For 30 years after the death of Alfred Hitchcock, the French film-maker Claude Chabrol near single-handedly kept alive a genre that without him might have become a museum piece, like the musical or the western: the icily elegant suspense thriller. The existence of these tense dramas depended largely on a strict set of social codes, a strong sense of order and a buttoned-up bourgeois society within which the idea of crime is unthinkable.
Yet the genre’s dramatic charge depends not merely on the chill of transgression, but on the realisation that with sufficient ruthlessness, or ingenuity, or social privilege, some crime or psychopathic outrage might be concealed and fester, unseen, for ever.
Perhaps it is telling that Hitchcock was an Englishman; Chabrol found something in French society that was highly congenial to the suspense genre, but one of his most well-regarded movies, La Cérémonie (1995), was based on A Judgment In Stone, the 1977 thriller by British author Ruth Rendell.
In Chabrol’s movie, a housekeeper employed by a wealthy woman is ashamed of her illiteracy, and her friendship with a local woman, played by Isabelle Huppert, propels her towards obsession and violence. The film deals with themes of class, resentment and social tension. Chabrol however, unlike many New Wave contemporaries, deploys these themes in the service of old-fashioned entertainment — albeit with a very sharp edge.
For almost 50 years, Chabrol kept up a fiercely disciplined output, directing about one film a year — a testament to the support the French film industry gives to its established masters, and to the remarkable energy and longevity of the New Wave generation of which he was a founder member. Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais, respectively 79, 82 and 88, are still working.
The cult of Hitchcock
Like the rest of his New Wave contemporaries, Chabrol started as a critic with Cahiers Du Cinéma, and participated in the new critical demand for American studio directors to be accorded the full auteur status. There was no one to whom this applied more than Alfred Hitchcock, with whom Chabrol and Truffaut conducted an awestruck interview in 1955. And yet it was Chabrol who made the cult of Hitchcock a touchstone in his own work, producing suspense thrillers that scrutinised French middle-class hypocrisy and vanity with a microscopic realism arguably exceeding anything the Master himself ever managed.
One of his most famous early films was La Femme Infidèle, or The Unfaithful Wife, in which a man tests his suspicions about his wife by striking up a gruesome acquaintance with her possible seducer. It was remade by Adrian Lyne in 2002, with the title Unfaithful. Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran played the husband and wife in the original; for the remake it was Richard Gere and Diane Lane.
My own favourite among Chabrol’s films is among his very earliest: Les Bonnes Femmes, or The Good Time Girls, from 1960. It is a tale of violence and sexual obsession, certainly, but atypical; it is hardly a straight suspenser, but much more modern in its perplexingly oblique depiction of fear and horror, which mixes in the kind of single-girl romantic comedy found in Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7, Godard’s Clueless, Rivette’s Paris Belongs To Us. Four young women work in a French store and dream of getting away somewhere, anywhere. Their lives unfold aimlessly, without the tight, structured plot for which Chabrol would later be known. They have encounters, adventures. There are laughs, and we might expect a rueful, bittersweet finale, such as that which might conclude something from the British kitchen-sink school. But Les Bonnes Femmes ends far more nastily.
It was a fascinating work from Chabrol: the man who anatomised the middle-class French body politic with a sadistic twist of the scalpel. – guardian.co.uk