Word: chabrols
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...1960s, when foreign-language films were the intellectual rage du jour and an inspiration for smart Hollywood directors. Today, with an adventurous spirit and a full tank of gas, you might track down a small gem like Patrice Leconte's Ridicule, a period comedy with rapier wit, or Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie, a sardonic thriller about the death of the bourgeoisie with fearless star turns by Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire. Those, alas, are just tokens. Few foreign-language films are released in the U.S. these days, and those that are attract fewer customers...
...Parisians visit an MK2 outlet each week. MK2 also produces and distributes films, championing filmmakers like German-born Austrian Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) and the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (the Three Colors trilogy: Blue, White and Red). MK2 also produces DVDs of the oeuvres of veterans like Chabrol and Resnais, with comprehensive bonus features, for international distribution. The schedules for each cinema are tailored to its neighborhood, with individual managers selecting movies for reprises and special screenings. Showing a high concentration of French films, Karmitz's cinema chain continues to grow, the latest addition being a 14-screen...
...pothead. The stepmother Mika (Isabelle Huppert) wanders about with a benign half-smile on her face, lacing the family's bedtime hot chocolate with a potent--and in her hands potentially lethal--soporific. The Swiss chateau is an unlikely stoner's paradise--and maybe, in Chabrol's mind, a metaphor for the way the bourgeois sleepwalk around their problems. Merci pour le Chocolat occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder. --By Richard Schickel
...praise, then, to Claude Chabrol for painting the story in honest shades of gray, for finding sense in a case that could wallow in sensation. His Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is caged in a drab marriage in a dull town in occupied France. The Germans have put hopes on hold; survival is a matter of wily , compromise. When Marie finds a neighbor artlessly attempting an abortion, she helps out. Word gets around, and soon she is a successful businesswoman. And the perfect homebody: she performs abortions in the kitchen, rents her spare room to a prostitute and takes her collaborator lover...
Story of Women, named best foreign-language film by three critics' groups, is an eloquent example of Simenon cinema -- the kind of movie that, in the manner of Georges Simenon's novels, treats melodramatic subjects with clinical dispassion. Chabrol never coddles viewers; he trusts them to sort out the evidence. His Marie is too complicated to be either a monster or a savior. And Huppert's beautifully deadpan performance finds the ideal emblem for Marie, a vessel empty of everything but human contradictions...