Word: chabrol
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...Blue Panther every so often) reveals the latter film ludicrously written in contrast yet wildly more mature stylistically, a riveting blend of calculated camera movement in sensual decor with brilliantly cut sequences of action employing the zoom lens. Far from stagnating in the world of commercial mystery films, Chabrol has emerged the finest new stylist in France, far superior to Truffaut (whose Bride Wore Black pales in comparison), and in many ways surpassing Godard and Resnais...
...Chabrol describes himself as "not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live." The background of his films show an avaricious and innately destructive world of monstrous and banal people. It is, for the most part, only background, and the films are more specifically about complex relationships and interaction of characters. But where Lang's or Hawks's characters will confront their directors' vision of society-gone-wrong head on, Chabrol's retreat a little from it to defensive personal eccentricities. Both Chris (Anthony Perkins) and Paul (Maurice Ronet) are warped in Chabrolian high-style: bored...
Spoken references to that unfilmed past which set up the plot premise provide an idea both of Chabrol's pragmatism and the point at which his imagination begins to make connections and build strange relationships between the characters: Paul is the legitimate heir to the Wagner champagne firm, an old and fabulously respected French wine. His father was swindled out of ownership by a man whose daughter Christine (Yvonne Furneaux) now runs the company. Paul has only rights to the name Wagner, this preventing Christine from selling the company to crass American industrialists who won't buy the firm without...
...Chabrol's films rarely offer this much insight into events of the unfilmed past--another requirement, in this case, of melodramatic genres. The grotesque levels of thievery and sexual blackmail implied make understandable an exhibited malaise (Chris generalizing supremely about all of Hamburg: "This place is dead. On Saturdays it's worse than France."), leading to a cynically Darwinian attitude toward self-preservation (Christopher: "I do have her interests at heart--as long as they're the same as mine."), leading to strange personal mannerisms (Chris's habit of repeating words and grimacing...
...Godelureaux< and The Third Lover, Chabrol's fourth and sixth films, were exercises in confrontation between the malevolent Chabrolian eccentric and an order he found intolerable: in both cases one of beauty and harmony. When a Chabrol character cannot become a part of whatever natural tranquility he is observing, he sets out to destroy it. In The Third Lover, Mercier, a writer jealous of the marriage of a more successful author, ruins their lives by unmasking the wife's infidelity, thus indirectly causing her death. The Champagne Murders, while sharing this theme, is immensely more complex, mind-bendingly hard...