Word: bouchere
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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...
...never able (or, for that matter, inclined) to raise his art to that Mozartian pitch of psychological tension at which Watteau's lovers and courtiers exist. Boucher, unlike Watteau, had no vision of a fragile society whose pleasures, no matter how refined, are menaced by time. Boucher painted pleasure as though it were a perpetual state, coquetry without end, threatened by neither satiety nor boredom. The elements that constitute his afternoon kingdom take on a preternatural luxury as objects; the sky, swarming with clouds of putti and looping swags of fabric, itself acquires the crisp sheen of taffeta...
...foundation of this airy palace of fiction (Boucher was far too rational, too much a Frenchman of the 18th century, ever to confuse art with reality) was, inevitably, the female nude, for which Boucher discovered a fresh convention. Since the chill goddesses of the Fontainebleau school in the 16th century, the nude in French art had retained some measure of Gothic proportion- elongated torso, small high breasts - and a distinct aura of remoteness. Boucher's nude was small, full and rounded: a compact little machine à plaisir, borne up like a plump rose on tumultuous puffs of cloud...
Almost Great. "There was an ar dor in Boucher's imagination, but not much veracity and still less elevation," wrote a stuffy diarist named Marmontel. "His encounters with the Graces had never had a respectable setting." It is not far from that to the later outraged philippics of Diderot, who treated Boucher's hedonism as a moral menace - "simperings, affectation, nothing but beauty spots, rouge, gewgaws...
...Diderot sounds unjust, it is not simply because the tone of our culture has swung back to a less civilized amorality in which our pornography is brutish. It is because, when the routine conventions of his work are subtracted, Boucher remains a startling and almost great painter. The sensuousness, the lively plasticity of drawing, the marvelous sensitivity to color and texture, the ironic grasp of elaborate mythologies and allegories still remind us of Talleyrand's wistful epitaph on the ancien régime - that no one who did not live before the Revolution can know the sweetness of life...