Word: audran
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...painted such personalities in commedia dell' arte costumes, for the masquerade was the sign and symbol of his era. To capture its magic, the Flemish-born painter had run away to Paris at the age of 18, then studied with Stage Designer Claude Gillot and Interior Decorator Claude Audran before striking out on his own. The times cried out for a chronicler. After the aged Sun King, Louis XIV died in 1715, French society, under the leadership of the dissolute regent, the Due d'Orleans, gave itself over to a rabid pursuit of pleasure, rivaling that of Imperial...
...Champaigne Murders. He is having enough trouble reconciling his past with his marriage with his friendship with his dreams of yachts with his furtive restlessness, and from all of this he retreats to yet another world, his secret affair with the woman played seductively by Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran. His dilemma is that of the Chabrolian malevolent driven to selfishly seek expedients, and that of the Chabrolian romantic clinging to an intangible yearning for love and friendship. The synthesis results in Chabrol's most complex and fascinating character but, with pragmatic pessimism, Chabrol makes Chris incompetent to deal with...
...final breakdown of the worlds comes in a violently sensual display of color. Audran, coming out into the open, crosses the barriers Chris has established between his lives, destroying forever his success as a hidden prime mover. The lush blues we identify with Christine and, we realize in retrospect, with the dead Paola, are disrupted by Audran's red dress, then by the blackness of the stocking with which Christine and the other girls are strangled. The violence of the deed is muted by the awesome lushness of the images, textures of decor which make murder a forbidden ritual...
...exposition (all the answers we've been waiting for) is relegated to an importance secondary to the meaning of the shocking last dozen shots. Realizing that Audran's secret world has brought about the destruction of his own ephemeral constructs, Chris reacts violently to destroy her, just as she (in Chabrolian fashion recalling The Third Lover) selfishly destroyed the tense harmony in which she was an outsider. Chris realizes spontaneously that Christine's unrequited love nonetheless was the center of his barren life; Audran screams about money; and Paul, innocent of crime but isolated from his familiar life-style...
...implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away...