Boucher, Le (1970)

Stuart's Nite
Chicken, Vegetable Assortment a la Koo Koo Roo, Birthday Cake

Roger Ebert: She is a school mistress, he is a butcher, their everyday lives obscure great loneliness, and their ideas about sex are peculiarly skewed. They should never have met each other. When they do start to spend time together, their relationship seems ordinary and uneventful, but it sets terrible engines at work in the hiding places of their beings. It is clear by the end of the film how this friendship has set loose violent impulses in the butcher -- but what many viewers miss is how the school mistress is also transformed, in a way no less terrible.

Claude Chabrol's "Le Boucher" (1970) takes place in the tranquil French village of Tremolat, and like almost all of his films, begins and ends with a shot of a river, and includes at least one meal. It seems a pleasant district, if it were not for the ominous stirrings and sudden hard chords on the soundtrack. It is a movie in which three victims are carved up offscreen, but the only violence visible to us is psychic, and deals with the characters' twists and needs.

There is no great mystery about the identity of the killer; it must be Popaul the butcher, because no other plausible suspects are brought onscreen. We know it, the butcher knows it, and at some point, Miss Helene, the school mistress, certainly knows it. Is it when she finds the cigarette lighter he dropped, or does she begin to suspect even earlier?

The movie's suspense involves the haunting dance that the two characters perform around the fact of the butcher's guilt. Will he kill her, too? Does she want to be killed? No, not at all, but perhaps she wants to get teasingly close to being killed; perhaps she is fascinated by the butcher's savagery.

...as the wedding ends and he walks her home to her rooms above the school, Chabrol gives us a remarkable unbroken shot, three minutes and 46 seconds in duration. They walk through the entire village, past men in cafes and boys at play. She takes out a Gauloise and lights up, and he asks: "You smoke in the street?" She not only smokes, she smokes with an attitude, holding the cigarette in her mouth, Belmondo-style, even while she talks. She is sending a message of female dominance and mystery to Popaul. Later, when he visits her, he sits on a chair that makes him lower than her, like one of her students.

"Le Boucher" has us always thinking. What do they know, what do they think, what do they want? The film builds to an emotional and physical climax which I will not describe, except to urge you to pay particular attention to a sequence toward the end where Chabrol cuts from her face to his. Popaul's face shows desperate devotion and need. What does her face show? Is it triumph? Pity? Fear? A kind of sexual fulfillment? Interpret that expression, and you have the key to her feeling. It sure isn't concern.

Sample the reviews of "Le Boucher," and you'll find it described as a film about a savage murderer and the school mistress who doesn't know the danger she's in. This completely misses the point. It's not that the point is hard to find -- Chabrol is very clear about his purpose -- but that we've been hammered down by so many slack-witted thrillers that we've learned to assume that the killer is the villain and the woman is the victim.

Popaul is a killer, all right, but is he also a victim? Was he traumatized by the army, by blood and meat? Is he driven to kill because Miss Helene, who he idolizes beyond all measuring, remains cool and distant, tantalizingly unavailable? Some think that Chabrol even blames Miss Helene for the crimes; if she'd only slept with Popaul, his savage impulse would have been diverted.

But it's not that simple. (1) He is attracted to her because she is unavailable, and it's her butchy walk through the village, smoking that cigarette, that seals his fate. (2) Since (as I believe) she is excited in a perverse, obscure way by the danger he represents, does he sense that? Are his killings in some measure offerings, as a cat will lay a bird at the feet of its owner?

The Guardian puts Chabrol in context: In terms of historical position in the new wave, Chabrol is a kind of accidental John the Baptist - a precursor without intending to be one. His first film, Le Beau Serge, was made in 1958 and Les Cousins was out by 1959 - the year Truffaut won the Director's Award at Cannes for The 400 Blows, Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour was in competition, and the official arrival of the "nouvelle vague". By 1960, Chabrol was considered already a veteran, getting a credit for providing "technical advice" to Godard on Breathless, the film that launched Chabrol's Cahiers du Cinéma colleague (the mind shies away from the idea of anyone giving advice to Godard, a man known to have literally kicked a producer when he was down).

All this should qualify Chabrol as a quintessential nouvelle vague director. But the psychological profile is not right. The original new wave director was a proselytiser intent on putting traditional cinema to the torch - a Truffaut or a Godard. (Resnais conducted his no less passionate rebellion in a more genteel way.) But Chabrol was - and most likely still is - what the French call a je m'en-foutiste. A marginally polite translation would be a "don't-give-a-bugger bugger". He was even a young je m'en-foutiste during the May Events of 1968, which required considerable je m'en-foutisme. This ability not to take anything too seriously - success or failure - was crucial in surviving a decidedly unsteady early career.

Chabrol interview: In your films, it’s character which immediately grasps one. Do you start with plot situations, or with characters?

My starting-point is the relationship between the story and a character. On this film, the audience is not aware of the fact that there is no story. The characters gradually reveal themselves, their relationships evolve, but there is no real plot. Like Simenon, I’m a great believer in structures that arise out of the confrontation between different characters. I take an important characteristic that determines the character (e.g. sex, for Betty), and try to monitor its development in relation to others. It’s chemistry, really. A chemistry of affinity. Although I make plenty of thrillers, I am not really interested in plot. What I am interested in is the mystery, the intrinsic mystery of the characters. The best Agatha Christie is Pension Vanilos. Poirot is investigating a student hostel. He discovers the killer, a young man who is on his tenth murder. No one had noticed the monster in him. The idea is magnificent. The last fifteen pages are a true accumulation of horror.

Are there any actresses you find particularly inspiring?

I am not like Ingmar Bergman. I don’t need to sleep with my actresses. But I do need to feel there is some communication, some mutual respect. I also have to like what I’ve seen. Then I think, ‘Hey, maybe we’d get on.’ Sometimes someone I’ve worked with says, ‘Look, you really should meet so-and-so.’ Or my daughter, who sees practically everything that gets released. She was the one who recommended Virginie Ledoyan. She said she’d be right. And she was. I get on with both Isabelle and Sandrine, though they are very different.

Can one shoot with an actress one does not get on with?

I have done. I don’t make a meal of it, I hate tense situations. [Maurice] Pialat only works in a crisis. There have been some people I’ve found tricky. Dear Romy [Schneider], for example. She cheated me. She said, ‘I warn you, I don’t have an ounce of humor.’ Amazing! A girl who can say such a thing. The trouble was, it was true. It went well. But she spent as much time acting in between takes as in front of the camera. We had a fight at the dub.

Do you write for specific actresses?

No. It’s often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.

Rebecca Flint on Chabrol: Widely credited as the founding father of the French Nouvelle Vague movement, Claude Chabrol is responsible for a body of work that is as prolific as it is boldly defined. A master of the suspense thriller, Chabrol approaches his subjects with a cold, distanced objectivity that has led at least one critic to liken him to a compassionate but unsentimental god viewing the foibles and follies of his creations. Inherent in all of Chabrol’s thrillers is the observation of the clash between bourgeois value and barely-contained, oftentimes violent passion. This clash gives the director’s work a melodramatic quality that has allowed him to drift between the realm of the art film and that of popular entertainment.

Born in Paris on June 24, 1930, Chabrol was educated at the University of Paris, where he was a pharmacology student, and at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. Following some military service, he developed an interest in the cinema and worked for a brief time in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox’s French headquarters. Chabrol’s true film career began during the 1950s, when he became one of a legendary group of critics for Cahiers du cinéma. Writing alongside the likes of Eric Rohmer (with whom he wrote a groundbreaking study of Alfred Hitchcock), Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, Chabrol developed theories of authorship that are still influential today, and attempted to revolutionize the cinematic value system.

Chabrol began his filmmaking career in 1958 as the director, writer, and producer of Le Beau Serge. Modeled after Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, the film charted the visit of an ailing city-dweller (Jean-Claude Brialy) to his hometown, where he is reunited with his childhood friend (Gérard Blain), who is now a self-pitying alcoholic. Their transference of personal guilt, and then, in the words of Chabrol scholar Charles Derry, “exchange of redemption,” gave audiences an initial taste of the deeply-psychological situations Chabrol would continue to examine with chilly objectivity throughout his career, and established him as an important new talent.

Jean Yanne, Actor, 1933-2003: Jean Yanne, the French actor who has died aged 69, was a multi-talented entertainer, whose gifts extended to production, direction, script-writing, stand-up comedy and even composition.

He once claimed to have written 6000 pop songs. But overseas he is best known for his atypical role as a provincial butcher with a secret life as a child murderer in Claude Chabrol's 1970 film Le boucher.

In France Yanne was celebrated primarily as a satirist with an anti-establishment chip on his shoulder. The late British comic Tony Hancock might have approved. But like much comedy rooted in purely national excess, Yanne's work did not travel well.

His first personal production, a 1972 lampoon of French society called Tout le monde il est beau - tout le monde il est gentil, became a blockbuster in Paris but was never released across the Channel - a fate shared by most of his pictures. Only when he acted in films by directors with international reputations, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Chabrol , were his skills widely seen and admired abroad. His finest role, in Le boucher, tapped hitherto unsuspected depths and resources. It achieved great poignancy in the contrast between the demon that drives him to kill young girls and the nobler instincts that draw him to Stephane Audran's village schoolteacher. The struggle for a man's soul is subtly reflected in the performances of the leading players.

For Chabrol, Yanne had previously appeared in the Resistance saga La ligne de demarcation (1966) and Que la bete meure (1969), another spiritual film masquerading as a thriller. Here Yanne played the villain, and although his was not the lead role, his acting was so different from his comic work that Chabrol was convinced he could play the butcher.

Jean Yanne was born Jean Gouye into a working-class family which had moved from Brittany to Paris some years before. After military service in Algiers, he planned a career in journalism and enrolled at the Centre de Formation des Journalistes in Paris. But he turned to radio and in 1957 gravitated towards comedy. From this he progressed to television with a regular sketch program mocking the French bourgeoisie.

His first screen appearance was a cameo role in Alain Jessua's La vie a l'envers (1964), but two years later he appeared in the first of four films for Chabrol, La ligne de demarcation. In 1967, he appeared in Godard's mordant satire on motoring and materialism, Weekend, in which his fate was to be eaten by motorway cannibals.

Following his acclaimed work for Chabrol, Yanne won the Best Actor award at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Maurice Pialat's Nous ne vieillirons ensembles as a sexually unfaithful film director. By this time, though, he and Pialat were not on speaking terms, so Yanne did not turn up to collect his award.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Yanne's own films as a director tickled only local palates. Les Chinois a Paris imagined an unlikely Chinese invasion of Paris, and Liberty, Equality and Sauerkraut (1984) applied the guillotine to the French Revolution.

During this period, however, he was also an audacious producer, putting his weight in 1974 behind art-house movies such as Robert Bresson's account of the Arthurian legend Lancelot du Lac.

After this, Yanne moved to California and became a tax exile - "French cinema bores me shitless", he explained. "I'm in showbiz, so I live in Hollywood. If I was making nougat, I would live in Montelimar" - but continued to act in French films. He took supporting roles in his last collaboration with Chabrol, the 1991 remake of Mme Bovary, and in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Horseman on the Roof (1995); and, just before he died, had completed a sci-fi epic, The Return of James Bataille.

He also published two books: Thoughts, Replies, Texts and Anecdotes, which won a literary prize in 1999, and Dictionary of Words that Only I Know (2000).

Yanne is survived by his former wife, Mimi Coutelier, and their two children.

Stéphane Audran, director's muse: Above all the other filmmakers, Chabrol prized Audran's fine face and perfect body, and, as far back as Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), understood a low-angle close-up of her profile brought forth an exquisite declaration. Her large, almond-shaped eyes with glistening emerald centers, could effortlessly entrance from a deadlock stare. And her lovely voice would gently tremble from its delicate semi-monotone when feigning confusion or subtly issuing an order, immediately snaring one?s attention. You can see it displayed in several of the director's thrillers: the La Muette segment of Paris vu Par (1965), where she played the wife to Chabrol's on-screen character; pouty and seductive in La Femme Infidele (1969); having a tipsy chat with Jean Yanne during a leisurely (and lengthy) stroll in Le Boucher (1969); as the working girl fleeing oppression in the woefully overlooked La Rupture (1970); and scrambling to make love with Michel Piccoli in Les Noces Rouges (1973).

Her image vital to the nouvelle vague, Luis Bunuel cast Audran along with his hungry bunch of Euro-chic fashion plates in Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972).

Stéphane Audran (b. 1932) is a French actress, known for her performances in Oscar winning movies like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and Babette's Feast (1987) and in critically acclaimed movies like The Big Red One (1980) and Violette Nozière (1978).

Audran was born Collette Suzanne Dacheville in Versailles, Yvelines, France, on November 2, 1932. She married French director and screenwriter Claude Chabrol in 1964, after a short marriage to the French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. Audran's first role was in Chabrol's acclaimed film Les Cousins (1959). She has since then appeared in most of Chabrol's films. Some of the more noteworthy Chabrol films she appeared in are La Femme Infidèle (1968), Les Biches (1968) as a rich lesbian who becomes involved in a ménage à trois (she first gained notice in this), Le Boucher (1970) as a school teacher who falls in love with a murdering butcher, Juste Avant La Nuit (1971), and Violette Nozière (1978).

She has also appeared in the movies of Eric Rohmer (Signe du Lion), Jean Delannoy (La Peau de Torpedo), Gabriel Axel (Babette's Feast, as the mysterious cook, Babette), Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de Touchon, as the wife of the cop turned serial killer, Lucien Cordier) and Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One). The most celebrated of her non-Chabrol films was Luis Buñuel's Oscar-winning The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) as Alice Senechal. Active in English-language productions, Audran has appeared in American bombs like The Black Bird (1975), and in TV movies like Brideshead Revisited (1982), Mistral's Daughter (1984) and The Sun Also Rises (1984).

Audran won a France's César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in Violette Nozière and British Film Academy award for Just Before Nightfall (1975). She divorced Chabrol in 1980. They had one child, named Thomas Chabrol, while together.