China Is Near [1967]

 Marco Bellocchio’s second film China Is Near retained the wild farce and blasphemy of his astounding debut feature Fists in the Pocket. If it was slightly less feverish and feral, it was as unapologetically offensive and risqué, and upped the satirical ante and ribald buffoonery while delivering a Molotov cocktail aimed at political, social, religious and sexual mores. In a fascinating coincidence, Godard’s dazzling gem La Chinoise and this – which released in the same year – didn’t just share zany humour, anti-bourgeoise filmmaking, Maoist references and impudent nonconformity, they even shared the Special Jury Prize in that year’s Venice Film Festival. Its principle targets are three siblings belonging to a hideously funny family of affluence and aristocracy in a provincial Italian town – Vittorio (Glauco Mauri), the rotund eldest brother, has tried his hands with various centre-left political options and has presently settled for the Socialist party to escape his guilt, look progressive and attain power; Elena (co-writer Elda Tattoli), the middle-aged, promiscuous and still glamourous sister, loves taking young partners from lower social classes, while ensuring that they never stake claim to her wealth; and Camillo (Pierluigi Aprà), the repressed and unhinged youngest of the lot, has started a three-man hardline Maoist cell to combat his dilemmas with aristocracy and Catholicism. Meanwhile, Carlo (Paolo Graziosi) and Giovanna (Daniela Surina), former lovers and belonging to the working-class, begin a scheming journey up the class chain, as the former seduces Elena while the latter decides to succumb to Vittorio’s ogling, hoping to marry rich. Splendidly shot by Tonino Delli Colli in baroque B/W and idiosyncratically scored by Ennio Morricone, it featured public brawl, fratricidal assassination attempt, failed abortion and other assorted craziness.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Social Satire/Romantic Comedy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Color of Lies [1999]

 A sleepy, closely-knit provincial town in Brittany – a place that Chabrol has returned to multiple times across his career – is a bubbling hotbed of secrets, suspicions, deceit, intrigue and criminal tendencies in Chabrol’s smouldering, deftly underplayed and excellent thriller The Colour of Lies. The deliberately paced narrative is bookended by two violent events – the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl, and a death by falling that could either be accidental or not – while there’re other misdemeanours that’re underway in parallel. The film’s languid atmosphere, however, belied these, as Chabrol was more interested in portraying the moral rot, the societal malaise and the psychological repercussions as opposed to making a regular crime and mystery movie. When the body of the girl is discovered, the cops – led by the new, young and gently tenacious chief of police Frédérique (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who’s also an outsider – immediately consider the embittered painter and art teacher René (Jacques Gamblin) as the primary suspect, as he was the last person to see her alive. Once a promising artist whose career crashed upon being wounded in the 1980s, he earns a pittance by teaching local kids and is largely dependent on the earnings from his vivacious wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire), who’s a professional physiotherapist. While she loves him and defends him against the growing rumours, she gets drawn into a sly affair with Desmot (Antoine de Caulnes), a slick, shady and highly successful writer who glibly collaborates with both left and right-wing establishments. Beautifully chiselled turns by the actors led by Gamblin and Bonnaire, the sultry restraint of its images, the gossipy amoral community, and the understated finale all added to the film’s sordid charm.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: French

Country: France

La Rupture (The Breach) [1970]

 Claude Chabrol’s stunning ‘Hélène cycle’ – La Femme Infidèle, Que la Bête Meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture and Juste Avant la Nuit – delivered barbed interrogations into the bourgeoisie through chilling crime thrillers, with all featuring the luminous Stéphane Audran as the eponymous heroine. The series’ penultimate film was among the darkest and definitely the most bonkers of the lot, operating simultaneously as fiendish psychological thriller, exploration into the rotten core of social entitlement, and black comedy veering towards absurdism and even surrealism. Its violent opening – Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), the drug-addled and mentally disturbed husband of Hélène (Audran), injuring their kid son Michel in a moment of frenzy, which makes her retaliate by beating Charles with a frying pan – set the tone for what followed. She leaves home with Michel, admits him in a hospital, takes refuge at a nearby boarding house, and files for divorce. Her affluent father-in-law Ludovic (Michel Bouquet), insidiously drunk in his power and privilege, had always despised her for her “disreputable” past as former strip dancer; and now, intent on seizing custody of his prized “male heir”, he employs the sleazy Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel) to tarnish her image. With no ploy – howsoever vile or grotesque – beneath him, he goes about doing just that with the help of his deliriously raunchy girlfriend (Catherine Rouvel). Audran was sublime as the unflappably moral and quietly defiant woman who refuses to bow down; Bouquet, Cassel and Rouvel were captivating in their varying shades of villainy; and the vividly bright photography accentuated the nasty undercurrents, in this nightmarish adaptation of Charlotte Armstrong’s novel, who he’d adapt again 3 decades later for the terrific Merci pour le Chocolat.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Les Biches [1968]

 Claude Chabrol decided to take inspiration from Patricia Highsmith’s legendary and fabulous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley for Les Biches. He, however, went for a saucy gender reversal and delectably ambiguous interpretation of the book, and using it as a launchpad instead for his caustic examinations of existential ennui, class and sexual power games, and mutually destructive ménage à trois among the bourgeoisie, while retaining the book’s languid atmosphere and amorality. Stéphane Audran was captivating as Frédérique, a bored, wealthy, attractive and therefore the archetypal Chabrol woman. She picks up the oddly named Why (Jacqueline Sassard), a young street artist and hustler, in Paris, and they embark on a casual affair. Frédérique brings Why along to her villa in Saint Tropez, and the story’s delicious amorality takes full bloom in the enchanting, lazy environs of the Riviera. Both, incidentally, are bisexual, as the young Why first has a short fling with the handsome architect Paul (Jean Louis Trintignant), and the older Frédérique then swoops down on him and they begin a steadier relationship. That sparks the unravelling of Why’s repressed jealousies and vengeful sociopathy, and she starts reimagining herself as her mistress’s doppelgänger; before long, she wants to usurp the latter’s place. There were clear parallels that Chabrol drew with Bergman’s Persona in how the two women engage in a dangerous game of interchangeability and one-upmanship, reminiscent of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in the celebrated Bergman classic. Shot in muted colours, and with a dash of silly irreverence thrown in thanks to the two goofy gay friends housed by Frédérique (Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi), this remains a strangely fascinating if decidedly weird entry in Chabrol’s rebellious canon.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Psychological Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

La Cérémonie [1995]

 Claude Chabrol had impishly quipped that La Cérémonie – one of his greatest accomplishments, and which I’d been craving to revisit ever since I read A Judgement in Stone, the terrific source novel by Ruth Rendell – that it’s a “Marxist film”. This deliciously insidious tour de force work wasn’t just a cutting dissection of class structures, dynamics and conflicts, it literally culminated into a violent class war. He transplanted the novel from the British to the French countryside, retaining the unnerving interplay between a provincial locale’s overly tranquil environs and its sordid undercurrents with sinister possibilities, while replacing the author’s faux-reportage prose with a venomously ironic tone that made this an icily controlled domestic thriller. The malevolent tale is spearheaded with stunning aplomb by two of the most fabulous French actresses – Sandrine Bonnaire, as the taciturn, eerily withdrawn and inscrutable Sophie who’s pathologically ashamed of her illiteracy, and Isabelle Huppert, as the chirpy, eccentric, borderline unhinged and devilishly volatile Jeanne. A ticking bomb is planted the day the wealthy, cultured and deeply snobbish Lelièvres – comprising of the ravishingly beautiful Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), her quietly arrogant second husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), his gently condescending college-going daughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen), and her gauche adolescent son – hire Sophie as resident maid in their isolated mansion, and the fuse gets lit when the latter ends up befriending Jeanne, an impetuous postmistress who loves prying into people’s secrets and holds a smouldering grudge against the family for their privilege and indifference. Further, the feral pair are subconsciously craving for delayed vendetta against the social order for their disreputable pasts, and their roiling resentments erupt into a shockingly manic climax that Chabrol must’ve especially relished filming.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

Nada [1974]

 Nada, the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-Gavras; the case for that appears especially stronger when one realizes that the Greek-French director made the magnificent State of Siege – which too featured the abduction and assassination of an American official by a left-wing guerrilla outfit, albeit in Uruguay instead of France – a year prior to the book’s publication. Though Chabrol was also a political filmmaker with strong leftist affiliations and made multiple subversive thrillers over his fecund career, his political expressions were often aimed at the bourgeoisie rather than the state, while his thrillers were distinctive for their sultry inaction and comeuppances that may never arrive. He was, therefore, an uncharacteristic person to adapt a violent and explosive book like this. However, he possibly sensed the cool, the cynicism and the dark irony underlying the tale of a ragtag group of anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador in France, even while the reader/viewer knows from get-go that this is a spectacularly suicidal mission. It ends in an ugly massacre as the vicious and reactionary cop tasked with hunting them down, and the ham-fisted governmental machinery backing him, don’t want it to end in any other way. The ensuing work, consequently, possessed the filmmaker’s sardonic and seditious jabs – and an arresting showdown that mirrored the book’s deep nihilism – while also appearing rough and uneven on various occasions. The eponymous Nada groupuscule comprised of a Catalonian partisan (Fabio Testi), a weary middle-aged revolutionary-for-hire (Maurice Garrel) and a dipsomaniac (Lou Castel) among others, while the carnage against them is spearheaded by a ruthless cop (Michel Aumont) and a Machiavellian Interior Minister (André Falcon).

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France