Word: chabrol
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...which brings us in a round-about sort of way to The Champagne Murders (Le Scandale), a wonderful film by Claude Chabrol which I submit to you, over the hisses of Wednesday night's audience at the Harvard Square, as the best film yet released in 1968. Chabrol, whose Les Coursins is famous as one of the first accomplished works to emerge from the French nouvelle vague, has had a troubled career resembling Lang's and Welles's. The films after Les Cousins grew increasingly serious, tended toward morbidity, and lost both money and the critics. In order to keep...
...shots and occasional harsh cuts. But anything made with any kind of style is good to see these days, given what Hollywood is releasing, and the pleasure of having a new Truffaut around is diminished only by the Boston release this week of Bunuel's Belie de Jour, and Chabrol's incredible The Champagne Murders, about which we will have more to say later...
Under Bazin's guidance, Truffaut quickly stabilized and began to write film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma, the recondite French movie journal that then housed such nouvelle vague cineasts as Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. Truffaut proved so corrosive a critic that in 1958 he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival and forced to snipe at targets he could not see. What he could see, however, was Madeleine Morgenstern, daughter of a film executive whose products had received Truffaut's hardest knocks. After they were married, Truffaut continued his criticism, this time...
...have become a process-screen behind Anthony Perkins, who in turn finds himself virtually assaulted by a grotesque woman who claims she knew him as a gigolo on the Riviera; the objective reality of the camera has shifted imperceptibly to the subjective perception of an unstable mind. Always eccentric, Chabrol's characters toy dangerously with the lives of their friends and lovers, and in The Champagne Murders, border a thin line between the perverse and the insane. A plot, psychological warfare between Yvonne Furneaux and Maurice Ronet over ownership of the brand name of a famous French champagne, assumes only...
...Chabrol's films often begin with a single relationship, then introduce a third person who alters it completely. In The Third Lover, for example, Jacques Charrier jealously destroys the marriage of the writer and his wife; in the immensely complex Champagne Murders, Perkins and Ronet are introduced as inseparable, almost identical companions, but the influence that undermines their relationship remains an unknown until the ending. Always unsure of motive, always aware of an eerie presence that threatens to destroy the eccentric harmony of Chabrol's self-centered trio (Perkins, his wife Furneaux and friend Ronet), we watch spellbound as Chabrol...