Word: chabrol
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...FRENCH NEW WAVE lost its steam in the mid-sixties, when the experiments of the early part of the decade began to turn into repetition on the one hand and polemic on the other. Chabrol churned out Chabrols and Truffaut, Truffauts. Daniel Cohn-Bendit gave Godard politics. No one gave Resnais money. This same vacuum which so facilitated the ascension of Eric Rohmer seems likely to do similarly for Alain Tanner. But like Rohmer. Tanner at his moment of success is no fresh young talent. He is a middle-aged Swiss with a varied career behind him that includes apprenticeship...
Directed by CLAUDE CHABROL...
...Claude Chabrol, who excels at tightly disciplined exercises in suspense (This Man Must Die, Le Boucher), seems himself to be going momentarily delirious in Ten Days' Wonder, where tension and insight are subordinated to sorry stylistic flamboyance. Chabrol's camera swoops about like a dizzy flamingo, descending from great altitudes to light on such still lifes as a garden, a pond or two naked lovers entwined in the green leaves...
There is also a great deal of cosmic chatter about guilt, punishment and redemption. Ten Days' Wonder exudes a sort of occluded Catholicism, a quality that the young Chabrol detected in the work of Hitchcock, who has been a heavy and not entirely salutary influence on him. Everything is rather uninterestingly out of control here, including Orson Welles. When Welles arches an eyebrow he undergoes such convulsions that it appears he is trying to launch a great hairy boomerang off his face and into the stratosphere...
...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...