Often pigeonholed as “the French Hitchcock,” Claude Chabrol in fact worked in a variety of genres over the six decades of his extremely prolific career. Arrow Video’s Lies and Deceit gathers together five of Chabrol’s finest efforts from the 1980s and ’90s: a linked pair of cop films, a lustrous adaptation of one of France’s most beloved novels, a brooding character study of a despondent wife, and the portrait of a marriage undone by madness and jealousy.
Cop au Vin, from 1984, initially sketches out the milieu that will dominate all the films in this collection: provincial France, where small-town living exposes residents to all sorts of secrets and lies. Not only does the film take its time setting the stage, it introduces Inspector Jean Lavardin (Jean Poiret) at the 40-minute mark. And he makes for one unconventional investigator, unhesitatingly beating or nearly drowning a suspect until he elicits some kind of confession. But, then, the point of the film is to underline that everyone is corrupt or deviant to some degree. When it comes to comparative guilt, Lavardin feels free to pick and choose, letting off a minor criminal in order to apprehend a far greater one.
Poiret’s caustic investigator returns in 1986’s Inspector Lavardin. This time out the detective is introduced straight away, and the film alternates in tone and style from an Agatha Christie whodunit to a low-key noir, complete with gangsters and gunsels. Chabrol’s vinegary satire widens to encompass the Catholic Church, since the film concerns a conservative Roman Catholic writer whose murder reveals a double life that includes prostitution and drug smuggling. The film reunited Chabrol with actors Bernadette Lafont and Jean-Claude Brialy, both of whom had starred in several of Chabrol’s early, New Wave-inflected films, and their presence here adds an extra layer of gravitas to the proceedings.
In 1991, Chabrol finally worked up the nerve to adapt Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a prospect that he’d first envisioned after reading the novel at age 13. Though, at first glance, it might resemble a Merchant-Ivory prestige film from the ’80s, Chabrol is after bigger game here, positioning his Emma Bovary (Isabelle Huppert) as a dreamer and a rebel against the stifling strictures of bourgeois, provincial life. Intriguingly, her seductions in this version are manifold. Not only is she betrayed by the Byronic posturing of Rodolphe (Christophe Malavoy), but even more disastrously so by the merciless mercantilism of Lheureux (Jean-Louis Maury), whose name contains a cruel pun on the word for “happiness” in French.
Betty, from 1992, is an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel about a young woman (Marie Trintignant) whose life spirals out of control after she’s caught cheating on her upper-middle-class husband (Yves Lambrecht). In many ways, the film is a companion piece to Madame Bovary, given its focus on the unhappiness brought on by conformity to superficial proprieties. It’s implied, for one, that Betty’s alcoholism surfaced long before her infidelity, and that it’s directly related to her discomfort with family affairs. Chabrol lays all this out in a series of flashbacks that sometimes return to the same scene, considering it again from a different angle. Betty’s dark night of the soul sees her taken under wing by a sympathetic older woman, Laure (Stéphane Audran), but a bit of business about a prominently placed aquarium symbolizes the fact that only one of them can survive the fishbowl of modern existence.
In 1994, Chabrol completed a project that had been initiated back in the ’60s by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Torment (a.k.a. L’Enfer), itself the subject of the 2009 documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno. Like Betty, Torment adopts an unconventional structure by incrementally slowing down the time frame of its individual scenes, and by progressively blurring the boundary between reality and delusion in the mind of hotelier Paul Prieur (François Cluzet). The moment when Paul begins to suspect his wife, Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart), of infidelity is framed in a mirror, doubling Paul’s image in much the same way that the voice in his head doubles his spoken lines. Chabrol carries this preoccupation with mirrors throughout, underlining the increasing fracture in Paul’s mind, just as the use of a movie projector in a key scene insinuates that Paul is projecting his own unhealthy obsessions onto Nelly.
Image/Sound
Three of the transfers—for Madame Bovary, Betty, and Torment—are from new 4K restorations that, although they tend toward blue-green in their overall color timing, look excellent in motion, sporting bright primary colors, golden skin tones, and deep blacks. Grain levels are well managed throughout. The HD transfers of the Inspector Lavardin films look good as well, with a bit more gray thrown into the color scheme. Four of the films have lossless French LPCM mono tracks, while Torment comes in LPCM stereo. None of these tracks are particularly showy, but they all do well by composer Mathieu Chabrol’s elegant scores.
Extras
As usual, Arrow Video offers a handsomely packaged box set with hours of bonus materials. Each of the Blu-ray discs comes in its own cardboard case featuring new cover art by Tony Stella. Also tucked into the slipcase is an 80-page booklet with excellent articles on the films by critics Martyn Conterio, Kat Ellinger, Philip Kemp, and Sam Wigley, as well as some nice archival materials, including writings by Claude Chabrol himself.
Every film boasts its own commentary track, a helpful intro by film scholar Joël Magny, and select-scene commentary by Chabrol. The filmmaker delves into his formal concerns, paying particular attention to how blocking and camera movement reveal character psychology. Film critic Ben Sachs handles the commentaries for the Inspector Lavardin films, and while they’re suitably informative, they’re plagued by very long stretches of silence. Ellinger tackles Madame Bovary and Betty, and she has a lot to say about the relationship between the films and their source material, as well as their place within Chabrol’s filmography. Lastly, critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson go deep into the ways that Torment encourages viewers to engage with its lead characters, bringing an accessibly academic eye to the film.
On the first disc, there’s an hour-long interview with Chabrol at the National Film Theatre in 1994 that serves as an engaging, often amusing career overview, as well as an interview with Chabrol’s interviewer on that occasion, Ian Christie, who relates his impressions of the director and his films. Among the notable odds and ends located on the other discs: an archival Swiss TV episode in which Chabrol and actors Jean Poiret and Stéphane Audran tout Cop Au Vin; Wigley talks about the continuing relevance of Chabrol’s films; French cinema historian Ginette Vincendeau discusses Chabrol’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Betty; and Chabrol details how he came to direct Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Torment script.
Overall
Arrow’s Lies and Deceit box set offers five of Claude Chabrol’s finest efforts from the 1980s and 1990s in a handsome new package with hours of bonus materials.
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