV newsflash in which they are requested back to Paul's home, as he has died under odd circumstances.

With the exception of Paul's mother, probably several people wanted the death of Paul, although Charles's incriminating notes of course pinpoint to his guilt: putting rat poison in his medication. As Charles is cross-examined at the police station, Philippe Decourt (Marc Di Napoli) confesses to his father's murder: Philippe has seen Charles as his 'real', spiritual father, so is he taking the rap for him? Charles later writes to Hélène stating that he is in fact the murderer, that he can't allow Philippe to assume the guilt, and is sailing into his death. To me, the jury is permanently out: this film has no closure, and we don't know who killed Paul: Philippe, after all, did produce the bottle of poison.

Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle | The Unfaithful Wife (1968)

La Femme infidèle is seen by Guy Austin in Claude Chabrol (French Film Directors series) as the first genuine film in the Hélène series, and that particular Hélène is Hélène Desvallées (Stéphane Audran), the wife of Charles (Michel Bouquet), who is having an affair with Victor Pégala (Maurice Ronet): Chabrol himself stated that none of his Chabrolian characters (called Charles) could be seen to kill a person called Paul (a Gégauffian character), hence the name Victor.

And, of course, Charles kills Victor after learning from the private detective he's hired, Bignon (Serge Bento), that Victor is having an affair with his wife. Charles is seen wiping his finger prints from every object touched in Victor's place, including the huge cigarette lighter that had in fact been an anniversary present from Charles to Hélène, and then dragging the wrapped body to his car and dumping it in the river.

This surprisingly brings a lift to their marriage, things are more together (including the jigsaw of their son Michel (Stéphane di Napoli)), even if Charles does have to go to the police and presumably confess to the murder.

Claude Chabrol's Les Biches | The Does (1967)

Les Biches refers to the does chalked by the pavement artist Why (Jacqueline Sassard) on the Pont des Arts as the rich and predatory Fréderique (Stéphane Audray) looks on until Why packs up and is picked up by the elder woman. Reading Guy Austin's Claude Chabrol in Manchester University Press's 'French Film Directors' series, it's interesting to note the observation about two prints sold by a bouquiniste in the film: Fréderique wants to know why they have different prices, and is told that one is the original, the other is a copy: a first-and-only-time viewer of Les Biches would find difficulty understanding this as an allusion to the real and the fake Fréderique at the end of the film.

I'm unsure of Austin's take on vampirism in Les Biches, although it's fascinating to learn of Chabrol's relationship with Paul Gégauff, the writer who frequently co-wrote screenplays with the director, very occasionally on his own. There's often a character like the younger Chabrol ('innocent, reserved, repressed') and a Gégauffian one ('cynical, charismatic, provocative'), often called 'Charles' and 'Paul' respectively.

In Les Biches though there's only a Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who breaks the lesbian Fréderique/Why duo when he first goes for Why, then Fréderique falls for him, leaving Why murderously jealous and taking on the perssona (and clothing) of Fréderique.

Guy Austin includes this (spiritually if not factually) in the Hélène cycle, although there is of course no actual Hélène.

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.

Claude Chabrol's La Rupture | The Breach (1970)

Hélène Régnier (Stéphane Audran) is the wife of the psychopathic Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), who violently begins the film by throwing their child down, who hits his head. In self defence Hélène batters him with a frying pan and rushes from the house, upon which neighbours come to her aid and she is driven to the hospital. Charles has no job and Hélène has run the family on the paltry sum she earns from her barmaid job, has kept the family afloat, although Charles's father is a wealthy businessman, but will do everything he can to protect his son and besmirch the reputation of his daughter-in-law, whom he sees as unfit for Charles: yes, it's of course Chabrol taking a poke at the moneyed hypocritical upper middle class.

Temporarily Hélène finds cheap accommodation at a boarding house opposite the hospital, run by Madame Pinelli (Annie Cordy) and (to a much lesser extent) the alcoholic Monsieur Pinelli (Jean Carmet), and the house more than a little resembles La Maison Vauquier of Balzac's Le Père Goriot. And here to stay on a temporary basis is slimeball Paul Thomas (Jean-Pierre Cassel), in theory staying there because of an illness, in reality there to paint Hélène black. He tries to do this by getting Pinelli into a drunken stupor while his wife is away, drugging the Pinellis' daughter and showing her porn videos by Thomas's girlfriend posing as Hélène, and finally (desperately) spiking Hélène's morning orange juice with LSD.

Needless to say, perhaps, Thomas's plan doesn't work: Hélène has already informed him that she knows he's a plant designed by Régnier père to make her look bad as he wants custody of the child, but anyway Thomas loses what little cool he had by killing Régnier's son Charles.

Claude Chabrol's Poulet au vinaigre | Cop au Vin (1985)

Chabrol's Poulet au vinaigre – meaning 'chicken with vinegar' but also punning on poulet meaning cop, and rather cleverly (for once) equally punningly translated as Cop au Vin – is a reference to Inspector Lavardin (Jean Poiret), who is good and bad cop in one person. Set in a small town (in reality Forges-les-Eaux, Seine-Maritime), Poulet au vinaigre displays a feast of characters with odd characteristics. The plot is far too complicated to go into, as Chabrol himself recognised, so I can only mention a few things.

Essentially we have Madame Cuno (Stéphane Audran), the slightly crazy dominating and wheelchair-bound mother of Louis (Lucas Belvaux), the young postman who lives with her and suffers her eccentricities. Three men – solicitor Hubert Lavoisier (Michel Bouquet), medical practitioner Dr Philippe Morasseau (Jean Topart) and butcher Gérard Filiol (Jean-Claude Bouillaud) – are after the Cuno house to develop on it, but not if the Cunos have anything to do with it.

And Louis certainly does have something to do with it, as he puts sugar in Filiol's petrol tank, leading to his death when he tries to overtake a lorry. It's about halfway through the film when Lavardin makes his appearance, and he'll use whatever means he chooses to get at his answers: he's not interested in getting search warrants and other permissions, and he beats Louis about the face and thrusts Lavoisier's head under water to extract the truth. But strangely, Lavardin nevertheless has his appeal.

There are many more events in the film, such as the doctor's wife Delphine (Josephine Chaplin) being found dead in a burnt-out car, a body in a statue in Morasseau's garden, and so on. Just a few of the lighter touches are the lustful behaviour of Henriette (Pauline Lafont) towards Louis, the penchant of Lavardin for fried eggs with paprika, Louis's mother's jealousy of her son and the desire of the barman who serves Lavardin for Morasseau's mistress. A highly enjoyable Chabrol.

Claude Chabrol's La Route de Corinthe | The Road to Corinth (1967)

La Route de Corinthe isn't one of Chabrol's most serious films: it's a spy spoof with a strong sense of the ridiculous. It's also a showcase for Jean Seberg (Shanny), whose French accent has really improved in the seven years since À bout de souffle, unless she was putting the American accent on then. The story behind it is about black boxes being smuggled into Greece to interfere with NATO radar: cue for Chabrol to play a deal of stereotypical Greek background music. Magician Socrate (Steve Eckhardt) sets the scene for the farce right from the beginning: at the frontier check he produces his passport out of the custom's officer's hat, his car is full of doves and rabbits, and a black box is found, meaning he's beaten up by the cops until he automatically magics a cheroot, splits it in two and swallows a cyanide capsule. No time for melodrama: this is sheer farce.

(Literal) cliff-hangers are, as are many casual murders, the order of the day, as the film moves from a quarry with a black box hidden in a head, to a chase via a rose petal trail through a cemetery with a cavernous chapel of rest, and on and on.

Shanny occupies most of the film, and certainly not only because her accent was probably very sexy to the French, and most of the characters want to bed her, probably even the slow-witted Josio (Paolo Giusti), who like the other non-French actors speaks fluent French: subtleties aren't on the menu here. Shanny's husband Robert Ford (Christian Marquand) has been assassinated before he can discover the clue to the black boxes, so she continues in his place, later with the help of intelligence agent Dex (Maurice Ronet). The end is as ludicrous as it begins, with Shanny kissing Dex on the homeward bound plane admidst a host black-attired, black-hatted orthodox Greeks.

This film (made not long before Chabrol made Les Biches) is one of his money spinners, a piece of fluff, but an amusing piece of fluff.

Claude Chabrol's La Fille coupée en deux | A Girl Cut in Two (2009)

In twentieth-century America the 'Trial of the century' came very early on in the century: 1906, when the fifty-two-year-old architect Stanford White was shot dead by the psychotic millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, whose ex-wife, model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, had had a long-term sexual relationship with White. The story had already been adapted a few times, and in 2007 was again re-adapted (into the present day) in Claude Chabrol and his daughter-in-law Cécile Maistre's screenplay of La Fille coupée en deux.

Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier) is a very pretty and up-and-coming weather forecaster (Deneige of course means snow – Chabrol loves to play) who rides a moped and lives with her mother Marie (Marie Bunel), who works in a bookshop. She catches the eye of Goncourt-winning novelist Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), who has just published a new novel and has a book signing the next day, where he invites her to an auction where he buys a copy of erotic writer Pierre Louÿs's La Femme et le pantin (1898).* The two are mutually attracted despite the thirty-year gap in ages: he will teach her things sexual, being a libertine who frequents a sex club where everything happens between closed doors.

And at the same time along comes Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), heir to a huge pharmaceutical fortune, a brat who is uses to getting his own way with everything, and is obviously seriously psychologically disturbed. We can guess this from his having to be restrained from strangling Gabrielle when she refuses to kiss him. And yet, Charles having refused to leave his wife for her, she marries Paul. And Paul is jealous of the fact that someone has taught her to go down on him so well, tearing himself apart because Gabrielle can't get Charles out of his head.

So, at a function where Charles is about to give him a speech, Paul shoots him dead. Paul's mother Geneviève (Caroline Sihol), who has never approved of mixed class marriages, tries to get Gabrielle to hush up the affair in court. She doesn't, and although Paul gets off lightly with seven years in prison, the icy Geneviève refuses to allow Gabrielle a cent of the fortune, although Gabrielle at least tells her she's making off with the car.

In the end, we discover the full meaning of the title: Gabrielle is reduced to the status of a magician's assistant, being cut in two.

The plot may creak a bit – no matter how much Paul is worth, would Gabrielle really risk her life by marrying such an egotistical, psychotic person, for instance? – but the hand of Chabrol is still firm, laying into the hypocrisies of the moneyed class, etc, and evidently influenced by Buñuel – as well as Hitchcock, it goes without saying.

*Buñuel adapted this novel into the film Cet obscur objet du désir (1977).

Claude Chabrol's Une partie de plaisir | Pleasure Party (1974)

So Philippe (Paul Gégauff) tells his (then real-life) wife Esther (Danièle Gégauff) that he's had several extramarital relationships, although she hasn't, but he tells her it's a good thing: well, this is the mid-seventies. So Esther goes to bed with Habib (Giancarlo Sisti) but doesn't tell Philippe everything: about how she feels, for instance. And Philippe's jealousy continues as Esther continues to see Habib.

The viewer can obviously see that Philippe is an egotistical slimeball, maybe (there are suggestions of it in his possessiveness and his control freakery) a real egomanic. But he obviously manages to fool the much younger (and much married, her second husband being Habib) English woman Paula (Sylvia Murdoch) because she marries him, and the couple leave the wedding reception with Philippe driving off drunk as a skunk.

Skunk would be a very polite word to use for Philippe, who can't forget Esther, tries (in the pleasant environment of the Jardin d'acclimatation) to use his very young child (by Esther), Élise (Clémence Gégauff – yes, his real daughter) as a go-between as he wants to get back with her.* But (his unbelievable pride wounded because Esther won't accept him back), he knocks her to the ground and kicks her to death in a cemetery. Élise, with a childminder, visits him in prison, he says her mother's gone and a journey, and all three will be back in a few years or so. Yeah, sure. Chabrol was a brilliant director.

* Paula is loaded, but that doesn't interest Philippe: what matters is control.

Claude Chabrol's Rien ne va plus (1997)

Rien ne va plus is Chabrol's fiftieth feature film – and although far from his best – is rivetting, complicated, and to some extent incredible: but then, what do you expect?

The roulette wheel begins the film, conforming to the title, and then we see Betty (Isabelle Huppert) in conversation with another player, pretending (highly improbably) to want to sleep with him, spiking his drink in the bar while he goes to fetch her a packet of cigarettes, and when the man falls asleep in his room Betty and her much older partner Victor (Michel Serrault) raid his wallet, she practices his signature for the chequebook, and they leave: yeah, they're just small-time con-merchants, travelling around in a camper van.

Until, that is, Betty meets Maurice (François Cluzet), who holds the funds of customers of a dental congress (5,000,000 Swiss francs), and the two really hit it off. But Betty and Victor are really up to their necks in it, and they're soon involved with a suitcase changing hands (more than once), Maurice being tortured to death and finishing with a dart in his eye, and, well it's too involved to explain but at least Betty and Victor come out of it all right.

Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995)

This above shot of the title here shows Léo Ferré's L'Île du Guesclin in the background: most of the film is set in this area of Brittany, with Saint-Coulomb as the village featuring in it. The film is adapted from Ruth Rendall's The Judgment in Stone (1977), itself inspired (as was Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947)) by the true story of the Papin sisters, who murdered their employees in 1933.

Chabrol said that he wasn't a Marxist, although he added that he had made a Marxist film. The two principal characters who  quickly become friends are Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a servant in the Lelièvre household, and Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a postal clerk in the village. Both young women have troubled pasts, Jeanne has a strong hatred for the bourgeoisie, and the timid Sophie hides a the fact that she is ashamed of being unable to read.

Taking many lessons from Hitchcock's films, this movie is shot through with suspense, and both the music and the long shots dwelling on the wealth and culture displayed in the house prepare the viewer for the unknown but obviously sinister events to come.

On seeing the Lelièvre family's library, Jeanne fishes out Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit, asks Sophie if she's read it, and decides to 'borrow' it herself. There is perhaps a double irony here: Jeanne doesn't seem like the kind of person who would enjoy Céline or even understand the book, although at the same time one wonders if Georges Lelièvre (Jean-Pierre Cassel) or his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) would appreciate this anti-capitalist book.

Georges seems particularly proud of his cultural knowledge, and swiftly recognises a quotation one his dinner guests mentions as being from Nietzsche. Towards the end, the family (Georges, Catherine, daughter Melinda and son Gilles) all sit on the sofa to watch Mozart's opera Don Giovanni: an activity which strongly contrasts with Sophie and Jeanne's liking for low-brow television programmes. Jeanne hates the family because they are rich, showing that the class war still exists. Melinda's remark (made twice) about 'people like you' (i.e. illiterate) and George's apparently great surprise that illiterate people exist in France towards the end of the millennium clearly show that class divisions and class ignorance are still prominent: there's no political correctness here. Inevitably it all ends in a bloodbath, with Sophie following it up by symbolically shooting at the bookcase. A powerful film.

Claude Chabrol's Les Innocents aux mains sales | Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975)

Claude Chabrol is of course another auteur of nouvelle vague cinema, generally thought to have been much influenced by Hitchcock, although he claimed that Fritz Lang was a bigger one. Here though we can see the hand of the master Hitchcock in Chabrol's work. This is a dark thriller with a number of twists and changing allegiances in it, the cops providing most of any humour there is, although these are clever rather than bungling cops.

The movie begins on a light note, with neighbour and writer Jeff Marle flying a kite near Draguignan (Var), which lands right on the ass of Julie Wormster (Romy Schneider), who is sunbathing naked on her back lawn, her husband Louis being absent at the time. Jeff timidly opens his mouth and Julie tells him to get it, which he does and then she asks provocatively him if there's anything else he wants. Cut.

Jeff becomes friendly with Julie and Louis, although we can see there's tension between the married couple because Louis is a hopeless whisky drinker, and when he staggers off to bed Jeff and Julie have passionate sex on the carpet. Soon the lovers form a murderous pact: Julie will club her drunken husband to death, Jeff will cart the body off to his boat and dump him in the sea. Julie, of course, will draw Louis's money from the bank.

So the cops question Julie, who is only too ready to provide an alibi for Jeff, who was far away driving the car Louis had 'given permission' for him to drive. She also remarks that her husband may have fallen overboard as he has a bad heart. Trouble is, the cops can't find a drowned body, blood found on the boat belongs to Jeff not Louis, and the car Jeff was supposedly driving went off a cliff. Furthermore, Julie walks right into it by going to the bank and enquires about her husband's money, and he's emptied the account. Furthermore, his doctor reveals that he has no heart problems.

There are of course more twists before we discover that both Louis and Jeff are alive. The dénouement comes thick and fast.

Paris 2015: Claude Chabrol, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #28

'CLAUDE CHABROL

1930 . 2010'

 

For some reason, among the many graves I've taken a photo of in Père-Lachaise, I'd missed out on Claude Chabrol's, although it may be because I was concentrating mainly on writers.