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Claude Chabrol wastes no time opening the fissures of the Beckettian title, with nightmarish abruptness the Belgian suburban household at breakfast is obliterated with child-tossing and frying pan-wielding. The barmaid (Stéphane Audran) and the struggling writer (Jean-Claude Drouot), she's hated by his wealthy parents, drugs turn him into a lurching zombie. Divorce and custody battles, "one can't judge from the outside." The father-in-law industrialist (Michel Bouquet) demands a chink in the heroine's saintly armor, the skunk (Jean-Pierre Cassel) shacked with the cheery lewdling (Catherine Rouvel) is on the case. The boarding house across the hospital, with prudish landlady (Annie Cordy) and sodden landlord (Jean Carmet) and gallant thespian (Mario David), the Three Fates play tarot cards in the lounge. Thus Racine's "épaisse nuit," pervasive breakdown at once harrowing and baroquely giddy. Aboard the tram Audran's elegant iciness thaws affectingly in confessional close-up (the nod to Murnau's Sunrise has been noted), Hitchcock's Easy Virtue by way of Marnie informs the technique otherwise. (Lang is in the mix as well: The mastermind is a Mabuse who, in Chabrol's sly comment on monetary power, has not Rudolf Klein-Rogge's flamboyance but Bouquet's fussiness.) "A knife in the back" is the norm, one sordid scheme sends the landlady's "abnormal but sweet" daughter (Katia Romanoff) to Cassel's den for satanic stag reels, afterward she eagerly asks for an encore. A brief reunion before the free-for-all, the hallucinogen in the orange juice locates God amid solarizations (cf. Preminger's Skidoo). The mock-stabbing from the beginning is literalized at the close, loose balloons like angels against a blue sky. "Le monde est fait de miracles." With Michel Duchaussoy, Marguerite Cassan, Angelo Infanti, Dominique Zardi, Margo Lion, Maria Michi, and Louise Chevalier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |