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Sanguine hands leave symmetrical imprints during the opening titles, the unmistakable Claude Chabrol signature. Donald Sutherland as the inspector brings back Klute rhythms, the case at hand is a pair of teenagers slashed in a backstreet, "a crime of chance." "Those girls went under the archway by chance. By chance that guy was there. If we find him, it will be by chance." The victim (Lisa Langlois) led a secret life, the survivor is the cousin (Aude Landry) whose brother (Laurent Malet) is the prime suspect. (Mom is Stéphane Audran, dubbed and with whiskey glass in hand.) The accused is "a sort of maniac," the girl's boss (David Hemmings) figures in the equation, the crucial evidence is a locked diary. "You should see what it looks like through the lens." Not the Manhattan of Ed McBain's novel but the Montreal of a visiting New Waver, drab in police stations echoing with ringing phones and distant sirens and pink in suburban bedrooms illuminated by a doomed maiden's mooniness. The sharpest effect is the play of glass and mirror in the introduction of a lineup of suspects, among them is the squirming pederast (Donald Pleasence) who adduces a note from Lumet's The Offence. The girl's journal turns to Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse as the mainstay, with a somber oil painting amid the pastels and voiceover musings euphoric ("When he touches me... I fly to unknown heights") and forlorn ("We're being punished for our sins, that's for sure"). The camera's sinister reverse track down a domestic corridor indicates Hitchcock's Frenzy, the truth comes out on a sunlit meadow that cuts to the reenactment in a rainy alley. Chabrol's contemplation of the lethal adolescent mind continues that same year with Violette Nozière. With Walter Massey, Kenny Ireland, and Guy Hoffmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |