Word: chabrol
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...CHABROL'S subdued descriptions of situations work most strongly in the home. When the wife lies back on her bed she is surrounded by the deep blues of coverlet and dressing-sreen, which Chabrol had avoided showing in an earlier bedroom scene. We hardly need hear her quiet sobs to feel the sorrow into which she has fallen. Chabrol tells us visually, and tells us emotionally more than intelectually. His realistic avoidance of significant dialogue throws the job of character delineation onto acting, set design, and camerawork. Chabrol's mastery of all three is complete...
...related specifically to the character in foreground. The background works on the characters emotionally, through its colors. The walls behind them are so brightly lit that one's attention is not drawn to any single object; the character seems to stand before a colored screen. The lengths to which Chabrol carries this lighting method throws all detailing of behavior and motivation onto the actors in the foreground. They rise magnificently to the challenge...
...instead of condensing the narrative, is designed to detail personal changes. The extraordinary cuts from the hero in motion to the hero standing still, as he cleans up after the murder, reveal the effects of his actions upon him, a thing few directors are able to do. Because of Chabrol's cutting, more delicate than in his previous films, the hero's crime of passion is also a crime of precise action...
Such stylistic precison and detailing of motivation are more typical of the fifties than of today's film-making. On many scores-his dramatic premises, his recurrent themes and characters, his stylistic means-Chabrol seems to be working with traditional material. But to take stylistic means as far as they will go is to break new artistic ground. La Femme Infidele, which uses an ultimately experimental style with extraordinary emotional power, deserves not to be dismissed as "perfect...
...YORK critic who called La Femme Infidele a "perfect bourgeois drama" had reason to be proud of himself. Claude Chabrol's new film takes for its subject the most hackneyed situation in melodrama, the triangular love relationship. Its subtlely of expression bespeaks the most exquisite taste. The critic's label nevertheless implies that the film's scope is restricted, and while most audiences may find that true. La Femme Infidele is far from the good little movie the label implies. It is perfect not because Chabrol has restricted his aims, but because he has taken his dramatic situations, themes...