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