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Sleek surface and cracked complacency, the bourgeoisie's harmony: Claude Chabrol's camera glides around an opulent drawing room until it comes to rest on the sherry glass in the protagonist's hand, it tilts up to catch the moment a grimace crosses his face and then back down to discover the glass shattered, the hand bloodied. An incisive schema of Othello, the failed French writer (Jacques Charrier) in a German village who sees a happy couple and decides "to be a party pooper." The husband (Walther Reyer) is a successful novelist, seemingly spirited but hollowed out by the war—at his most somber, he posits apathy ("Tout m'est éga!") as the root of all depravities for man and country. The wife (Stéphane Audran) is mediator, object of desire and ironic "vision of happiness," watching coolly in the background as the men match rigid profiles across a chessboard. (Polanski's concurrent Knife in the Water adds blade and ocean to the composition.) The eponymous third lover is the bloke Audran meets in Munich and the catalyst for Charrier's realization that his fantasy of the idealized home is merely a mirror of his own desolation, though Chabrol's original title ("The Evil Eye") is much more expressive of the film's malevolent, inquisitive gaze. A handheld stroll through Oktoberfest shakes off the filmmaker's last vestiges of Nouvelle Vague jitteriness, judicious use of the jump-cut during the stalking of the wife (each snapshot shutter clicks like a miniature stab) blurs the line between voyeur and saboteur. The upshot is a Gallic Norman Bates ultimately stuck with the narrative of envy and despair he's spun for himself, a key transitional note between Les Cousins and Les Biches. With Erika Tweer, Michael Münzer, and Claude Romet. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |