The extremely inteligent and insightful analyst of the human psyche and a very likeable, funny and communicative hedonist was a great fan of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, from which Lang and Hitchcock made a crucial impact on his artistic coming of age



Among François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godardand Claude Chabrol, tthree great authors of the French new film, whose names are closely tied to the pioneering time of film criticism in the legendary magazine Cahiers du Cinéma the later rise of the new wave, Chabrol the one with his feet on the ground the most and conditionally the most populist of the directors. He was the only member of the trefoil who did not think of himself exclusively as an Author and Innovator, but rather accepted compromises and conventions of film mainstream in order to realize his continuous and abundant filmography. He was an extremely inteligent and ianalyst of the human psyche and a very likeable, funny and communicative hedonist whose debut film Handsome Serge from 1958 is considered to be the starting point of the French new wave. was a great fan of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, which Lang and Hitchcock a crucial impact on his artistic coming of age. From Lang he adopted the sense of spatiality and awareness of a strong interrelationship between film story and picture; from Hitchcock he inherited the sens of (dark) humor and irony, tendency to investigate the relations between individualism and guilt, partly motives of ordinary people who are pushed out of their routine by an unusual situation, focus on crime and murder as the turning dramatic moments in which psychopathology of the protagonist and indirectly the wider community are most graphically manifested and reflected.
We begin the program of the master’s films with his film Handsome Serge, story about a young man François (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his hometown and finds out that his childhood friend, from the title of the film, (Gérard Blain) is now a lost alcoholic. It is a story in which some might identify autobiographical elements as the film was shot in Chabrol’s native village Sardent. In The Good Girls from 1960, through several intriguing events, the author shows the audience dreams of four young and busy Parisian girls. Besides dealing with his favorite topics of crime, guilt and bourgeois (a)moral, Chabrol also shows his interest in human weaknesses that he portrays with quite a bit of irony evident in the unexpected violent ending. In the next decade, before 1967, and his turning point title Girlfriends, Chabrol directed 13 films that were not very successful but in which he demonstrated his resourcefulness in different genres, form thrillers and spy parodies to war film, as well as his affinity towards variety in genres and adaptations of crime fiction by Patricia Highsmith, Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon, Nicholas Blake and the couple known under the artistic name Ellery Queen. In the aforementioned Girlfriends Chabrol began his collaboration with his future second wife Stéphane Audran, who in many of his films starred as an intelligent and sensitive woman, always called Hélène, often inhibited by conventions and hypocrisy of the bourgeois society she lives in. In the great drama The Unfaithful Wife Hélène is an adulteress whose jealous husband (Michel Bouquet) murders her lover (Maurice Ronet) and thus with that desperate act destroys both of their lives.

His master piece The Butcher was named by the Le Figaro magazine as best French film after WW II. It is a story about a teacher from the province Hélène who becomes close to the seemingly kind-hearted butcher Popaul, who later turns out to be a serial killer of young girls. The film was shot in the village Tremolat in the province Perigord and in order to gain as much credibility and authenticity Chabrol cleverly placed the two main actors, Stephané Audran and Jean Yanne, in a real community in which everyone knows each other and it seems that there are no secrets. At the same time he reduced dialogues to their minimum and emphasized the atmosphere of an expanding unease to its maximum. The skill with which the director, under the pretense of a psychological horror drama, creates complex, likeable and such human characters that learn to like or even love each other, is very impressive. On the other hand, sexually motivated cruel murders are almost completely neglected and kept well out of the camera’s reach, as if they were some unpleasant and disturbing events that the viewer, as well as the heroine herself, hope they would simply stop. The Butcher is an emblematic film by Chabrol, a work in which the author, as well as in some of his previous successful films (The Beast Must Die , Wedding in Blood, Violette Nozière, Madame Bovary, Hell, A Judgement in Stone) and some less sucesful ones (Dr. Popaul, The Cry of the Owl, At the Heart of the Lie, Nightcap, Bellamy) without any moral or other judgement, but from a clear ethical position, unmasks the middle and upper class of the French society, inhabited by provincials and bourgeois, noble people and crooks, likeable antagonists and unpleasant protagonists. Chabrol tries to understand all of them and their actions through their character nuances, social background and family and social environment. The master Chabrol often starts from banal and everyday situations such as adultery, jealousy and envy, researches the narrower and wider context of social conventions, rituals and traditions of the French citizens of the second half of the 20th century and finally paints quite a dark picture of it all. In 1985, his darkly humorous crime drama Cop au vin about a small town in which every person has some secret, reanimated his somewhat slowed down career that turned more to less successful TV films in the 1970’s. One year later Chabrol repeated his collaboration with the comedian Jean Poiret in the very entertaining film Inspector Lavardin, in which Poiret starred again as the inspector from the title. His crime drama Betty from 1992 is an adaptation of Simenon’s novel and a wistful and anxious psychological drama that functions as an intriguing character study of a depressive and alcohol prone member of the French bourgeois (Marie Trintignant) who turns out to be a great manipulator that hurts everyone who dares to like her. Two years later he directed the psychological crime drama Hell based on the unfinished screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot from 1964. It is a masterfully directed, extremely suggestive, disturbing and uncompromising study of psychopathologiocal perversion garnished with darkly humorous elements. With it Chabrol refconfirmed himslef as the permanently great analyst of deviations of human psyche. He repeated this a year later in the similar film A Judgement in Stone, whose main actress, the fantastic Isabelle Huppert, won the French César and together with Sandrine Bonnaire an award in Venice. Finally, we close the program with the thriller drama The Flower of Evil from 2003, the 50th film in Chabrol’s career, who was at the time 72 years old. It is similar to his previous film Nightcap, as Chabrol uses his distinctive bitter-sweet cerebral manner and a subtle psychological profiling of characters to portray the relationships between members of a bourgeois family defined by disturbing secrets.
(Josip Grozdanić)