Though usually locked behind gates of sardonic coolness, hints of troubled Catholicism have studded Claude
Chabrol's work as early as the veiled hellfire and redemption routines in Le Beau Serge. Long dismissed by the
director, his religious knots nevertheless make a full-blown if befuddling appearance in this odd whodunit. Anthony
Perkins, a young sculptor with a weird penchant for waking up in strange hotels with his memory wiped clean and bloodied
hands, invites a former professor (Michel Piccoli) to the Gatsby-like provincial manor presided over by his powerful
tycoon father (Orson Welles). Welcomed by Welles' young wife (Marlene Jobert), Piccoli soon finds a nest of rats
beneath the bourgeoisie voluptuousness -- a clan bound in a circle of illicit romance, blackmail, faked burglaries and,
of course, murder. The movie kicks off like a lampoon of psychological drama, with angles so tilted I expected Perkins
to slide off the screen, before camping out in the insidiously opulent décor of the mansion, with its maze-like corridors
and family secrets (including a raving granny stashed away in one of the rooms). Just as it looks like Chabrol chose the
Ellery Queen material for another insects-under-the-microscope stab a la Le Scandale, the film unleashes a tide of
Christian imagery -- a broken Commandment for each of the ten days, crosses, talk of souls, facsimiles for the Garden
of Eden and the crucifixion, and the shaping of Welles' melancholic patriarch into a malevolent God-figure. The screenplay
(by Paul Gégauff, Eugene Archer and Paul Gardner) spells things out laboriously, but Chabrol's prowling camera foregrounds the
dialogue's artificiality with cannily somnambulistic performances. Like most of the great anti-thrillers of the '70s (The
Spider's Stratagem, Night Moves, The Parallax View), the film leads not to the restoration of social order but to its very
disintegration, with no redemption but a fuller awareness of human evil. One of Chabrol's most off-putting movies, but
essential to the darkening of his vision. With Guido Alberti.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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