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