Word: chabrol
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Pity the poor director who must shoulder the burden of a hackneyed plot. Damn the filmmaker who tries to weave too many new wrinkles into the same plot to justify the whole enterprise, thus producing a convoluted pattern that exceeds the limits of our credulity. Claude Chabrol has earned these conflicting reactions from his latest venture into the realm of the film noir, Dirty Hands, and his ultimate failure amounts to a minor tragedy. Seeing the 1976 release leaves you with the initial thought that Chabrol came so close to making a reasonably competent suspense thriller, only to blow...
Having dragged the viewer through the police investigation and voice-over readings of the letters written to Schneider from her lover on the lam, Chabrol finally throws in some new twists. Steiger resurfaces out of nowhere, savoring the confrontation with his faithless wife as he relates how he foiled her best-laid plans to do him in. Watching the would-be widow get her just desserts restores a sense of justice to the film, but here the structure of the story shows its first signs of coming a cropper. Chabrol chooses to dwell on Steiger's triumph for several more...
Film lives and preserves and Goretta is consciously paying tribute to it. Through allusions to Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (Pierre's wife tells him "sometimes I think you're crazy") and to Chabrol ("are you frightened? Do you think I'll strangle you?") Goretta places himself in the tradition of modern French, not Swiss, filmmakers. He is certainly more subtle and less pretentious than Alain Tanner, though as yet he has not been as widely received in this country. Perhaps sufficient interest will be stirred by this film to prompt more screenings of his first two features...
...PARTIE DE PLAISIR. Claude Chabrol's devastating study of a common-law marriage breaking up, with particular attention paid to the problems of self-absorption and the childishness of the male ego. Psychologically shrewd, dramatically stunning, it is a masterful cautionary tale...
...Partie de Plaisir. Nothing pleasant here, but rather Claude Chabrol's story of two unwed partners who play around on the side, driving the male in this hip arrangement to show his true chauvanist, possessive, jealous and increasingly inhuman colors. We cautioned you about the cruel commentary on the new morality in Alpha-Beta last week, but at least the outcome of that romantic fiasco stayed pretty much up in the air. The wind-up here is far less ambiguous: this Mr. Machismo stomps his liberated and true love's face in with his bootheel. Subtle, Chabrol, subtle...