Word: furneaux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...point at which his imagination begins to make connections and build strange relationships between the characters: Paul is the legitimate heir to the Wagner champagne firm, an old and fabulously respected French wine. His father was swindled out of ownership by a man whose daughter Christine (Yvonne Furneaux) now runs the company. Paul has only rights to the name Wagner, this preventing Christine from selling the company to crass American industrialists who won't buy the firm without its famous trademark. Paul has calculately engineered the marriage of Christine and his close friend Chris, a beach boy "working" the Riviera...
...camera has shifted imperceptibly to the subjective perception of an unstable mind. Always eccentric, Chabrol's characters toy dangerously with the lives of their friends and lovers, and in The Champagne Murders, border a thin line between the perverse and the insane. A plot, psychological warfare between Yvonne Furneaux and Maurice Ronet over ownership of the brand name of a famous French champagne, assumes only tangential importance in comparison to questions of what is or isn't real, whether insanity or cold-blooded calculation motivates the strange behavior of characters, and the three murders...
...Perkins and Ronet are introduced as inseparable, almost identical companions, but the influence that undermines their relationship remains an unknown until the ending. Always unsure of motive, always aware of an eerie presence that threatens to destroy the eccentric harmony of Chabrol's self-centered trio (Perkins, his wife Furneaux and friend Ronet), we watch spellbound as Chabrol brings us further into an impeccably decorated, completely corrupt world of malevolence. The final images, shocking and indescribable, are unlike any other in narrative cinema and, if nothing else, suggest an existential hell as beautiful and provocative as we are likely...
...others: The Making of a King, by Alan Lloyd, Invasion: 1066 by Rupert Furneaux, The Conquest of England by Eric Linklater...
...them seem quite different every time they appear. None is developed fully enough so that the facets of his personality cohere; and since Polanski, a Pole, is directing in a language foreign to him, the English dialogue doesn't add much. (Catherine Deneuve, who plays the girl, and Yvette Furneaux, who plays her sister, are speaking in a foreign language too.) Repulsion is undeniably interesting, and should give most people frisson or two. But like the opening credits, which glide up and down Miss Deneuve's glistening eyeball, the movie as whole is silly and uninspired...