Imperfection in his opus goes hand in hand with his virtues: an uncontrollable need to observe and comment on life, describe and devour France with its moods, faults, family secrets, dark passions and evil that hides behind elegant Louis IV facades.




Unlike Croatian cinema that often discarded generations of its film authors at their peaks (which is why they often had to start over from the beginning), French cinema draws its strength from its firm veins of continuity. In French film there are the strong middle, young and the youngest generations of film authors along with the very active league of veterans who still make films along with the new lions. Most of the New Wave grandpas are still active today. Every year we see new films by Godard and Rohmer, as well as Resnais and Rivette. Some of them, like Rohmer, made their best films in their third age.


Claude Chabrol belongs to this group of diligent old-timers. The New Wave master of thrillers, now at the age of 76, still makes at least one film per year. This year in Berlin he presented L'ivresse du pouvoir, his sixtieth film along with four segments in omnibuses and several TV films. With such an insatiable hunger for creation it is often hard to maintain quality. Just like other productive authors - for example Ford, Eastwood or Woody Allen - Chabrol is not always in the best form. Younger generations are often confused when they are attracted to the theatre by this classic name and then in the dark of the movie theatre they encounter an average or even a below average film that could well use another hand of script-doctoring, mending of dramaturgy and more patience in directing. But that is Chabrol. Imperfection in his opus goes hand in hand with his virtues: an uncontrollable need to observe and comment on life, describe and devour France with its moods, faults, family secrets, dark passions and evil that hides behind elegant Louis IV facades.


Among the New Wave directors Chabrol was one of the most prominent film writers and one of the first ones who directed his own film - as early as 1958. As a film critic he adored the classic masters of suspense Hitchcock and Lang. While most of the other New Wave directors more or less moved away from the classic narrative style towards modernity, Chabrol remained faithful to genre film, suspense, narration and form standards of storytelling classics from 1950s. Chabrol left the pot untouched but filled it with new content. In sixty films he described the lives and characters of the French bourgeois, their adulteries, jealousies, envies, Oedipus’ and other complexes. “If there is a dead guy at the very beginning, I am immediately more interested” said Chabrol once, explaining his unflinching interest in thrillers, the genre that he always returned to. Nevertheless, Chabrol was less interested in the typical French film policier. He is, just like James Cain or Ruth Rendell, more interested in crimes by the kitchen table and bed, the small household scandals. That the kitchen table is big and rich and the bed stylistic are just additional factors. In Chabrol’s salons everything smells of death and after death comes inheritance, possession and the deposited assets of the class society.


Chabrol depicted the French middle class in such detail that he overwhelmingly reminds us of another great master of reality - Balzac. Chabrol’s world scandalizes but it does not have an ideological mark. On one side Chabrol is a Catholic and on the other a liberal. When the Berlin wall fell, Chabrol answered it by making - in his own words - the last Marxist film and his last master piece, La Ceremonie. Chabrol is not a director of one single point of view. He is a suspicious skeptic who is shocked over and over again that the perspective of humanity is so easily hooked on greed, egoism and evil.

Chabrol is a filmmaker who honors literature. Some of the great writers on whose work he based his films include classics such as Henry James and Flaubert as well as those of completely different sensibility such as Henry Miller and Simone de Beauvoir, or the masters of Chabrol’s genre such as Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, Charlotte Armstrong or Georges Simenon. This love between Chabrol and writers is reciprocal. In fact, writers like Chabrol even more than other directors who often resent him for dryness, unimaginativeness and lack of cinematic peculiarity. In the end, those faults are Chabrol: that is how he is; he is a painter of the contemporary Human Comedy, a man who left to his nation and colleagues a clinical description that is very rarely found in film history. (Jurica Pavičić)