A Guide to Claude Chabrol, Dark Master of the New Wave

It’s too simple to say that Claude Chabrol was the French New Wave’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, though that’s often how he’s described. Whereas Hitchcock was preoccupied with elaborately staging the perfect murder, Chabrol’s bread and butter was more primal stuff: adultery, the family, honor and shame. Rather than merely a disciple of the ‘Master of Suspense,’ Chabrol could just as easily be understood as the godfather of the modern New French Extremity movement—the bristling, treacherous, sexy films of Catherine Breillat, Christopher Honoré and Francois Ozon. The real tragedy today is that the French auteur’s work is so little known (in the United States at least) that he must lean on a more famous surname to generate interest.

Seeking to remedy this injustice, the French cultural center L’Alliance New York has programed a series of newly minted restorations from Chabrol’s “mid-career golden era” (1968–78) during which he created some of his most scintillating works of cinematic transgression. Chabrol’s career is too vast and varied to fit within a single program, but the prime cuts at L’Alliance make for an ideal place to start.

Born in 1930 in Paris but raised in the miniscule town of Sardent, Chabrol was always something of an outsider. His childhood cinephilia was considered more of an obnoxious malady than a trait of erudition—by age 12, he was screening self-programmed detective films inside of a barn. After French liberation, Chabrol returned to Paris, where he fell in with Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette—all of whom went on to write for the legendary film journal Cahiers du Cinema and become major filmmakers in their own right. Happily, this contentious bunch of cinemaniacs all agreed on one thing: Alfred Hitchcock was the holiest director in Hollywood. Chabrol co-wrote a book on his films with Rohmer and, in 1954, interviewed Hitchcock alongside Truffaut, after which the two were allegedly so starstruck that they fell into a frozen lake.

Ever the country kid playing catch-up to his cosmopolitan peers, in 1958 Chabrol ended up leap-frogging over the rest of his Cahiers colleagues to direct his first feature film, Le Beau Serge. He produced at least one movie a year for the rest of the century, slowing down only when he was in his late 60s, and continuing to direct into 2010, the year of his death. Almost every picture he made includes at least one murder. Compared to Hitchcock’s 50-odd films across 75 years, who’s the true master of suspense? 

Le Beau Serge (1958)

An essential document of the French New Wave, Chabrol’s first feature combined documentary-style filmmaking in a cheap locale (his childhood village of Sardent) with a character-driven plot of love and betrayal. The film follows François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who returns to his native Sardent from Paris to discover his childhood friend Serge (Gérard Blain) has become a violent alcoholic barely able to take care of himself, despite the pregnant wife (Michèle Méritz) he’s supposed to provide for at home. Horrified, François extends his vacation to help them, and Chabrol’s story soon resolves into a fable of secular sainthood reminiscent of the films of Roberto Rossellini, another shared obsession of the Cahiers clan. 

Nevertheless, the seedlings of Chabrol’s mature work are already present in Le Beau Serge, thanks to a perverse subplot in which a local villager (Edmond Beauchamp) learns that he was once the victim of adultery, and immediately starts lusting after the illegitimate daughter he’s heretofore raised as his own. Though relegated to the margins of Beau Serge, the act infuses a strain of psychological complexity and terror into the otherwise placid plot, and Chabrol spent the rest of his career obsessing over similarly precarious dynamics.

Les Biches (1968)

The sexy centerpiece of the L’Alliance retrospective is Chabrol’s sixteenth feature which combines Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) with Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), to delirious effect. Notably, it opens with a lesbian love affair between the wealthy Frédérique (Stéphane Audran, Chabrol’s second wife) and the waifish street artist Why (Jacqueline Sassard). After meeting in Paris and falling into bed, Frédérique whisks Why off to Saint Tropez, where off-season idleness becomes the devil’s playground. At first radiantly happy in the company of gay men, Frédérique and Why are soon driven apart by the arrival of Paul (the ever-reserved Jean-Louis Trintignant) a straight male architect in the midst of further developing the French resort town. Sapphic solidarity turns spiteful as the women increasingly find themselves imitating one another to please Paul, with murderous results.

In addition to being far ahead of its time in its foregrounding of queer desire, Les Biches also feels bizarrely modern in terms of sheer tackiness. Something about these sad displays of wealth in a wintery Saint Tropez feels more reminiscent of the Reaganite ‘80s than the communist convulsions France was actually undergoing in 1968, when the film was released. Compare it to Godard’s militantly revolutionary A Film Like Any Other (1968), or even Roger Vadim’s ogling space epic Barbarella (1968), and the uncanny familiarity of Chabrol’s vision is made plain. He was neither interested in demanding utopia nor pursuing the final frontier; instead, he patiently peels back the layers of humanity’s worst impulses. 

Violette Nozière (1978)

Chabrol may have found his ideal performer in Isabelle Huppert, the iconic French film star famed for her depictions of opaque and amoral women. The two worked together several times near the turn of the century, including on a sturdy and faithful adaptation of Madame Bovary (1991). But Huppert’s earliest major accolades came from playing the title role in Violette Nozière, her first collaboration with Chabrol, which was made when she was just 25.

Based on an infamous French crime scandal of the 1930s, Violette’s story could not have been better suited to Chabrol if he had made it up himself. A wayward teenager chasing the high life, Violette ditches school to work as a prostitute, while somehow keeping up appearances inside the cramped one-bedroom apartment she shares with her parents. Her father is not really her father—a train conductor, he was cuckolded by the railway owner he had the honor of transporting, and Violette was the result—a fact that she and her mother both know but keep hidden from him. Once again, infidelity and the falsity of blood relations becomes the impetus for total collapse in Chabrol’s film. The young Violette, vain and aloof, discovers she has contracted syphilis at her tender age, and can’t determine if the cause is sexual or genetic.

L’Enfer (1994)

This late-career masterpiece is a hidden treasure of modern French cinema, and one of the most important progenitors of modern New French Extremity. Adapted from an unfinished script by the legend of French noir Henri-Georges Clouzot, Chabrol’s L’Enfer (Hell, or The Torment to American audiences) stars François Cluzet as Paul, the owner of a rural hotel, whose happy marriage to the gorgeous and vibrant Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) becomes unbearable when he begins to suspect her infidelity. Reducing the theme of familial strife to its most basic unit, Chabrol unravels the happy marriage with patience and passion. Their hotel’s idyllic setting, rapturously captured by cinematographer Bernard Zitzermann in tracking shots dripping with sunshine, serves only to heighten the contrast between the happiness just outside Paul’s life and his anguish within.

Nelly insists that she has never been unfaithful to her paranoid husband. But when he refuses to stop harassing her, she suggests, in a cruel twist that does logic no favors but smacks of truth nonetheless, that his lack of faith may well drive her to commit the crime she is already being accused of. Extending far beyond the realm of normal suspicion, Chabrol’s final coup de grace takes us to truly Hitchcockian realms: twitching agitation swells into surreal paranoia, and reality itself comes crashing down.