The Third Lover [1962]

 Chabrol’s renowned ‘Hélène Cycle’ of films – murky, morally complex and spellbinding investigations into bourgeois social structures and familial setups, made between 1968-72, and with Stéphane Audran starring in most of them as the icy and ambiguous Hélène – is considered to have started with the brilliant examination of fractured relationships in La Femme Infidele. The Third Lover – made 6 years before that – could however be considered as a compelling precursor. Shot in brooding B/W by Chabrol’s frequent collaborator Jean Rabier – which provided an aesthetic departure from the afore-mentioned cycle made in lusty colours – it zoomed in on a ménage à trois involving an eerily happy couple and a shifty stranger who gets himself inserted into their private space, and which eventually progresses into darker impulses and rips everything apart. Albin (Jacques Charrier, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Alain Delon’s devious personification in the riveting Plein Soleil) is a mediocre, frustrated and self-destructive French journalist who’s been sent to Germany by the newspaper he’s employed with. While stationed at a small village near Munich, he befriends Andreas (Walther Reyer), a wealthy and respected German novelist, and his beautiful French wife Hélène (Audran, in a role that she’d make her own during her extraordinary tryst as muse for Chabrol, who she’d get married to a couple of years later). As Albin starts getting invited to their luxurious villa quite frequently, he becomes increasingly besotted with their contented conjugal life in general and with Hélène in particular. Before long he’s mired with sexual jealousy and murderous obsessions, especially when he realizes she’s uninterested in responding to his infatuated overtures, and starts following her like a manic prowler intending to blackmail her into acquiescence.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Marital Thriller/Romantic Noir

Language: French

Country: France