Family Secrets

The (bourgeois) family becomes the focus of intense investigation and dislocation in Chabrol’s films and this chapter examines its subversive representation through the following key issues: incest, the couple, family rituals and the role of the patriarch. The use of ellipsis, symmetry and doubles, Magrittian trompe-l’œil, expressionistic mise-en-scène and theatricality are some of the techniques used by Chabrol to highlight the fact that the family is a mask, a well-rehearsed performance hiding dark impulses and mental disorders. As demonstrated through La Fleur du mal, Au cœur du mensonge, Poulet au vinaigre and Inspecteur Lavardin, the Chabrolean family is a highly toxic environment in which incest, dark secrets and murder swarm, thereby providing ideal ground to observe and dissect human pathologies and invite the viewer to ask questions about representation and ‘reality’ and the blurry relationship between appearances, ‘truth’ and lies.

The Human Beast

This chapter examines Chabrol’s fascination with ‘human beasts’ or ‘monsters’ through the following (overlapping) motifs: the serial killer, the automaton and the female killer. Through detailed film analysis and close attention to techniques, it shows how Chabrol uses these figures to rethink the boundaries and concepts of normality. Although he often provides a detailed social and ideological framework within which to problematize the human beast, class and gender are misleading keys and causality is ultimately blurred to the point of opacity. The closer one gets to the monster (sometimes literally, through the use of close-up shots), the less one understands it. Case studies of the following films illuminate how Chabrol explores film grammar to convey the complexities of human nature and the fragmented, opaque nature of evil: Le Boucher; Landru; Les Fantômes du chapelier; Violette Nozière; La Demoiselle d’honneur; Blood Relatives.

Chabrolean Spaces as Heterotopias of Crisis

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or functional buildings (the hospital in Le Boucher) become places in which generic battles take place and the real and the virtual come to a head. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is used to illuminate these unstable and overcoded Chabrolean topographies through the following case studies: the boarding house and park in La Rupture; the crystal house in Juste avant la nuit; the hotel room in Violette Nozière and the Gothic houses in Poulet au vinaigre and La Demoiselle d’honneur.

Contexts and Influences

This chapter seeks to contextualise Chabrol’s extensive filmography; reassess its place and significance in French Cinema; and shed light over key influences on Chabrol’s aesthetic. The detailed analysis of his first four films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, A Double tour and Les Bonnes Femmes, helps to understand the formal inventiveness and diversity of his overlooked Nouvelle Vague palette whilst offering key insights into recurrent Chabrolean motifs: the gradual blurring or undermining of realistic / naturalistic modes of representation; expressionistic mise en scène; self-reflexive structures and theatricality; voyeurism; oppressive relationships and family dynamics. Whilst the influence of Lang, Hitchcock and Renoir on Chabrol is already well established, in this chapter Balzac’s pragmatic aesthetic is identified as pivotal: beyond the numerous diegetic references to Balzac, Chabrol draws on Balzac’s ‘mosaic’ approach in order to conceptualise his œuvre. It is argued that the Balzacian strategy of the recurrence of characters (see the recurring trio of Charles, Paul, Hélène) helps Chabrol to turn contemporary material into ‘myths’ and build his own dark Human Comedy.

Conclusion: Towards an Aesthetics of Visual Opacity

Chabrol’s filmography greatly gains in depth and significance by being examined as a whole. Following in Balzac’s footsteps, Chabrol subscribed to the idea that an œuvre is above all a mosaic, made of pieces that may very well be uneven in quality but that, ultimately, provide an overarching structure and a unifying vision. So what exactly is this ‘very precise vision of things’...

Through the Looking Glass: Chabrol’s Mirrors and the ‘Crystal-image’

In close conversation with the previous chapter, Deleuze’s concept of ‘crystal-image’ is used here to explore various reflexive structures and show how pivotal they are to the construction of an aesthetic of opacity. Mises en abyme, mirror images, widespread theatricality help interrogate the fluid and playful relationship between illusion and reality. Like Magritte and Renoir, Chabrol excels at subverting the representation of reality by making it look oneiric or uncanny, sometimes through a mere detail. Through the key examples of La Fille coupée en deux as ‘crystal-film’ and L’Enfer as paranoid narrative, this chapter examines how and to what extent Chabrol challenges the status of the image and the reception process.

Chabrol and Genres

This chapter investigates the various ways in which Chabrol’s cinema engages with genre(s). Although his output is generically diverse, Chabrol remains mostly associated with the crime thriller. The focus is on how Chabrol works broadly within the confines of a generic frame while managing to reflect it in very different ways. The first case study, on Le Boucher, shows how a generically stable thriller transcends the genre at the end in order to become a philosophical investigation into civilisation and the human. In so doing, it identifies Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey as a key, undiscovered intertext for Le Boucher. The other films examined in this chapter, Masques, La Fille coupé en deux and Bellamy show how Chabrol resorts to reflexive modes (parody, theatricality) in order to raise questions about spectatorship. Finally, by examining the fortunes of the adjective ‘chabrolien’ in film reviews and identifying a number of Chabrolean markers through two case studies (films by Anne Fontaine and Denis Dercourt), this chapter explores Chabrol’s lasting legacy on the contemporary French thriller.

Introduction

Claude Chabrol famously said that one of his key priorities was ‘ne pas emmerder le public’ (‘not to bore the audience stiff’).1 It is therefore slightly provocative to apply the label of ‘opacity’ to a director who always prided himself on the accessibility and entertainment value of his films. Yet, his overtly anti-elitist and popular approach to cinema was by no means achieved at the expense of creativity, artistic standards and depth of meaning, and one can get some precious insight into the ‘Chabrol paradox’ through another light-mooded yet revealing quotation of his: ‘Ce qui est drôle, c’est de faire des plans avec deux ou trois strates de lecture’ (‘Making shots with two or three reading grids, that’s what’s fun’)....