Word: chabrol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Landru. The New Wave, which surf-boarded French Moviemaker Claude Chabrol to fame in Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, is receding, and the beach is littered with reels of cinematic flotsam. A fair sample is this Chabrol film based on the macabre amours of Henri Desire Lan dru, a French antique dealer, who whiled away World War I by having affairs with 283 women, only 273 of whom survived...
...screenplay and dialogue are by Françoise Sagan; she and Chabrol started out to do a picture about the life of George Sand, but became bored with the idea and switched from blue story to Bluebeard in mid-project. The film is mean to ladies in more ways than murder. Its closeups of fading Film Queens Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan constitute a photographic invasion of privacy. One corpulent beldam, a doomed weekend guest at Landru's Art Nouveau rookery near Paris, eats raspberries from Landru's hand and ends up with jam dribbling wretchedly down...
...writing reviews for the Paris monthly, Cahiers du Cinéma, the Parisian equivalent of Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood, a place where young hopefuls loiter. In the late '50s, every young French director who had directed nothing wrote for Cahiers. One by one, they emerged - Claude Chabrol with The Cousins, François Truffaut with The 400 Blows. Only Jean-Luc Godard seemed to stay behind, and one day he disappeared with the Cahiers' petty cash. Chabrol and Truffaut wondered if Godard was trying to finance a film. They came to his aid, the money...
Like the Renault, The Cousins has its selling points, even if it is not a wonderful buy. The examination of Paul's existence is a perceptive and frightening study in purposelessness, and its Siamese twin, hatred. Chabrol dismisses as illusory Charles' concept that the Earth is a planet where hard work and honesty pay off. He does not content himself with bitterness, though, and descends into cynicism. He involves the audience in a world where only the pimp's concept of love can prevail. And this world is proclaimed as not only the real, but the ineluctable and unchangeable world...
...audience is allowed no distance to evaluate the state of affairs that Chabrol presents; there is only emotional involvement and an ultimate hollowness...