Word: audran
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WEDDING IN BLOOD. Two married lovers (Stephane Audran, Michel Piccoli) are driven by their shared need and the transports of passion to commit murder. This woebegone plot, written and directed by the sometimes masterly Claude Chabrol (Le Boucher), needs all the voltage it can stand. From Chabrol and his stars, it gets only a few anemic charges. The paramours are intrepidly bourgeois, their longing for each other so squalidly selfish and narcissistic that every time they paw each other they seem to be polishing a mirror. They lavish the sort of affection and attention on each other that...
...stake in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are the attenuated meals that six characters (Fernando Ray, Bulle Ogier, Raul Frankeur, Delphine Segrig, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Stephane Audran) never finish. A misunderstanding--guests arriving a day in advance for a dinner party--is the movie's premise and from it follow seven meals, each real or fantasy, all of which are interrupted by events, again either actual or imagined. The causes for the disruptions are as absurd as they are unexplained--the hosts making love while their guests wait, a funeral, a French military battalion, imprisonment for drug trafficking...
...years later, this new film, his 29th, uses a device reminiscent of The Exterminating Angel. A small group of frivolous, well-heeled Parisians (Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Bulle Ogier, Paul Frankeur) sit down to a series of meals that are in some way either interrupted or totally disrupted. The movie is a skein of the guests' separate fantasies, each one originating with the recurring comic nightmare of a disastrous dinner. Bunuel, as if working an artful parlor trick, sometimes pulls one dream from inside another like a series of splendid silks...
...detachment and their resulting obsession with manners and surfaces. If the film lacks quite as much force as it might have had, that is because the targets themselves have been pretty well battered by this time. The actors do all they can and work considerable charm; Rey, Seyrig and Audran are especially stylish...
...does Chabrol fall victim to melodrama in his direction. He gets impact from understatement and from two superb, low-key performances by Yanne and Audran (who is Mrs. Chabrol in private life). In Chabrol's treatment, the schoolmistress not only triggers the killer's dormant psychopathy but becomes a partner in his crime. Perversely, as he becomes more dangerous, she is all the more drawn to him. Finally, knife in hand, the crazed killer confronts her late at night in her apartment. It is only then, in a violent, weird, but somehow touching denouement, that the two finally...