Chabrol's Inferno

One of the better, by which I mean both "perfect" and "inevitable", author-director pairings I've encountered is that of Ruth Rendell and Claude Chabrol. Rendell, the late British writer of exquisitely diabolical and bleak tales of human catastrophe may not have been adapted by Chabrol, the late French director of either an individual's moral collapse or the blossoming of that same individual's immorality, depending on how you look at it, all that often (there are only two: Chabrol adapted Rendell's The Bridesmaid in 2004, and her masterpiece A Judgment in Stone as Le Ceremonie in 1995), but the degree to which the two artists seemed to be on the same page is akin to the psychological twinship of David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard. Cronenberg has thus far only adapted Ballard once, but when Ballard died it's a little surprising that Cronenberg didn't himself pitch over face down in the garden, mysteriously. 

All of which is to say that, just as it's impossible for me to watch certain Cronenberg films such as Shivers and eXistenZ that are not adaptations of Ballard (and in the case of the former was written in complete ignorance of Ballard's work) without nevertheless thinking of Ballard almost constantly, it is similarly pointless for me to bother trying to resist, any time I watch a Chabrol film, the specter of Ruth Rendell hovering over the proceedings. And even though Rendell was a writer of suspense and mystery novels, this juxtaposition occurs in my head even when the Chabrol film I'm watching is not of a similar genre. Which brings me to the Chabrol films collected together in a new Blu-ray set by Cohen Media. This trio of 90s films from the extremely prolific director did not follow one after the other -- in fact they're broken up by first The Eye of Vichy, his 1993 documentary about Nazi-occupied France, and the aforementioned La Ceremonie -- but as a package both harmonize with each other and feed into my Rendell thoughts, and break off sharply, leaving me stranded as someone who may have overstated his case. But in any event, enough about Rendell, would probably be the wise philosophy hereafter, and more of Chabrol.

But I'll be damned if Betty, the first film chronologically in the set, doesn't remind me of Rendell. At least as far as the psychology of the characters is concerned. In Chabrol's film, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, the titular Betty is played by Marie Trintignant with a wild mix of despair, depression, innocence, aimlessness, coquettishness, and, as it transpires, more. When we first meet her, Betty is horribly drunk, with the aim of becoming even drunker. A man claiming to be a doctor (and maybe he is, but it turns out he's also a junkie) is happy to oblige her, and take from her later whatever payment he deems fitting, one presumes, until Mario (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the owner of the bar to which the doctor has taken Betty, and Laure (Stpehane Audran), Mario's lover and a retired nurse who lives in a nearby luxury hotel, save her, with Laure almost instantly taking the younger woman under her wing. Laure rents a room, adjacent to her own, at the hotel for Betty, and helps Betty arrange to have her clothes and other personal items picked up from her former home, where her estranged husband, the son of a prominent military figure, and their two children still live. This all leads to Betty explaining to Laure how she ended up in this lowly alcoholic haze of a life (though Laure herself can drink, herself), most of which we learn in a series of flashbacks. Chabrol gives these scenes a while to take a full shape -- how and why did Betty disgrace herself in the eyes of her husband and her in-laws? what did Betty sell, as a way of buying her way out of the family and a future of public scandal, a decision that fills Betty with shame and seems to fuel her drinking? -- until finally a clear, or clear-ish picture of this tortured young woman reveals itself.

And yet. I can't go too much further without robbing Betty of too much of its considerable power. Though not a suspense film, Betty has within it a considerable amount of quiet suspense, and, more importantly, though not a mystery film, the force of its final impact is due to an accumulation of story and character information, and of performance. Chabrol, who up until the point that everything we need to know has been learned has been as invisible as ever, steps out of the shadows and kicks you, and everyone, in the stomach. At no point in Betty is a crime committed, yet by the end it's understood that the world the characters inhabit is an amoral one, and maintaining one's honor, and expecting others to do the same, is a sure way to bring Rendell-ian doom down upon one's head.

More terrifying still is L'Enfer, from 1994. Originally conceived and written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, the film was begun but left unfinished by Clouzot in 1964 (footage of the aborted project is used in Serge Bromberg's documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno). Thirty years later, Chabrol adapted the original script, and cast Emmanuelle Beart and long-time collaborator Francois Cluzet as a young married couple who run a lakeside hotel. Initially they seem quite happy, but after a while Paul (Cluzet) begins to suspect Nelly (Beart) of being unfaithful with one of the hotel's regular guests, Martineau (Marc Lavoine, a kind of French version of Everett McGill). Even before Paul makes his suspicions known (first to the audience, eventually to Nelly), the viewer is clued into something being off in their relationship by Chabrol's use of a few frames of pitch black to separate some scenes. At first jarring, then perhaps merely an experiment in visually representing jumps in time, this technique achieves its full, if mild, note of disorientation when at one point it seems to cut off Nelly in mid-sentence.

When Nelly first learns of Paul's suspicions, she's touched, because she takes it as evidence of his love for her. But soon his jealousy becomes more aggressive, and, further, it becomes impossible to persuade him that he's wrong. Chabrol makes it fairly clear, I think, that Paul's accusations are baseless, but the precise reason Paul is so certain is less so (though I suspect casting Emmanuelle Beart as Nelly was not done arbitrarily). This fits, as his behavior, and finally his violence, become, one hopes, impossible to understand, and Paul shifts from a man one might find it possible to empathize with to a man one hopes to see hit by a bus. Both Beart and Cluzet are superb, but Cluzet in particular feels frighteningly authentic. Watching L'Enfer, as Cluzet's Paul begins to really spin off into a storm of choking rage and paranoia, I thought "This seems like exactly the kind of man, or one of the type of men, who murders his wife." I was reminded less of Rendell, I'll confess, than of another Chabrol film, his more naturalistic (in L'Enfer, Chabrol sometimes employs Dutch angles and back-projected shadows to highlight the irreality of Paul's thought process) Pleasure Party from 1975, which, along with Fosse's Star 80, strike me as the most depressingly believable depictions of murder, and murderers, I've seen on film. Anyway, with Cluzet, Chabrol again reaches those same heights of unease and menace, and with Beart that same heartbreaking confusion and fear, as the marriage she thought was happy becomes a prison of terror and abuse. She woke up one morning and found herself in Hell.

It's a curious irony that the last film in the set, 1997's The Swindle, is a light-hearted con artist thriller that also includes, of the three, the bloodiest moment of violence. But at a certain point, as is the tradition in this sort of light thriller, the stakes must be, or often are, raised. Chabrol, directing from his own original script, does so effectively, but up to that point The Swindle is simply great fun. It's about an at first glance mismatched pair of con artists -- Isabelle Huppert as Betty and Michel Serraut as Victor, the age difference pronounced, but other than business partners what are they? Their relationship doesn't appear to be romantic. In any case, the plot takes them to Sils Maria in Switzerland, where a local hotel is hosting a dentist's convention, which Victor believes offers many opportunities to rip off rich orthodontists. Betty precedes him there and when Victor arrives he finds out that she's already found a mark, but not one associated with a convention. The man, Maurice (Cluzet again), is hauling around an attache case stuffed with five million Francs, which he has to deliver for, etc. Victor and Betty begin palling around with Maurice, laying the groundwork to snatch the money, while, gradually, the question arises, as it often does in these situations, who is conning who? And who is conning that person?

I do not mean to sound dismissive with those glibly phrased questions. The Swindle really is a delight, Serraut in particular is wonderful (he's closer to being the star than he is to sharing the main stage with Huppert), and part of that delight comes from recognizing the structure but not knowing what exactly that structure is supporting this time. And there are just lots of little details, like Cluzet, somewhat more likable here than he was in L'Enfer, a little bit drunk, raving that cheese fondue "gives [him], personally, a taste sensation like no other." Chabrol seems to be on vacation a little bit here, and more power to him. It's fun to go along with him.

Capsule Reviews for November? Indeed So.

Here are reviews of things.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (d. Tobe Hooper) - Though I count myself among the many horror fans, and film lovers in general, who consider Hooper's original 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be one of the great masterpieces of the genre, and as an admirer of other Hooper films (I consider The Funhouse to be especially underrated), I have nevertheless been resistant to Hooper's 1986 sequel. In fact, prior to this past Friday, I'd tried to watch the film twice before and failed to get through it. My problem has always been, essentially, that amping up the comedy isn't something I thought The Texas Chainsaw Massacre especially needed. And while I realize that there is a lot of black humor in that first film, it's never been the thing that really appealed to me. In many cases, the jokes, such as they are, in that film played differently for me. If you ignore the joke Hooper and screenwriter Kim Henkel were going for in a given moment (which, and this may seem an odd thing to say, given that I've said I love the film, is easy enough to do because I don't really think the jokes are funny), the horror of that moment remains. And that's what works for me.

But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is beloved by many, so I had to finally bite the bullet. And I don't know what put me off those other times. Well, yes I do: the comedy, which is located much closer to the surface, in that it is right there on top of the surface, than it was in 1974, still didn't strike me as actually funny, or even interesting. Setting that aside, which I found surprisingly easy to do, as a mad, alarmingly graphic (far more so than the original, which fans will never stop telling others is actually surprisingly bloodless), brilliantly designed, and propulsively ruthless bit of slasher insanity. The plot (ripped off by Rob Zombie for his awful The Devil's Rejects) involves an obsessed cop named Enright (Dennis Hopper) hunting the family of cannibalistic killers we met in 1974 (with some changes, including a new actor, Bill Johnson, as Leatherface, and a new family member, Bill Moseley as Chop Top; only Jim Seidow, as Drayton, makes the transition from the first film to the sequel). The two murders that open the film are witnessed, in a sense, by a night-time DJ named Stretch (Caroline Williams, in a performance that struck me as potentially as exhausting to give as Marilyn Burns's in the original), who provides Enright's best lead in years, and becomes his, sort of, partner. And off we go, ending up in a very long sequence set in the family's phantasmagorically nightmarish underground lair of tunnels and skulls and skin and shadows.

Among the pleasures of the film is seeing Lou Perryman, who I know best from Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match, another major piece of Texas cinema (and whose fate in this film is both awful on its own terms, and even worse when you know Perryman's own terrible end), and also Hopper's performance, which is better and more committed than I, unfairly, would have expected him to bother shooting for in a film like this. By saying "like this" I'm accusing Hopper of a kind of snobbery I have no actual reason to believe he actually felt. Anyway, he's real good here, is what I'm saying. And that long last set-piece is, as I've suggested, one lunatic visual after another. Even if it recreates the original's climactic dinner scene more specifically than it probably should have, it makes up for that with other, different insanities. Personally, I consider this to be a film completely separate from the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To me, they're both just riffs on the same idea, with different tones and employing different styles. Both valid, both terrific.

Carnage Park (d. Mickey Keating) - The films of Quentin Tarantino have been enormously important to Mickey Keating. Which is weird, since judging by Carnage Park he hasn't bothered to think at all about any of them.

Masques (d. Claude Chabrol) - The above shot is unquestionably my favorite from Masques, Claude Chabrol's 1987 thriller about about a young mystery writer named Roland Wolf (Robin Renucci) who for whatever reason wants to write the authorized biography of the famous game show host Christian Legagneur (Philippe Noiret), and for a period of time is a guest in Legagneur's expansive estate, so that he may interview the older man for the book. During this time, Wolf meets Legagneur's servants, which include a mute chauffeur/chef named Max (Pierre-Francois Dumeniaud), a flirty masseuse (Bernadette Lafont), etc., and most importantly, Legagneur's goddaughter (her parents having died in a terrible car accident when she was a child) Catherine, played rather brilliantly by the luminous Anne Brochet, a young woman, we're told, who is recovering from a strange illness the treatment of which left her briefly paralyzed, and is now terribly nervous, afraid, panicky, and sensitive to light. That's her up above. As Roland's motives become perplexing to the audience -- when he's hanging out in his room on his first day at the estate, we see him unpack a gun and randomly say the name "Madeline" to his reflection in a mirror -- it becomes clear that whatever mystery is about to unravel before us, Catherine is the key to it all.

That shot (look up) isn't static, it's a camera move, and I don't want to spoil what it signifies to the viewer, but it is so elegantly done, so precise and smooth, artful at the same time it is utterly free of ostentation. Though I wouldn't rank Masques among Chabrol's greatest films (of those I've seen), I would not hesitate to cite this shot as evidence that Chabrol was a brilliant director (and Brochet a terrific actress), or even film itself as a uniquely powerful artform that can depict true human emotion in its most naked and simultaneously most subtle forms. If you know the film and think I'm overstating things, I understand. But sometimes these moments can be so thrilling that I can't help myself, and I imagine it's the same for you.

What's interesting to me is that as much as I enjoyed Masques (I enjoyed it a great deal), it's probably the lightest film of Charbol's that I've seen -- it ain't exactly Pleasure Party, for example. There's one completely goofball shot showing Wolf, alone in his room, after an encounter that has left him feeling either happy or smug (which one is up to you). He was getting ready for bed when the thing that occurred occurred, and he's wearing a gray shirt. That's all we've seen of his outfit, until the camera pulls back to reveal that he's wearing cartoonishly colorful boxer shorts. It's an odd choice, but one that indicates the level of playfulness Chabrol's trying to get at. And which he gets at. Masques isn't unserious, but it's fun, more than anything. It's playing around so much that I think it loses track of itself now and again (I don't know what the point was of a revelation about one character), but any missteps are small. And they're further dwarfed by an ending that actually sort of recalls Network, but with an even better stinger of a last line.

Venom (d. Piers Haggard) - Speaking of significant shots, how about this one? While not significant to Venom in the same way that the shot in Masques I wouldn't shut up about is to that film, the snake in the liquor cabinet rather neatly symbolizes one reason, perhaps the primary reason, that Venom is such a cult favorite. Which is that somebody at some point, or maybe several people working together, decided that the best way to get this suspense film about a group of ruthless criminals who kidnap the young son of a wealthy family, only to find themselves penned into that family's home not only by, eventually, the cops, but also by the presence of a deadly black mamba snake loose among them, was to cast a giant handful of the most psychopathic alcoholic hellraisers in motion picture history: Oliver Reed, Sterling Hayden, Nicol Williamson, and Klaus fucking Kinski all star in this crazy thing. Very early on in Haggard's commentary track for the Blue Underground disc, the director says that he took over from the original director (Tobe Hooper, as it happens) who, Haggard says, may have suffered a nervous breakdown during his time on the film, though he's not sure about that.

This was more or less all I knew about Venom before watching it, and what's unfortunate about this undeniably alarming and curious fact about its production is that it suggests the film probably isn't very good and is nothing more than a curiosity. But the truth, as I see it, is that Venom is actually a pretty terrific little film. Whatever drove Hooper back to the US (this being an English film) isn't on-screen. As unpleasant as it must have been to actually spend time with that quartet (my guess is that Hayden was, on average, the most palatable), they were each, to begin with, immensely talented actors who all showed up to, at least after Haggard called "Action", do the work they were paid to do. Reed in particular is pretty superb, as the dumbest, most cold-hearted of the criminals, while Kinski, as the boss, tamps down on his natural, and probably genuine, psychopathy to play the smart (but probably no less evil) one. Williamson is the cop on the case, and Hayden is the grandfather of the little boy who, with snake scientist or whatever Sarah Miles, are the people in the house trying to keep things from spiraling out of control, have the least showy roles among this cluster of madmen, but their performances are just as good, in their way (plus Michael Gough is in there too, and Susan George, as the criminal partner of Reed and Kinski).

The weirdest thing about Venom, really, is that it's almost a riff on Dog Day Afternoon, with Nicol Williamson in the Charles Durning role, and Klaus Kinski in Pacino's (I suppose this would mean that Oliver Reed is John Cazale's Sonny). But man, this thing plays like gangbusters, because Haggard, who off the top of my head I only know from The Blood on Satan's Claw (a good movie!), knows how to put together a damn movie. If the premise is goofy, no matter: Haggard and screenwriter Robert Carrington (and, in fairness, perhaps also author of the original novel Alan Scholefield) know how to make it plausible, immediate, and even frightening. And the whole film hinges, in truth, on the first death by snakebite. It's prolonged, because nobody realizes, at first, how serious being bitten by a black mamba actually is. But the character who was bitten is starting to get an idea. Though the character is quite unlikable, their death is horrifying (and beautifully acted). At that exact moment, if not before, Venom is on rails.

Fear of Fear (d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - Some time ago, and I honestly don't feel like linking to it, but some time ago I wrote, in another post collecting a handful of capsule reviews, about Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone, in which I said something to the effect of, Coppola has never considered any era of filmmaking style, from the earliest silents to whatever year he happens to be making a given film, out of date, or unavailable to him. It's not a matter of homage; it's a matter of exploration, curiosity, and a complete refutation of the idea that a mode or style is "dated" simply because some audiences are born later than others. The same, more or less, goes for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I say "more or less" perhaps out of ignorance -- the man made a jaw-dropping number of films in his short life, and I've seen a mere handful -- but not as a criticism: Fassbinder wanted to rescue melodrama from the trash heap. Weaned on Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder's approach to that sort of classic Hollywood "women's picture" wasn't to recreate the florid style, as fellow Sirk enthusiast Todd Haynes has done on occasion, but rather to recreate it in his own image. When Fassbinder traveled this road, the results were a wild mix of that melodramatic intensity of Sirk and others, and a kind of grainy naturalism. You kind of can't just start watching Fassbinder blind. More than most filmmakers, it helps to know what's what.

Fear of Fear, one of four pictures Fassbinder made in 1975, is quite illustrative of all this. The film's title is seen over a dolly zoom, the shot Hitchcock invented for Vertigo, his masterpiece of what you might kind of have to call melodramatic suspense. What's being dolly-zoomed is an image of what might under other circumstances be seen as a moment of domestic calm, but which that particular camera move has informed us, on a primal level, is in fact soaked in dread and depression. Starring the great Margit Carstensen as Margot, a housewife with one young child and, as the film opens, pregnant with a second, whose grip on her life and happiness is threatening to slip away, Fear of Fear manages to be both frightening and sympathetic to characters you might not expect it to like very much. I'm thinking of Ulrich Faulhaber as Kurt, Margot's husband, who is initially ignorant and insensitive, perhaps even, at first blush, detestable, but Fassbinder allows him to become someone who we understand loves his wife, and who is truly scared that what seems to be her genuine madness might have been something he could have stopped in its tracks had he not been so self-absorbed. Other characters, such as those played by Fassbinder stalwarts Irm Hermann and Brigitte Mira, who make it their mission to make Margot feel as bad about her parenting abilities and as guilty as possible about the ways in which she tries to grab some happiness out of her day, aren't afforded quite as many levels, but if everyone in this world was at worst secretly nice, none of us would ever feel miserable.

It ain't a perfect film, though. One danger, the big one, I'd say, in what Fassbinder did is to confuse style with formula. It's a trap he was often able to escape -- look at Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or, better yet, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The idea of narrative formula is, I've always said, a bit of received wisdom that needs to be stuffed in a bag and drowned, and I think on some level, at least in Fear of Fear, Fassbinder received it a bit too happily. But definitely consciously and knowingly, too, so there's that. Anyway, there's the added touch of eerie mystery revolving around the character of Bauer (Kurt Raab), who seems to haunt Margot like a ghost, though until the end she doesn't seem to understand the meaning of it. Though she probably will, eventually, after the credits.

He Mustn't Wake Up

[What follows contains what some might consider spoilers for Le Beau Serge and, especially, Les Cousins. Proceed with caution, and sorry this warning went up a bit late...]

Claude Chabrol was one of a handful of filmmakers who made up the French New Wave, and like the others -- Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, etc. -- began his career in film as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema. All would become actual filmmakers, of world-spanning importance and influence, except less so in the case of Chabrol. There's Godardian, but there's no Chabrolian. Yet Chabrol was the first of the group actually make a film, 1958's Le Beau Serge, which, along with his 1959 follow up, Les Cousins, is being released on DVD tomorrow by Criterion. So the man who actually, concretely and physically began the French New Wave is almost forgotten, or at least the length and breadth of his career and achievements seem to routinely get short-changed.

In his commentary track for the Les Cousins DVD, Adrian Martin chalks up Chabrol's status as the New Wave's odd man out to the inconsistent nature of his career, as well as his essentially straightfoward approach to cinematic storytelling when compared to Godard and Rivette's more radical burrowing underneath the nature of film. But it might also be a genre thing, as Chabrol worked extensively, though not exclusively, in the crime genre, which, yes, also interested Godard and Truffaut and so on, but they seemed more interested in taking it apart or pushing it off a cliff. This is probably why Chabrol's my own favorite among the New Wave directors, given my own proclivities, but the films themselves back me up. Has there ever been a greater depiction of the short, shocking road from every-day asshole to self-justifying murderer than Chabrol's deeply troubling Pleasure Party? Chabrol's interest was focused far more on the dark psychology of crime and violence than on any element of cops and criminals procedure, and in this way his source for literary adaptation tended towards complimentary writers, such as Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. La Ceremonie, Chabrol's adaptation of Rendell's A Judgment in Stone, proved that both artists shared a removed interest in and cold fascination with human disaster.

But you don't see a lot of that in Le Beau Serge or Les Cousins, or at least not in the way you would in years to come. Written at around the same time and, due to the earlier film's delayed release, arriving in theaters about a month apart, Chabrol's first two films do show a kind of transition from a more traditional, life-as-it-is-lived arthouse story in Le Beau Serge to the more dark and murderous realm Chabrol's work would eventually inhabit. They are companion films, self consciously so -- Le Beau Serge stars Jean-Claude Brialy as Francois, a city dweller returning to his small, rural hometown to rest up after an illness, where he rekindles, sort of, his friendship with Serge (Gerard Blain), who has become a near-hopeless alcoholic and abusive, uncaring husband to Yvonne (Michele Meritz), who he married because he'd gotten her pregnant, though their child was stillborn. Meanwhile, over in Les Cousins, you have Gerard Blain playing Charles, a small-town kid travelling to Paris to attend college. He lodges with his cousin Paul, played by Jean-Claude Brialy, also a student, as well as a Mephistophelean sybarite. So the country does all the boozing in one film, the city in the other -- taken together, this might seem to make the two films seem schematic, but in fact this sort of thing is just the tip of the iceberg.

In "The Nature of the Beast", his Criterion essay for Les Cousins, Terrence Rafferty describes that film as being "both lighter and infinitely darker" than Le Beau Serge, and to paraphrase Larry Miller in Waiting for Guffman, he's not wrong. Le Beau Serge is a bit of a wallow in Serge's deeply off-putting drinking and general awfulness, but he does have Francois there to take it upon himself provide an "example" of proper living. A priest (Claude Cerval) takes Francois to task for being terribly prideful, and he, too, is not wrong, but Francois at least is motivated, for whatever reasons you might wish to ascribe to him, to do good, and some sort of good, however ambiguous, is actually achieved. But Les Cousins is one of those situations where all the carousing is fun and free and enviable, right up until the point where it isn't, at which time it becomes not merely unhappy, but sinister.

As in Le Beau Serge, a turning point of sorts is reached in Les Cousins after a woman behaves in a certain way. That "certain way" is not really the same in either film, nor are the women, nor, for that matter, is the turning point. Strangely enough, there's a whiff of femme fatale, and even a strong dose of perversity, in Le Beau Serge's version of these events, but Les Cousins, where things are altogether more lazy and casual, is the one with the gun in it. If one were to break the two films down along these lines, Les Cousins, at the level of its premise, feels like something Patricia Highsmith might have come up with, while Le Beau Serge is more like Simenon (perhaps because there are cities everywhere, but only one French countryside), but Chabrol only followed this view of the world in his second film. Le Beau Serge does feel a bit unformed, its ending a little false. Les Cousins -- which has an interesting scene involving a bookshop owner (Guy Decomble) bemoaning the popularity of detective fiction -- strikes me as complete and much more clean, despite the shambles with which we're ultimately left. There's a sense that the ending to Les Cousins, as unlikely as it may seem, was, like many great crime stories, which Les Cousins isn't but also sort of is, inevitable.
The central performances of the two films must not be ignored, of course. Interestingly, Jean-Claude Brialy maintains a certain throughline between the films. He's not rambunctious as the desperately helpful Francois, but he's just as smug as Paul. Again, though, until he isn't, and his performance in Les Cousins' final minutes is as effective a portrayal of shock as I've seen, which I say while not being all that sure Brialy does anything in particular. Context may be everything, but then again I can tell you right now, I couldn't do it. More impressive, and frankly maybe a bit more clearly actorly, is Gerard Blain's dual roles as a country boy either angry and dissolute, or fresh-faced and innocent, just waiting for the dissolute people around him to take him down. "Waiting" probably being the key here, because I don't care how gracefully one wishes to bow out, having the woman you've given up, and the man you've just given her up to, taking a shower right behind you while you're trying to study seems to me like it might be regarded as a little bit much. You'd really like Charles to snap, in other words, and the fact that he doesn't, in a way that most would see as natural, probably contributes to the unnatural way he does finally choose to snap. So try not to bottle this shit up, is what Chabrol is trying to say.

Anyway, both films are entirely worth your time, Les Cousins being worth it and then some. Go forth and seek them out.

Web

[This post is part of Ten Days' Wonder, a Claude Chabrol blogathon, hosted by Flickhead]

Claude Chabrol's The Flower of Evil is a very deceptive film, but, given the story Chabrol's telling, it would sort of have to be, wouldn't it? At the center of the story -- and virtually the only characters in the whole film -- is the Charpin-Vasseur clan, a family with a highly scandalous past (and not much less scandalous present) that is made public when an anonymously written leaflet about the family -- detailing everything from unsolved murders to Nazi collaboration -- is distributed to the public in the wake of Anne Charpin-Vasseur's (Nathalie Bye) announcement that she's going to run for political office.

Anne's husband, Gerard (Bernard Le Coq), is very much against Anne's political ambitions, though his reasons for this are never made entirely clear. He's also serially unfaithful to Anne, which is one -- but only one -- of the reasons that his son Francois (Benoit Magimel), who has just returned home after four years in America, dislikes his father. This dislike is shared by his step-sister, Michele (Melanie Doutey), who is Anne's natural daughter. Her natural father, and Francois's natural mother, died together in a car accident years ago. They were, respectively, married to Anne and Gerard, and their deaths brought those two together, although the Charpins and the Vasseurs had always been very close over the years, and intermarriage had bonded the two for generations. The families are so close, in fact, that Francois and Michele have long harbored a non-familial love for each other, which Francois's return to France has rekindled.

Rounding out the characters, and joining Francois and Michele in their dislike of Gerard, is the elderly Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon). It was Aunt Line's father who was the victim of the unsolved murder mentioned in the leaflet, and Aunt Line herself was actually tried for the crime, though she was acquitted. Though Aunt Line dislikes Gerard, I got the impression that she did so for no reason more specific than because Gerard is so very unlikable; generally Aunt Line wants to simply get along, and wants her family to get along, and to be happy. Although it's not her political campaign that is in danger of being derailed, the leaflet may trouble Aunt Line the most, as it dredges up so much anguish that she hoped had been buried.

The Flower of Evil plays, at times, like a mystery, the central question being "Who wrote the leaflet?", but that isn't really what it is. What the film really seems to be trying to do is explain its title, and I mean that as a compliment. I think viewers can be forgiven for not having a complete understanding of all the backstory laid out by the leaflet -- which, we're told by Gerard, is "all true" -- but that's not terribly important. What is important is the knowledge that this family, or pair of families, has been laced with deviance and, yes, evil for decades. What can such a past do to future generations, even as those deficiencies would seem to have thinned out over the years?

Earlier, I referred to Francois and Michele as step-siblings, but in the film, at one point, Francois refers to Michele and himself as cousins, which would make their relationship fully incestuous, as opposed to only technically incestuous. I don't have the family tree completely clear in my own head, but if they are indeed cousins, then the fact that they don't hide their intimacy from their family, and that intimacy is not only accepted by the family, but in some cases actually embraced by them, becomes a little alarming. I'm told France is more permissive than the US in sexual matters, but this is really pushing it. Which is, finally, I believe, the point. The Charpin-Vasseurs are so terribly casual in their abnormalities. Francois and Michele are very likable (and also very well played by Doutey and Magimel, but then the high quality acting in this film is formidably consistent, with my own favorite performance coming from Le Coq -- his Gerard is so exquisitely, humanly awful), but the ease with which they slip into their relationship, and the happiness that Aunt Line takes in seeing them together, is faintly chilling.

Not just that, but when murder finally occurs, as you sort of know it will, and two characters are attempting to hide the body, at one point they lose their grip on the corpse, and both break into laughter. By this time in the film, there are a great number of moral complications and grey areas revolving around this crime, but if two more normal people had found themselves in the same awful situation, I don't think laughter would ever be a feature of their evening. It is for these two, though, because in the history of the Charpin-Vasseurs, violence runs deep, as does secrecy and sin. If they didn't laugh, they'd go crazy.

In a sense, I believe that Michele and Francois are the title characters. As the youngest generation of this diseased line, they are the ones who are most able to see all that is wrong around them and try to step back from it. But as I've said, they have their own problems, still inherited from their ancestors. If, perhaps, they could see past the ends of their own noses, and possibly try to, you know, not marry their own family members, they could have children who were still more cleansed than they are, and those children could have children, and on down the line. There could be a light at the end of the tunnel, maybe, but probably not the way these two are going about it.

Capsule Reviews!

Vinyan (d. Fabrice du Welz) - Du Welz's first film, Calvaire, belongs firmly within the new trend of extremly grotesque and violent French horror films (Du Welz qualifies as French inasmuch as he's Belgian) that, generally, I don't like at all. But I thought Calvaire was actually kind of interesting, not just because it looked good, but because it combined backwoods European hillbilly horror with an occasionally Bela Tarr-esque texture. The film was a pose, but an interesting one. His new film, Vinyan, owes a great deal to Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now, but it's either a credit to the film, or a condemnation of my memory, that this didn't occur to me until after the film was over. The film features Rufus Sewell and Emmanuel Beart (both terrific) as parents who lost their son, Josh, to a tsunami disaster in Burma. When Beart believes she sees Josh in a video intended to draw attention to the plight of children in that region, they decide to travel into the jungle and see if Josh could possibly have survived. The above image should indicate to some degree what they encounter. Like the Roeg film, the horror of Vinyan comes from the bottomless well of grief contained in Sewell and Beart, and as a result of that, and du Welz's eye for unsettling images, this film carries a much stronger impact than a film like Inside could ever hope for.

JCVD (d. Mabrouk El Mechri) - When I first heard of this post-modern, heart-laid-bare action film, which features Jean-Claude Van Damme as a version of himself, I though it must be some kind of disaster. What happens is, Van Damme -- frustrated over his divorce, loss of custody of his daughter, and the trajectory of his career -- goes to a bank in Belgium, and finds himself in the middle of a robbery. Due to an unfortunate mix-up, the police believe him to be the guy robbing the bank, which, for the safety of those inside, Van Damme goes along with. As a crime film (which this is, more than it is an action film), JCVD is a little too loose for my tastes, but Van Damme is the real point of the movie. To put it simply: I had no idea. And it's not just his now-famous tortured monologue, delivered to the camera, and to his fans -- throughout the film, he's so effortlessly moving as a 47 year-old guy, whose career is that of an action film star, and who now believes that his career is not only kind of silly, but maybe worthless, too. He said it, not me, but if Van Damme really thinks that he's never done anything worthwhile with his career, he can think again.

Les Biches (d. - Claude Chabrol) - This film has been on my radar for at least a decade, maybe more, beginning before my knowledge of films was even that deep, because, hey, lesbians. Of course, that kind of content is pretty meager, probably because I just can't win, but Chabrol's highly influential, quiet thriller about two women -- the rich Frederique (Stephane Audran) and the poor, withdrawn Why (Jacqueline Sassard) -- is fascinating in the way it subverts our ideas of who will snap, and the reasons behind it. If you've never seen a Chabrol film, but have read the novels of Ruth Rendell, you'll already be familiar with the sensation of coldly watching a group of people -- who, for the good of all, should have never even met -- coming together like a car-less traffic accident. Quietly, coolly, and perversely compelling.