"A work of superior acting and quiet strength"
- BBCi
The Colour of Lies
Directed by Claude Chabrol
A review by Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard.
Claude Chabrol's films usually serve up more than murder for our pleasure. They
serve food. A meal, for Chabrol, is an index to character, an omen of events,
a reminder that killers must eat, too, and their victims. The family that massacres
a platter of mussels in La Cérémonie gets massacred itself with
the same gluttonous zeal.
The bedtime chocolate prepared by a Swiss heiress in Merci pour le Chocolat
hides a poison in its bland depths. And in Au coeur du mensonge, Breton lobsters
are devoured by a trio of uneasy diners: a husband suspected of murder, a wife
suspected of an affair, and their guest, a media big shot, suspected of several
venal sins, but mostly vanity. Chabrol cracks them all open like the shellfish
as he teases out the meat of the story.
Au coeur du mensonge begins with one murder, ends with another. The first is
a child, raped and strangled in St Malo, one of those parts of France we'd all
settle for on holiday, though, on this showing, maybe not for longer acquaintance.
Chabrol isn't that much interested in who dun it: the denouement is almost a
sidestep in the plot. What matters more to him is the way the investigation,
pushed ahead with deceptively low-key informality by the new woman chief of
police (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), changes the suspects' relationships with each
other. Chief among them is an embittered painter (Jacques Gamblin) who has given
up on the Paris galleries and now gives schoolkids lessons - he's the last person
who saw the raped child alive.
His much-put-upon wife (Sandrine Bonnaire), a still-beautiful woman, is badly
in need of extramarital solace. She receives it from St Malo's celebrity resident
(Antoine de Caunes), a Paris pundit on newspaper page and TV screen, who sells
his opinions with indiscriminate opportunism Right, Left and Centre; a fellow
with commitment only to himself. This character, the sharpest drawn in the film,
is a mischievous and entertaining send-up of the faux intellectual to be found
on both sides of the Channel.
The story, a character study, barely adds up to even a police procedural. The
social side of the commissaire's life, in a place where gossip multiplies rumour,
elides into her official duties, but imperceptibly so. The two sides meet when
she laments: "You've no idea how hard it is to keep your baby-sitter's
lover in custody." I'd like to hear that from any police officer of ours.
Chabrol enjoys thickening the plot: not with clues, but sins. There's scarcely
anyone in town without some flaw, moral, criminal, or simply shameful. This,
the film-maker seems to be deploring, is the state of France
today. Even things more sacred than human life, like the relics in French churches,
are walking out of the doors nowadays on to the thieves' market-stalls - and
a niche spot in the plot. All this reminded me of
Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1943 film, Le Corbeau, about the bitterness generated
by a poison-pen writer in a little Gallic town. It was considered so typiquement
French by the occupying Nazis that they exported the movie to screens Germany.
France banned it, temporarily, after the war.
Chabrol's film, made in 1998, between Rien ne va plus and Merci pour le Chocolat,
is the product of an age that's not necessarily more honest, simply more cynical.
It has an unmistakable poison-pen feeling. It's good to look at, with the dashed-off
freshness of a water-colour sketch. Eduardo Serra lets the quick-change act
of Breton skyscapes saturate his photography. The barometric pressure at times
seems a measure of his moral tone. It's a minor work, admittedly. But you feel
the amusement it gave Chabrol to mix its home-grown ingredients with a characteristic
dash of vinaigrette. A refreshing summer salad.
A review by Michael Thompson
Director Claude Chabrol, one of the most successful members of the French New
Wave, is still (after a hugely busy career) able to breathe life into suspense
with subtlety, irony, and humour. Considering he returns time and again to the
French bourgeoisie, the freshness of his films is all the more striking. Yet
it is the middle classes, the gulf between what they say and what they actually
think, and the importance of things left unsaid which stoke the drama of so
many of his films.
And so it is with Au coeur du mensonge, a gentle but powerful psychological
thriller, which targets a failing French painter and his increasingly introspective
wife, both of whom live in a Brittany fishing village. One of his art students
- a young girl - is found raped and murdered, and he - immersed in nervousness
and gloom - is placed under the microscope by the police and the gossipy, judgmental
community, with even his own expressions suggesting he might well be guilty.
His wife'demeanour, meanwhile, hints at a woman who, though clearly very loving,
would quite like to withdraw from her marriage and enjoy an affair with the
media celebrity next door, a glib, charming egotist played by Antoine de Caunes.
It is this ambiguity in both
husband and wife which keeps the other - and us - guessing.
In a film whose theme lies in all their assorted forms and shades, the three
actors prove highly skilled in nuance, with Antoine de Caunes banishing all
memories of his clownish alter ego in Eurotrash. Chabrol, forever asking us
to spot detail, ensures that every one counts. A work of superior acting and
quiet strength.
©
Keswick Film Club 2003
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