Word: chabrolian
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...greatness: The Champagne Murders uses the zoom lens, violently colored images and elaborate decor; Les Biches has only one zoom (the final shot), employs only cool colors (mostly blue-greens; Chabrol says that most color films "hurt my eyes") and is more conventionally formal. Both films, however, are unmistakably Chabrolian, and mark the increasing maturity of France's most important young director...
...wonder whether it will act as an agent of destruction or of change. If Les Biches proves a spellbinding and gloriously beautiful melange of personal relationships, The Champagne Murders is more complex and experimental, less perfect but ultimately greater. The character of Chris (Anthony Perkins) combines the Chabrolian malevolent driven to seek expedients selfishly and the Chabrolian romantic clinging to an intangible yearning for love and friendship; his vain attempt to satisfy both needs makes up the story (although we don't learn this until the film ends); by showing how his warped vision limits the success of his life...
...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...
...reconciling his past with his marriage with his friendship with his dreams of yachts with his furtive restlessness, and from all of this he retreats to yet another world, his secret affair with the woman played seductively by Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran. His dilemma is that of the Chabrolian malevolent driven to selfishly seek expedients, and that of the Chabrolian romantic clinging to an intangible yearning for love and friendship. The synthesis results in Chabrol's most complex and fascinating character but, with pragmatic pessimism, Chabrol makes Chris incompetent to deal with the schizoid existences he leads. Too many...
...answers we've been waiting for) is relegated to an importance secondary to the meaning of the shocking last dozen shots. Realizing that Audran's secret world has brought about the destruction of his own ephemeral constructs, Chris reacts violently to destroy her, just as she (in Chabrolian fashion recalling The Third Lover) selfishly destroyed the tense harmony in which she was an outsider. Chris realizes spontaneously that Christine's unrequited love nonetheless was the center of his barren life; Audran screams about money; and Paul, innocent of crime but isolated from his familiar life-style for the first time...