just before nightfall: the cinema of claude chabrol july 23 - august 19, 1999 photo: L'ENFER / HELL

calendar Along with Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol was part of that astonishing trinity of critics-turned-filmmakers responsible for the birth of the New Wave of French Cinema at the beginning of the 60s. At the start, though LES COUSINS and LE BEAU SERGE were hailed as New Wave hits, he seemed the lesser artist of the three, but time has altered that initial ranking: Chabrol now stands as one of the world's last classicist directors. The turning tide was marked by LES BICHES (1968), his exquisitely composed Hitchcockian exercise in sexual transference and betrayal and the terrible fluidity of identity. The film featured Nice in winter and the glorious Stéphane Audran, Chabrol's then-wife and star for the next quarter-century or so. With a coolly observant eye, he would continue to voluptuate in the specifics of places and seasons (and cuisine), and to explore the ambiguities of sin, guilt and penance. (Chabrol had co-authored a book-length study of Hitchcock with Eric Rohmer; no wonder he demonstrated a sometimes stone-cold comprehension of the kinds of sad, murderous beasts that lie in the darkness behind the human brain.) During the 70s, Chabrol's "genteel-bourgeois-murder cycle"- LA FEMME INFIDELE, LE BOUCHER, LA RUPTURE, QUE LA BÊTE MEURE , JUSTE AVANT LA NUIT AND LES NOCES ROUGES - almost all starred Audran, with actors Michel Bouquet (to whom LES BICHES had been dedicated) and Jean Yanne coming to assume symbolic roles in the very fallen worlds dreamed by the director. Beginning in 1978, with Violette Nozière, Chabrol began to investigate the often-masklike visage of actress Isabelle Huppert, trying to plumb the buried truths of seemingly sociopathic characters who matter-of-factly-amorally?-murder, follow the lure of money, hate the bourgeois to death. You might say that Chabrol's films bloom during those fraught hours just before night falls on his flawed, all-too-human protagonists-often the encroaching darkness of death heralds epiphany and /or a species of ecstasy. And in stark contrast with much of contemporary filmmaking, Claude Chabrol's classical cinema marries form and content in a seamless, deeply satisfying union. Alfred Hitchcock would be proud of his spiritual son.

LA FEMME INFIDELE / THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE JUSTE AVANT NUIT / JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL LE BEAU SERGE / HANDSOME SERGE LES COUSINS / THE COUSINS BETTY QUE LA BÊTE MEURE / THE BEAST MUST DIE LE BOUCHER / THE BUTCHER

LA FEMME INFIDELE / THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE (1968; 98m) Arguably Chabrol's masterpiece, this rigorous, elegant, heartbreaking film depicts the dawning awareness of an unremarkable suburban husband and father that his wife has taken a lover, his confrontation with his rival, and the subsequent transformation in his bourgeois household. To say more would risk spoiling the exquisite tone, the passionate perfection of Chabrol's formal lucidity and rapturous embrace of his characters. Michel Bouquet gives a wondrously tender and vulnerable performance as the wronged husband, and the magnificent Stéphane Audran (Mme. Chabrol) makes the wife Penelope and Helen of Troy rolled into one. They are linked and divided by some of the most magisterial camera movements in the history of the cinema. With Maurice Ronet, Serge Bento, Michel Duchaussoy. Fri July 23: 1 pm and 5:30 pm; Sat July 24: 6:20 pm JUSTE AVANT NUIT / JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL (1971; 100m) The marvelous Michel Bouquet plays a model bourgeois, complete with job, wife and mistress. His sexual tastes run toward sadomasochistic games, and during a bout of sexual frenzy he accidently strangles his lover to death. He's denied the satisfaction of guilt and self-flagellation when both his wife (Stéphane Audran) and his best friend (and the victim's husband) refuse to condemn him or let him confess to the police. Chabrol brings his ironic eye-and famously self-conscious tracking shots-to bear on what constitutes the truest texture of guilt and repentance in a socio-economic world where murder is as unacceptable as poverty or vulgar manners. (Note that JUSTE AVANT NUIT reverses and plays variations on LA FEMME INFIDELE.) Fri July 23: 3:15 pm and 7:45 pm; Sat July 24: 4:15 pm and 8:30 pm LE BEAU SERGE / HANDSOME SERGE (1958; 97m) Arguably the first film of the Nouvelle Vague and certainly the 28-year-old Chabrol's debut, though it was released after its companion piece LES COUSINS. A tubercular theology student (Jean-Claude Brialy) retreats to his bleak hometown in the country where he tries to give aid and comfort to an old friend (Gérard Blain)-once talented, now a drunk and estranged from his pregnant wife (Bernadette Lafont). Chabrol works an exchange of guilt and redemption, in the style of his mentor Hitchcock. Sun July 25: 4 pm and 8:45 pm; Mon July 26: 6:30 pm LES COUSINS / THE COUSINS (1959; 112m) Best Film, Berlin Film Festival, 1959 Reversing the personalities in LE BEAU SERGE, Chabrol casts Jean-Claude Brialy as a suave slacker given to orgies and casual seductions. Into his dangerous urban world comes his sweet, innocent country cousin Charles (Gérard Blain). The latter studies like mad for his exams while Paul parties and steals Charles' girlfriend-naturally, the bourgeois country mouse fails and the decadent city rat passes. This dark little fable climaxes in a wild "Bohemian" party and an extraordinarily cruel jape. Cinematographer Henri Decaë illuminates Paris so that we see the magical city as it would dazzle the eyes of a naive newcomer. Calling LES COUSINS "perhaps the most skillful, complex and beautifully acted film produced by the French New Wave," Pauline Kael remarked on the film's "remarkable collection of faces....[and] some of the best orgies on film. Every scene is smooth and elegant." Sun July 25: 6:15 pm; Mon July 26: 4 pm and 8:30 pm BETTY (1993; 103m) Adapted with meticulous fidelity from the novel by Georges Simenon, BETTY shares some of the themes that made Chabrol's superb LES BICHES (1968, starring Stéphane Audran and Jean-Lous Trintignant) so erotically suspenseful...and Hitchockian: the exchange of identity and guilt between an older and a young woman in love with the same man. A drunken and promiscous girl (Marie Trintignant) ends a disastrous evening at The Hole, a bar-restaurant where the recently widowed Laure (Audran) hangs out with her lover, the joint's owner. Betty's sad, sordid story of betrayal and self-destruction comes in flashbacks after Laure takes her under her wing. Soon the two women's relationship raises questions as to whether a new life can be obtained, a new identity borrowed or even stolen from another. As usual, Chabrol's thriller is of the psychological brand, and the Freudian shape of a dysfunctional family constellation can be discerned in the emotional dynamics within this director's familiar trinity of characters. Wed July 28: 4 pm and 8:30 pm; Thurs July 29: 6:15 pm UNE AFFAIRE DE FEMES / THE STORY OF WOMEN (1988; 110m) Best Actress, Best Film, Venice Film Festival, 1988 Isabelle Huppert lives in poverty with a layabout husband (François Cluzet) in a Nazi-occupied village during the bad years of WWII-until she finds a lucrative profession doing abortions for respectable women and whores alike. There's no heroism, melodrama or particular socio-eoncomic message attached to her actions; she simply recognizes a demand that she can fill and grow rich on. Naturally, after the war, when the complex exigencies of staying alive give way to black-and-white self-righteousness, Chabrol's pragmatic "capitalist" must pay for dealing with reality's intractable messes. Huppert is superb as an ordinary woman, neither monster nor saint-rather opaque in motivation as are actual as opposed to fictionalized human beings. (Inspired by the real-life story of Marie-Louise Girard, executed in 1943 by the Vichy Government, who'd declared abortion as a Crime Against the State because it diminished the number of potential soldiers for the Reich.) Wed July 28: 6:15 pm; Thurs July 29: 4 pm and 8:30 pm QUE LA BÊTE MEURE / THE BEAST MUST DIE (1969; 112m) On a quiet country lane, a small boy is struck by a hit-and-run driver and killed. His father (Michel Duchaussoy), a writer of children's books, becomes a self-taught detective to track down the guilty party. His search brings him into the household of a brutal man (Jean Yanne of LE BOUCHER) whose departure from the scene would be a blessing to everyone in his orbit-including the sister-in-law (Caroline Cellier) with whom Duchaussoy has begun an affair. Chabrol milks every moral-ethical nuance from this fraught situation, then astonishes us with a final, exultant leap into pure legend. Fri July 30: 4 pm and 8:15 pm; Sat July 31: 6:15 pm LE BOUCHER / THE BUTCHER (1969; 94m) A movie about a serial murderer abroad in a small, tightly knit French village, but enriched along the way by Chabrol's investigation of the limits of love and the relationship between savagery and civilization, rite and ceremony, instinct and reason. Stéphane Audran plays-flawlessly-a repressed school teacher tenderly brought back to emotional life by Popaul, the burly, uneducated village butcher (Jean Janne, creating a character of formidable complexity and disconcerting attractiveness). Chabrol's version of Beauty and the Beast is a classically constructed banquet for the eyes and mind. Fri July 30: 6:15 pm; Sat July 31: 4 pm and 8:30 pm THE NADA GANG (France/Italy, 1974, 132m) In Paris, when a gaggle of young revolutionaries kidnap the American ambassador out of a high-class brothel, the French government decides to make an example of these inept, cliched terrorists. Violence escalates, and all factions are corrupted. Nora Sayre writes that THE NADA GANG "condemns the state even more fiercely than it does the outlaws; when the authorities consider sacrificing the hostage's life so that the public will lose its sympathy for the Left, the film thoroughly fulfills...Chabrol's conviction that 'the state prefers terrorism to revolution.'" With Maurice Garrel as an aging professional revolutionary, "a rueful cynic who alternates between being vulnerable or ruthless, wistful or hardheaded"; Mari-angela Melato as terrorist "groupie"; and Fabio Testi. Mon Aug 2: 4 pm and 9 pm Wed Aug 11: 1 pm and 6 pm Thurs Aug 12: 3:15 pm and 8:15 pm A DOUBLE TOUR aka LEDA aka WEB OF PASSION (France/Italy, 1959, 110 m) Through a fascinatingly labyrinthine narrative, full of flashbacks, Chabrol explores-in his first color film- the amorous and various other affairs of a bourgeois Provencal vintner, his family, their lovers and servants. When the vinter's gorgeous mistress (Antonella Lualdi) is murdered, his neurotic wife (Madeleine Robinson) and her Oedipal son (André Joselyn), his headstrong daughter (Bernadette Lafont) and her brutish Hungarian fiancé (Jean-Paul Belmondo) all start coming apart at the emotional seams. Mon Aug 2: 6:45 pm Tues Aug 3: 4 pm

THE NADA GANG A DOUBLE TOUR aka LEDA aka WEB OF PASSION LA CÉRÉMONIE aka A JUDGEMENT IN STONE POULET AU VINAIGRE LA RUPTURE LES NOCES ROUGES / WEDDING IN BLOOD LES BICHES LES BONNES FEMMES / aka THE GIRLS

LA CÉRÉMONIE aka A JUDGEMENT IN STONE (France/Germany, 1995, 112m) LA CÉRÉMONIE marks the fatal collision of two distinct and incompatible species: paternalistic bourgeois and a new breed of savage. Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jacqueline Bisset and their two children perfectly incarnate the kind of sleek, well-meaning elite for whom empathy is a matter of good taste, though wealth and class still privilege them to pigeonhole their efficent new maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) as a deprived member of the lower orders-or handy household appliance. But when their TV-worshipping servant hooks up with a perkily amoral postmistress (Isabelle Huppert), the two sociopathic pals make very bad company indeed. LA CÉRÉMONIE edges inexorably into the Chabrolian darkness beyond our cozy hearthfires, with a goodly measure of this director's nastily ironic grace. - Film Comment Wed Aug 4: 4 pm and 8:30 pm POULET AU VINAIGRE (France, 1984, 110m) Another Chabrolian small town full of dark plots and delicious secrets-and multiple murders. Doctor, butcher, and notary need to acquire a house belonging to the postman and his mother to complete a major real estate deal. Trouble is, the two eccentrics -given to reading everyone's mail before it's delivered-won't sell. With townsfolk dropping left and right, it requires the deceptively charming Inspector Lavardin (Jean Poiret) to get to the bottom of it all. A masterful jeu d'esprit, with Michel Bouquet, Stéphane Audran, and Pauline Lafont. Wed Aug 4: 6:15 pm Thurs Aug 5: 4 pm LA RUPTURE (France/Italy/Belgium, 1970, 124m) "I wanted to make a melodrama, a real melodrama.... It is a really black film; besides which all my other films, even the cruelest, will seem mild.... It portrays the world as it will be in 10 years' time if we go on in our present crazy way." - Claude Chabrol Ex-stripper Stéphane Audran tries to pull her life back into normalcy through marriage with a wealthy but crazy type. But her husband's drug-induced homicidal rage-during which he assaults her and his little boy-ruptures any illusion of normalcy. In the aftermath of this terrible eruption, the woman takes refuge in a boardinghouse full of eccentrics, while her husband returns to his family. His father determines to prove his daughter-in-law unfit to raise his grandson and uses all of his considerable resources to besmirch the young woman. Chabrol draws suspense from souls under terrible seige-that of husband and wife-while telling a story of goodness standing up against impossible odds. (Dave Kehr calls Chabrol's modernist deconstruction of the genre of melodrama one of the key films of the 70s: "The 'rupture' of the title belongs to the narrative, which begins with clear black / white, good / evil distinctions and then gradually self-destructs, breaking down into increasingly elliptical and imponderable fragments.") Fri Aug 6: 4 pm and 8:30 pm Sat Aug 7: 6:15 pm Sun Aug 8: 4:10 pm and 8:50 pm LES NOCES ROUGES / WEDDING IN BLOOD (France / Italy, 1973, 95m) Yet another facet of Claude Chabrol's view of the bourgeois life as a facade behind which lurk extravagant, destructive, and often totally ridiculous passions. Like his idol Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol loves to work variations on the disintegration of an ordered world; but unlike Hitchcock, who keeps his order and his chaos neatly separated, Chabrol concentrates more on character, so that when the bottom drops out, it does so precisely and inevitably. Stéphane Audran and Michel Piccoli star as adulterous lovers who never manage to realize that there's an easier way out of their predicament than murder. A smashing work from a master craftsman. - Don Druker, Chicago Reader Fri Aug 6: 6:30 pm Sat Aug 7: 4:10 pm and 8:50 pm Sun Aug 8: 6:45 pm LES BICHES (France / Italy, 1968, 104m) A darkly mysterious and very stylish woman (Stéphane Audran) picks up a beautiful young street artist (Jacqueline Sassard) enigmatically named "Why." The affair continues at St. Tropez, where their menage is enlarged to include an attractive architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who seduces and is seduced by both women. As usual, Chabrol's location-the Riviera in winter-plays a part in this Hitchcockian exercise in elegant style, played out with cool, sexy wit. Audran is impeccable in expressing the arrogant-yet compellingly attractive-appetite of a wealthy woman accustomed to her own way with all of her playthings. with CLAUDE CHABROL or THE ENTOMOLOGIST (Jean Douchet interview with Claude Chabrol, 1990; 51m) "I have discovered that the script for a one hour and 50-minute film fits exactly into this 96-page notebook," explains Claude Chabrol, as he meticulously composes-Hitchcock-style-every aspect of the narrative he will eventually film. While he writes, the TV stays on, providing a kind of white noise. Chabrol's own movies play on the TV while Jean Douchet talks to the director about Balzac, Romanticism, his "ideal" film (one with "Renoir's vitality and Lang's rigor"), his masterly use of the zoom (a "savage tool"), why the characters he creates are so often "monsters," why he likes to work with the same actors again and again, and whether there is a "Chabrol morality." An insightful and engrossing interlude with an extremely articulate and self-aware artist. Mon Aug 9: 1 pm, 4:10 pm and 7:20 pm Tues Aug 10: 1 pm L'ENFER / HELL (France, 1994, 100m) Every view of L'ENFER's lakeside resort brims with the sunlit clarity of a postcard ad for a honeymoon paradise where picture-perfect bride and groom (François Cluzet and Emmanuelle Béart) will whirl forever in joyous dance and shadows will never fall. But Chabrol, working from a decades-old script by Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique), deconstructs our perceptions, forcing us behind the hungry eyes of Cluzet's jealous husband, who so lusts to frame his beautiful wife, he "stars" her in his own mad, but seamlessly edited, home movies about une femme infidèle. A relentless excursion into epistemological delusion. - Film Comment Wed Aug 11: 3:15 pm and 8:15 pm Thurs Aug 12: 1 pm and 6 pm Weeklong Presentation LES BONNES FEMMES aka THE GIRLS (France/Italy, 1960, 102m) The finest of Chabrol's early films, and the first to successfully weave his characteristically mordant humor into its design, LES BONNES FEMMES focuses on the aspirations of four shopgirls working by day at an appliance store and yearning by night for various ways of escape from their present lives. "The Girls" are played by Bernadette Lafont, Clotilde Joano, Lucile Saint-Simon and, of course, Stéphane Audran. The supporting cast includes such eccentric characters as the storeowner's wife, who keeps a strange talisman, a handkerchief soaked in the blood of a guillotined rapist; a neighborhood poet who pops in periodically to annnounce the theme of his latest composition; and a mysterious motorcyclist (Mario David) whose comings and goings gather intensity like a tightening noose. A fascinating mixture of cinematic irony and tenderness. Fri Aug 13: 1 pm, 3:15 pm, 5:30 pm, 7:45 pm and 10 pm Sat Aug 14: 6 pm and 8:15 pm Sun Aug 15: 6 pm and 8:15 pm Mon Aug 16: 1 pm and 8:30 pm Tues Aug 17: 1 pm, 3:15 pm, 6 pm and 8:30 pm Wed Aug 18: 1 pm and 8:30 pm Thurs Aug 19: 1 pm and 8:30 pm