Claude Chabrol’s Tales of Deceit

Claude Chabrol’s Tales of Deceit
Studio: Kino Video
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Kino’s new five-disc Claude Chabrol collection is called Tales of Deceit, a theme in the director’s oeuvre that is hardly specific to these titles. You could throw all of Chabrol’s pictures into a hat, pull out five at random and release them as Tales of Deceit.

The godfather of the French new wave, Chabrol has been obsessed with the lies and deceptions that recur in the seemingly banal lives of the bourgeois in his more than 50 films. He’s been called the French Hitchcock, and while he often views his characters with the same cruelty and suspenseful irony, the classical elegance of his visual and storytelling styles places more emphasis on psychological fastidiousness than on propelling a mystery plot.

Case in point: 1985’s Cop au Vin and 1986’s Inspector Lavardin, the two finest films in this box. The plots are ultimately irrelevant framing devices for the director’s fascinating observations of character. Both are adapted from Dominique Roulet detective novels and feature the hard-boiled Lavardin character, played with deadpan detachment by Jean Poiret. Somewhere between Dirty Harry amorality and Jean Gabin cool, Lavardin proves a remarkable conduit for Chabrol’s delicious malice and dark humor.

Moving into the ’90s, L’Enfer (1994) is a gripping study of adultery-turned-mental illness. The comfortable life of a hotel proprietor (Francois Cluzet) abruptly ends when he suspects his wife (Emmanuelle Béart) of having an affair. He visualizes her adulterous escapades in elaborate fantasies a la the The Secret Lives of Dentists; his imagined reality grows more absurd and then dangerously insane. After this intense chamber piece, 1998’s The Color of Lies feels almost like an afterthought. Still, it’s a proficient thriller about the rape and murder of a child and its impact on a struggling painter, his wife and her successful celebrity lover.

The only weak link in this collection is the torturous Betty (1992). A dreary exercise in pointless sadism, the film stars Marie Trintignant as a glazed-eyed alcoholic who recites her depressing life story, and it’s shot with all the visual imagination of a soap opera. There’s no suspense, just barf bags chock-full of ennui.

Betty is the work of a second-rate hack, but everything else in Tales of Deceit reveals the skills of a master still challenging himself. It makes a nice complement to the excellent eight-disc Chabrol box already available from Pathfinder.

This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.