Word: chabrols
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...visits, sponsored by West European Studies, which bring together, at Harvard, principal filmmakers and their major works. Eric Rohmer, the French director, made a rare public appearance, as part of this series, on Oct. 11. Others who have indicated interest in the series are Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut...
ORSON WELLES ALWAYS DID have a voice and presence rather like the Sunday school image of Almighty God, but the role Claude Chabrol has given him in Ten Days Wonder is probably as close as he'll get to playing the real thing. Welles, as a millionaire striving for omnipotence must not only defend the world he has built up around himself from a psychotic son, but support a droopy, chche-ridden script derived in about equal parts from Ellery Queen and Sigmund Freud Queen's novel provides the story, and the message is Chabrol's interpretation of the gospel...
...this final scene, Theo, the man who plays God, gets his comeuppance at Chabrol's hands--but so does God Himself. In the past, Chabrol's films have shown retribution coming to those in whom the id has won out in violence or immorality. At best that retribution has been tragic. But in Ten Days' Wonder, although Charles meets his death it is Theo--who drove Charles's passions to "unnatural" outlets-who is literally guilty: his is Helene's murderer. He is punished for his hubris, for daring to manipulate men as if he were God. But beyond that...
...Chabrol punctuates Charles's self-questioning with the good old Freudian image of the mirror: Charles in front of a bathroom mirror, wondering where the blood on his hands came from; Charles seeing himself twisted in a shiny bar counter; Charles at home seeing his reflection and Helene's in a pond. And in this last image is represented a certain success for Charles in his quest: he has fallen in love with Helene, his father's wife, whom he calls mother...
...GOES," as Kurt Vonnegut says, but for a director of Chabrol's stature, it never should go like that. As cheap Freudianism expands into cheap theology, even a skillful development of suspense is neglected. The "second level" with which Chabrol's idol Hitchcock expands the thriller here comes forward and overwhelms the story. What could have been turned into suspense or shock--the identity of Helene's murderer--is abbreviated and intellectualized into a sort of "wrap-up" scene between Paul and Theo. It is the philosophy professor, significantly, who has to figure out that...