Word: chabrol
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...Claude Chabrol, fresh from three years of relatively impersonal cheaper projects, made a picture which restored him to critical favor. The film, which directly embodied his ideas about perception and morality, was called Les Biches...
...Chabrol realizes Why's childlike outlook in a phenomenology of sensation. The objects of Les Biches melt into the soft-colored fields on which they are placed. Though Chabrol's compositions have a lot of spatial depth. the camera penetrates the spaces before it with such fluidity that one thing is not sharply distinct from another: changes of position in space occur so smoothly and continuously that people, objects, and setting appear to merge...
...perverse characters and grotesque objects of Chabrol's earlier films take a part in La Femme Infidele. The taller of the two anarchic clowns, whom he has repeatedly employed, turns up unshaven in a bar and insults the protagonist as he passes through. The shorter one appears as a truck driver who rams the rear of the hero's car at a crucial moment. But like the extravagant colors and camera motions that La Femme Infidele inherits from the earlier films, these characters have become precisely integrated and thereby far deeper in emotional effect. The boorishness of the second clown...
Similarly, the themes and characters of this earlier films are here so integrated as to make their significance more immediate. The hero is Chabrol's destructive romantic, but his dialogue hardly reveals profound love or the insane determination to preserve close personal relationships. It is his facial expressions that detail his momentary emotional states and reactions to other characters' words that betray his character. He is the most completely motivated character I have even seen in a film, for Chabrol has chosen to use dialogue obliquely, turning rather to acting and camerawork to describe his characters...
...home has the deepest possible bearing on the emotional climate of the relationships then developing. The world of the film contracts and its relationships become less existential, more archetypal, as they turn to the family: man, wife, and son. Here again scenes are played less outrageously than in earlier Chabrol, so that the child who sees through the superficial amicability of his parents' relationship reacts to his intuitive insights only indirectly. His inability to finish a picture puzzle, a metaphor for the changed relationship of husband and wife, describes his position in the family as that of a passive being...