Word: chabrol
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...Champagne Murders and Les Biches are the two best films of 1968 and they are the work of a genius named Claude Chabrol. One of the founders of the Nouvelle Vague (Les Cousins), Chabrol followed a series of personal-but-unsuccessful films with a string of Grade-B melodramas. These, he explains, afforded him great stylistic freedom, a chance to experiment, and money to pay his taxes. The Champagne Murders is the last and most important, and it enabled him to make Les Biches, a great success which has restored Chabrol to critical favor. The difference between the two films...
NONETHELESS, the potential for new formula exists in these films. We are familiar with the story of the country innocent corrupted by the wicked city, a plot-type appearing frequently from Griffith's Way Down East through Chabrol's Les Cousins. Hollywood has begun to alter this: the conclusion of the product-mongers appears to be that innocence--at least sexual innocence--no longer exists anywhere, certainly not in the country. Hollywood is probably right: God knows they helped make it that way, and God know there's no money to be made in innocence. The three runaways in Dreifuss...
...implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away...
Finally, a camera style of slow and balanced moving shots is, successfully executed, one of the great joys of narrative film. When Chris goes to Paul to reassure him in a scene discussed earlier, Chabrol cuts together shots already in motion, joining a shot moving left in a circular are, a crane down from high angle, a forward track moving left, one moving right, and a pull back to wide-angle. The effect is again one of montage--the creation of masterful rhythm from smaller individual rhythms -- and again the illusion gives way to the truth of the image...
...simple moral of all this, and one Chabrol would probably agree with in his humble fashion, is that plot and script content, always captivating, seductively able to sustain our need for entertainment, is limitless in its capacity for excellence yet always a subordinate. The discipline we must cultivate is that of understanding statements of edited images. As in all high art, great film teaches. Even on the lowest level of its excellence, The Champagne Murders teaches us to see better