Word: chabrol
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...Boucher, French Director Claude Chabrol once again explores his obsession: murder and the darkness of soul required to commit it. While the film is neither as tightly wound as La Femme Infidele nor as intricately plotted as This Man Must Die, Boucher creates a mutely eerie quality that builds to a compelling climax...
Like an objets trouves sculptor, Director Claude Chabrol (La Femme Infidele) likes to give commonplaces a classic aspect. Is coincidence a cliche? Very well, then, the father, Charles Thenier (Michel Duchaussoy), learns the identity of the hit-and-run murderer by a convenient accident. Are villains too often betes noiresl The driver is a child-beating, wife-torturing, mistress-abusing salaud. Does the pursuer fall in love with his quarry-as Belmondo did with Deneuve in Mississippi Mermaid! The villain's mistress (Caroline Cellier) is a lodestar of beauty and melancholia. Naturally, Charles is smitten...
...other French mysteries, were abject hommages to American directors of the recent past. This Man Must Die pays an older debt. As Charles seeks his son's killer, his self-examinations are not reminiscent of a contemporary detective but of Ulysses on some unchartable mental voyage. Indeed, Chabrol makes poetic use of the wine-dark sea and refers constantly to the ancient legends of death and vengeance...
Such riddles are the texture and the text of This Man Must Die, and they persist after the film. The actors who pose them are perfection. Each performs as if he were in full possession of a secret, but only one person has the solution-Chabrol-and he is not giving it away. Perhaps, he implies, there is more than one. Perhaps moral laws are subject to appeal. Perhaps, as Mallarme observed, "All thought emits a throw of the dice." Most film makers vainly attempt to have it both ways; Chabrol succeeds. This Man Must Die is as full...
...mingling colors and sensuous personal relationships of Les Biches give it a deceptively tranquil mood. Beneath its apparent softness lie a morality and visual style of steel. The fundamental principle of Chabrol's view of the world is the inevitability of change in the ordering of relationships. In his films the positions of objects in space are altered, often via camera motions, over time. Chabrol carefully organizes other types of change-the evolution of personal relationships being the most explicit-around this basic kind...