Ah, this is more like it, the truly Chabrolian world taking shape, liberated into the constraints of genre. As if to signal the shift from the new wave naturalism of his earlier works to the glorious artifice of what would become his mature mid-period, he offers us two films, two worlds, one giving on to the other, appropriately divided by a murder, figuring the death of one style and the birth of another.
The film opens with almost parody New Wave-ness, a loud, gaudy riot of blaring American jazz, broad character comedy, and larger-than-life performances. The film begins with a nearly naked housemaid lounging from her window in a huge country house, like a heroine locked in a fairy-tale tower, driving to erotic madness an aging gardener and a camp milkman, the gardener with his shears signalling his lascivious intent matched by the rose she rubs over mouth, squalls of jazz adding to comic overheatedness - it's like some sort of Gallic 'Carry On' movie, especially as the strait-laced mistress looks on with prudish distaste.
Then we're introduced to Jean-Paul Belmondo, still milling around Paris in fast cars and jump cuts, an escapee from his fate in 'A Bout De Souffle' (his character's name, Laszlo Kovacs, is one of Michel's pseudonyms in that film), although Chabrol's true intent is revealed when he follows the Godardian frenzy with a cool long shot which imprisons Laszlo down a snake-like alley, hemmed in by a street, houses, roofs, Chabrol's ironic camera. Laszlo IS a snake, the city boy who infects the rural Eden, by bringing transgressive lust into the bourgeois family, as well as the baser attitudes (food and sex outrageously linked) airbrushed by the middle-classes; an early flipside to Terrence Stamp in 'Theorem'.
The film continues in this hyperactive vein, with Laszlo and his drunken buddy clowning about at a parade to the astonishment of the real-life bystanders who stare uncomprehendingly at Chabrol's camera. But even here, there is another Chabrol waiting to get out, as he sets in motion the country-house murder plot, the family tension, the psycho-sexual power games, the incestuous/Oedipal frisson. It's remarkable how he takes a genuine, 'real' location e.g. the cafe where Laszlo and his buddy drink, and turns it into a set for an MGM musical.
It is no accident that the first truly Chabrolian film should also be his first in colour - his skill in artifice is given free reign, the restricted camerawork already developed in COUSINS bolstered here by the bursts of pure primary colours and the rigid tableaux, as he traps his characters in more than a country estate.
The two halves are joined by simultaneous flashbacks, that seem to free the film from its oppressive present tense, but only cancel each other out, the promise of spiritual rebirth through love in one destroyed by madness and death in the other. The first flashback begins a common motif in Chabrol, the transgressive relationship conceived in a setting of nature, in woods - this subjective memory of the father's is coloured with Chabrol's irony - the Oz-like poppy fields hinting ominously at danger; the move from 'natural' secrecy to a social openness finally sealing the relationship's fate.
The second half is truly magnificent - the murder taking place completely in mirrors, mirroring (sorry) the cruel humiliation of Therese earlier. The eerily peaceful track over the dead woman's artefacts, stopping at the bed that caused all the trouble, wiping her out in more ways than one, but also reminding us of the real source of all the trouble, prefiguring Chabrol's hero's 'Psycho' by a year (although Laszlo's tacit Oedipal tension with his surrogate father adds a Chabrolian twist). The silent mastery of the interrogation sequence and the closing shots hint at Chabrol pleasures to come, pleasures we have to wait eight years and 'Les Biches' to fulfil.
4 out of 8 found this helpful