Word: chris
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Opposing pulls are acting on them. The working reality they have made for themselves comes dangerously close to cracking, filmed by Chabrol with the violent surrealism of a nightmare. Competently handling guests at party, Chris suddenly finds himself virtually assaulted by a grotesque woman who knew him as a Riviera stud. Chabrol distorts the sound, the background suddenly jumps from people in the room to a back projected screen of people in the room. The objective reality of the camera has shifted imperceptibly to the subjective perception of an unstable mind. Similarly, Paul, ambiguously scarred by the opening accident, strives...
...every pull that threatens to destroy the menage, Chabrol inserts with instinctive rightness suggestions of its permanence. The duplication of names--Chris and Christine--assumes relevance when Paul picks up a girl named Paola, who is prompt-murdered. No possibilty is allowed for Paul's reversing or breaking-out of his role in the trio. His sexuality has been effectively destroyed in the opening accident. Although Chris and Paul are introduced as inseparable, interchangeable companions, wearing the same plaid jackets, Chabrol slowly separates them, Paul entering a world of shadows, Chris existing in a private world of secrets...
...Chris's secret life adds the final layer of complexity to The Champaigne Murders. He is having enough trouble 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...
...final breakdown of the worlds comes in a violently sensual display of color. Audran, coming out into the open, crosses the barriers Chris has established between his lives, destroying forever his success as a hidden prime mover. The lush blues we identify with Christine and, we realize in retrospect, with the dead Paola, are disrupted by Audran's red dress, then by the blackness of the stocking with which Christine and the other girls are strangled. The violence of the deed is muted by the awesome lushness of the images, textures of decor which make murder a forbidden ritual...
...exposition (all the 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...