Chabrol, Claude

views updated

Claude Chabrol

French filmmaker Claude Chabrol (born 1930) has long been regarded as a master of the suspense genre, and he was a founding father of the French nouvelle vague (French New Wave) film movement.

Few film directors have amassed such a large body of work as has Chabrol, who has averaged about a film a year over five decades beginning in the 1950s. Over his long career he has frequently focused on ordinary settings and favored emotionally detached characters, crafting classic French psychological thrillers with an underlying element of social critique.

Ran Wartime “Cinema”

Born on June 24, 1930, in Paris, Chabrol had his adolescence shaped by the German occupation of France during World War II. He and his family were forced to move from Paris to the village of Sardent in the Creuse départment in central France. With an uncle who owned a chain of movie theaters, Chabrol was attracted to film from the start. He and some friends set up a homemade cinema in a barn, showing whatever movies they could get their hands on under Nazi restrictions.

Chabrol's parents expressed their disapproval toward his growing interest in film. Chabrol told Peter Lennon of the London Guardian, “My mother explained that the cinema was full of homosexuals. As far as I was concerned, either I was a homosexual or I wasn't, so making films would change nothing.” His father, a pharmacist, convinced him to attend the Sorbonne university. Chabrol studied medicine and law, but eventually he left school altogether. He was offered a teaching job and turned it down—in favor, he told Lennon, of “an infernal life of drink and skirt-chasing.”

At age 22, Chabrol developed a bad case of chicken pox and went to Switzerland to recover. While there, he ended up falling in love and marrying his first wife, Agnes Goute; the marriage produced two children but later ended in divorce. As his wife had a lot of money, Chabrol did not have to worry about finding work. Instead, he spent his days going to the burgeoning postwar cinema clubs, where he met filmmakers Franois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer. They invited him to write film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the groundbreaking magazine of the French New Wave. Chabrol later teamed with Rohmer to write a comprehensive book on Alfred Hitchcock, who became one of Chabrol's major cinematic influences, and to whom he has often been compared.

Chabrol also worked as an advisor on Godard's 1960 feature debut A bout de soufflé (Breathless), one of the bestknown films of the French New Wave. Chabrol's roles as a writer and advisor led him into work as a producer; after working with the public relations office of 20th Century Fox in France, Chabrol took charge of AJYM, the production company responsible for his first works as a director. When Chabrol heard that fellow Cahiers writer Roberto Rossellini wanted to help young filmmakers, Chabrol sent him a short script. Rossellini turned it down, but Chabrol made the film anyway. His 1958 directorial debut, Le beau Serge (Handsome Serge), was financed with money from his wife's recent inheritance.

Won Prize with Debut

Chabrol returned to his childhood village of Sardent to shoot the film, a simple story about a young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his hometown to find that his old friend (Gérard Blain) has become an alcoholic. The film ended up winning the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo, providing enough prize money for Chabrol to begin work on his next film, Les cousins (1959). Teaming again with Brialy and Blain, Chabrol began using the character names of Charles and Paul, which he would continue to re-use over the next decade to describe a pair of contrasting characters. Often Paul was the name for the troubled or isolated loner, while Charles was the conventional middle-class family man. Les cousins won an even more prestigious prize: the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

In his next project, 1960's Les bonnes femmes (The Good Girls), Chabrol set the tone of dry, emotional detachment that would become his trademark. In his first color film, A double tour (released in English as Web of Passion), he started to examine the psychological causes of violence and to relate them to the emptiness of bourgeois values. By 1962, when he released L'oeil du malin (Eye of the Devil), Chabrol had introduced a long-lasting formula: the love triangle story involving the recurrent female character Hélène, played by actress Stéphane Audran, whom Chabrol married in 1964. Chabrol's early films, often personal in nature, are considered central documents of the French New Wave.

To finance further films of a more personal stamp, Chabrol took on commercial assignments in the 1960s. Among theses were the spy films Le tigre aime la chair fraiche (released as The Tiger Likes Fresh Meat, 1964), Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha (Marie-Chantal vs. Dr. Kha, 1965), and La route de Corinthe (The Road to Corinth, 1967). He also did a Shakespearean parody called Ophelia. During the same period Chabrol collaborated with other major players in world cinema for several episodic films. In Les plus belles escroqueries du monde (The Most Beautiful Scams in the World) he teamed with Hiromichi Horikawa, Roman Polanski, and his old friend Godard to tell a story of four international con artists. He also collaborated with several of France's top directors for Les sept péchés capitaux, an investigation of the seven deadly sins. The Barbet Schroeder-produced Paris vu par (Paris as Seen By) featured six vignettes, each directed by a different filmmaker. Chabrol's segment “La Muette” starred himself and Audran as a husband and wife. Chabrol also tried his hand at war films with La ligne de démarcation (Line of Demarcation) starring Jean Seberg, the short-haired American beauty seen in ? bout de soufflé.

In the late 1960s, Chabrol began what is generally regarded as a period of masterpieces, often employing variations of the love triangle story line featuring his stock characters Charles, Paul, and Hélène. With Audran as the calm, cool Hélène, actors Michel Bouquet and Jean Yanne often appeared as Charles or Paul. The rest of his crew also remained constant, with AndréGénovès generally serving as producer, Paul Gégauff as screenwriter, Jean Rabier as cinematographer, Pierre Jansen as composer, and Jacques Gaillard as editor. During this time he developed his own style of the psychological thriller that, as Terrence Rafferty discussed in the New York Times, “refuses to thrill,” heavily influenced by directors Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. In Rafferty's words: “The icy, bemused manner he perfected in those years enabled him to generate tension in ways that didn't depend so heavily on satisfying the audience's desire for the resolution of a plot; the suspense was in the excruciating restraint of his direction, the scrupulous withholding of the artist's judgment on his often very, very naughty characters.”

Launched Series of Triangle Tales

Chabrol's breakthrough film of this period was 1968's Les biches (The Does), the story of a lesbian couple in a love triangle with an outsider named Paul. Lennon wrote, “This could have been simply pandering to a classical male fantasy, and 1968 was not the best year to bring out a film with no political gloss, but it was given substantial depth by Chabrol's treatment. The critics liked it and it was a financial success.” Stéphane Audran won the Best Actress Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for her performance. Chabrol's next film, La femme infidèle (The Unfaithful Woman), is considered a classic of love-triangle suspense; it was remade by director Adrian Lyne as Unfaithful in 2002.

Over the next several years, Chabrol continued to explore the ramifications of the basic scenario he had established. In Que la bête meure (The Beast Must Die, 1969), the Charles character finds out about Hélène and Paul as he investigates the death of his son. In La rupture (The Breakup, 1970), Charles and his wealthy parents hire the outsider Paul in a plot against Hélène. In 1970's Le boucher (The Butcher), among the most celebrated of all Chabrol films, Hélène is a schoolteacher and Paul is a butcher who returns from the war. They develop a friendship while a series of murders shake up the small town. In Juste avant la nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971), Charles is the one having the affair, while Hélène is the one compelled to turn to violence. In the last film of this period, Les noces rouges (Red Nights, 1973), the wife and her lover team up against Paul, the estranged husband.

Chabrol's films of the late 1970s and early 1980s were less consistent but more diverse, and he often worked in television and even commercials during this period. Written by and starring his longtime screenwriter Paul Gégauff, Une partie de plaisir (A Portion of Pleasure, 1975) was a dark psychological drama about the breakup of a family, costarring Gégauff's own wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Chabrol's own marriage to Audran was breaking up, “because,” Chabrol told Lennon, “I found myself becoming more interested in her as an actress than a wife.”

He would soon find a new leading lady for his next era of films: Isabelle Huppert. In 1978's Violette Nozière, Chabrol investigated the true story of a young girl who killed her parents in the 1930s. A young Huppert played the title character, taking the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. Audran also had a role in the film. Chabrol also found a new production company in MK2, headed by Marin Karmitz. He also found a new composer, his son Matthieu Chabrol, and a new script supervisor, his third wife, Aurore.

Helmed World War II Abortion Film

While the careers of the other surviving members of the New Wave movement were finished or winding down, Chabrol returned to international distribution and critical recognition with 1988's Une affaire des femmes (An Affair of Women). Huppert portrayed a woman who was killed by the Vichy government for performing abortions during World War II. Despite a controversy at release time, it won international acclaim, including a Golden Globe nomination. In 1991 Chabrol took on the nineteenth-century literary subject Madame Bovary. He told Lennon, “I had wanted to do it for years, but was afraid. Then I said to myself, I am 60, if I don't do it now I never will—and I have the perfect actress: Isabelle.”

In 1995's La cérémonie (The Ceremony), Huppert played a working class woman who befriends a shy maid, played by Sandrine Bonnaire. The film offers a strong example of a Chabrol story in which quiet desperation builds, here exploding in a violent attack against an upper-middleclass family. The film earned festival acclaim and several nominations for César awards, France's equivalent to the Oscars. Chabrol himself sat on the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 2000.

That year he teamed with Isabelle Huppert for Merci pour le chocolat (Thanks for the Chocolate, released in English as Nightcap), based on a crime novel by Charlotte Armstrong. In this slow thriller, Huppert took emotional detachment to an extreme level. According to Rafferty, “Merci Pour le Chocolat is as elegantly impersonal as a mathematical proof; a rigorous exercise in sang-froid. That description could, in fact, apply to a majority of [Chabrol's] 48 feature films, and to all the most celebrated ones.” Featuring the director's son Thomas Chabrol in the supporting cast, La fleur du mal (The Flower of Evil, 2003) dealt with the criminal wrongdoing in three generations of a wealthy family. It was nominated for the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, almost five decades after Chabrol was first honored there.

La demoiselle d'honneur (The Bridesmaid, 2004) was another typically slow-moving thriller involving a romance between Philippe, a middle-class man and Senta, a moody girl. Their relationship could be seen as a metaphor for Chabrol's films in general, argued Rafferty: “Philippe is attracted to Senta, then fascinated by her, then virtually obsessed with her, all without quite knowing why and without fully understanding who she is; she's ardent yet at times strangely affectless, opaque, and that opacity somehow both disturbs and excites him. That's what watching a Claude Chabrol movie is like.”

In 2003 Chabrol was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Film Awards, but he showed no signs of resting on his laurels. In 2006 Chabrol addressed current affairs with L'ivresse du pouvoir (The Comedy of Power), loosely based on the Elf affair, a real-life investigation of a corrupt oil company. Making a North American debut at New York's Tribeca Film Festival, the film showed Chabrol's continuing interest in exposing the corrupt values of the upper class. Chabrol returned in 2007 with the black comedy La fille coupée en deux (The Girl Cut in Two), winning the Bastone Bianco Award at the Venice Film Festival. Still at work in his eighth decade, Chabrol told Alison James of Variety that “when you get to my age, you have to accelerate, not slow down. I've still got a lot of films I want to make, and I don't want to tempt fate.”