Word: boucher
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...BOUCHER...
...Boucher is rich in its details of village life, a deceptively benign milieu for such a sinister film. It begins with a magnificent scene of a wedding, where the butcher and the teacher meet. It is the bride at this wedding who will become one of his victims. In Chabrol's hands, such pat plotting seems part of a fateful, remorseless order...
PART OF THE brilliance of Le Boucher, Claude Chabrol's newest film, is the complexity which glides beneath the surface of a clean, moving, and beautifully liquid story. We know a man is guilty of murder, we know he loves a woman, and we know the woman loves him. Those discoveries are usually the fruit of stories, not their premises. But Chabrol uses evil, and love, and sexual repression as building blocks. He explores the concepts of emotional isolation and delayed gratification with a maturity rarely seen in conventional murder mysteries...
Because Le Boucher is primarily a narrative, because it moves from scene to scene discretely, with visible growths and amplifications, its realism conveys an almost anthropological charm. The story makes an explicit link between the drives and aspirations of the Cro-Magnon man and the diverted energies of us, his descendants. Sublimation, murder, and love are three traditionally heavy themes, and the fact that Chabrol sets them in a narrative (rather than historical, or surrealistic, or impressionistic) context allows them to assume the same weight that, say, Freudian psychopathology plays in Alice in Wonder-land...
...Boucher is also part documentary. The movie was shot in a French town near the site of the Lascaux caves, and many scenes include glimpses of locals whose faces are ingratiating. Kes, a British film directed by Ken Loach, is also part documentary, and the delicate way in which it mixes overt fiction with pure reportage is admirable. Kes is a kestrel hawk; the bird is caught and trained by a 15-year-old boy, and the movie is as much about freedom and repression than anything else. The boy is the no-good-nick of his class at school...