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"The poet comes home..." (Heidegger) The bus ride adduces a baleful note from Minnelli's Some Came Running, the youth with wary eyes and weak lungs (Jean-Claude Brialy) might by Gide's "l'enfant prodigue," back amongst the rubes. From the very start, a Claude Chabrol film: A high-angled shot finds two characters on one side of the depot before a lateral pan reveals a second pair on the opposite side, the first set of doppelgängers in an oeuvre of cracked mirrors. Provincial life is "kind of a shock" after a decade in the city, the successful novelist is met by the fallen architect (Gérard Blain), the once-promising boy lost in a haze of booze and self-pity. (A string of reverse tracking shots as the muttering lout meanders down a dirt road and into a graveyard paints a remarkably suggestive picture of a squashed life.) Blain's tormented, pregnant wife (Michèle Méritz) is rhymed in the town coquette (Bernadette Lafont), the runaway sister tending to the malevolent drunkard (Edmond Beauchamp) who cannot wait to molest her. Vacant chapels and infernal fireplaces, the self-appointed savior in the blanched void of rural winter: "The boy's got a Christ complex!" Part mock-neorealist homoerotic foxtrot, part obsessively symmetrical study of Hitchcock's I Confess, Chabrol's debut abounds in Cahiers theorems and jokes. (Philippe de Broca turns up as somebody named "Jacques Rivette.") "You observe us as if we were insects," the locals protest, yet the camera's inquisitiveness exudes its own brand of mordant humanism—every altruistic gesture is tarnished and every loathsome deed is multifaceted, all contrasting halves are connected by the director's sense of ambiguity. One character's self-annihilating sacrifice is another's disconcerting redemption, hysterical laughter fills the screen in the most chilling happy ending since Blackmail. With Claude Cerval, Jeanne Pérez, and André Dino. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |