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Two by Claude Chabrol on Kino Lorber Blu-ray: Bluebeard and Blue Panther

Both films come from a period in Chabrol’s filmography that finds him moving away from the naturalism of his early New Wave films.

Bluebeard

Hard on the heels of Ophelia, his moody monochrome updating of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Claude Chabrol shifted gears for 1963’s Bluebeard, a full-color period piece chronicling the life and death of the infamous WWI-era serial killer Henri Landru. Between 1914 and 1919, Landru murdered at least 10 women, having swindled them of their money, and then apparently disposed of the bodies by incineration at a rustic villa he rented for the purpose. He used the proceeds of his misdeeds to maintain first his petit bourgeois family, then a mistress he acquired late in his spree. Landru was also the subject of Charles Chaplin’s mordant yet oddly humanistic Monsieur Verdoux, but Chabrol takes a very different approach to the material, albeit one that’s not without its own jet-black streaks of comedy.

Throughout the film, Chabrol maintains a chilly distance from the unfolding action that mirrors the opacity of its main character. We’re introduced to Landru (Charles Denner) as a kind of inscrutable abstraction, seen from behind, the camera zooming in on his bald pate as he holds forth over the family dinner table. Much like the real-life killer, who went to his execution stoically maintaining his innocence, the film’s Landru plays things close to the vest. We get only a few ironic clues to his interiority, and, interestingly, they’re all filtered through cultural artifacts. At one point, he recites some lines from Baudelaire about the equivalence of love and death. Later, he expounds on the story of Samson and Delilah as depicted in the Saint-Saëns opera, claiming that women seek the subjugation of men.

Over the film’s first act, Chabrol painstakingly lays out Landru’s seduction techniques (strolls through the Luxembourg Gardens, a night at the opera), before we follow Landru and one of his victims to his villa in Gambais just outside of Paris, where the woman’s murder is signaled by a chaste freeze frame and a cut to smoke billowing from the chimney. In a sly bit of stunt casting, Chabrol packs the roster of Landru’s victims with grande dames of the French cinema like Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan, and Juliette Mayniel. Later in Bluebeard, Chabrol pares events down to an attenuated montage: meeting, opera box, chimney smoke. It’s the routinization of murder as a kind of Fordist assembly line.

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Bluebeard is peppered with Brechtian alienation effects. Chabrol emphasizes the theatricality of his impeccably designed sets through precise, symmetrically arranged shots, in a style distinctly reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick. Title cards abruptly interrupt the flow of the narrative. Interspersed newsreel footage of the war provides a documentary parallel to Landru’s more modest efforts at depopulation, as well as the pretext for his paternal dictum: “Life is filled with blood and terror.” Landru isn’t a rebel in opposition to the dominant social order, but a logical extension and internalization of its values.

Blue Panther, from 1965, is also (and more aptly) known as Marie-Chantal Versus Dr. Kha. Chabrol’s tongue-in-cheek innovation here is to plunk down a plucky socialite, played with unflappable insouciance by Marie Laforêt, into the murky world of international espionage. The film isn’t so much a Bond spoof, as it’s often billed, as it is a fascinating genre mashup. Its self-aware tinkering with various thematic tropes and visual styles suggests an affinity with its rough coeval, Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise, minus all the Pop and Op art mayhem.

Though blatantly a commercial venture, and a successful one at that, what Chabrol does with Blue Panther is remarkably avant-garde. He pushes past the usual “nobody is what they seem” paranoid paradigm to a realm of total metanarrative. A Soviet spy comments at one point: “When in capitalist lands, do what they do,” and he might as well be speaking for Chabrol himself. Characters get flattened out, reduced to little more than silhouetted shadows of themselves, or else they swap identities (and genders) altogether. Witness the intricate pattern of cross-dressing characters that culminates in some admittedly chaste lesbianism between Marie-Chantal and the elusive Olga (Stephane Audran) along the lines of Chabrol’s later Les Biches. As the film approaches its risibly inconclusive conclusion, Dr. Kha (Akim Tamiroff) even accuses suave spy Paco Castillo (Francisco Rabal) of having lost his place in the storyline.

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Both of these films come from a period in Chabrol’s filmography that finds him moving away from the naturalism of his early New Wave films and toward the almost geometrical precision of his “golden era” studies of lust and dread among the haute bourgeoisie. They show him experimenting with styles and genres, fully committed, in even the most commercial ventures, to exploring the possibilities of film language and form. You only have to scratch a little bit below the surface of both films to find the work of a true cinema artist.

Bluebeard and Blue Panther are now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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