Word: chabrol
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This Man Must Die. Claude Chabrol's most recent American-released film is perhaps not so tightly conceived as last year's La Femme Infidele -but it may also be this director's funniest thriller. As usual, the story deals with murder and the way murder changes complex human relationships. The color (particularly the late-Hitchcockesque blues) is more florid than ever, and there are two scenes that can only be described as amazing: one involving a dinner at a bourgeois French family's home, the other featuring the carving of a duck...
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...
...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...
...Chabrol again proves that he is a master of brutal counterpoint. Corpse No. 2, for example, is discovered on a cliff when blood drips onto a little girl's sandwich below...
Throughout the film there is the discomforting contrast between savagery and soft pastel colors, much as if Renoir had painted an execution. Chabrol's talent is very nearly matched by that of his wife Stephane, who gives touching depth to the role of the existential Gallic heroine...