One of Claude Chabrol's most obscure movies - also most likely destined to remain that way. The first thing you should know is that it contains absolutely no mystery or suspense elements at all - it is strictly a love-triangle comedy-drama. It is well-shot (by Chabrol's favorite cinematographer), but the script is meandering and the film is often boring, especially during the protracted scenes of pranks and vandalism (loud comedy was never really Chabrol's forte). Bernadette Lafont, who epitomizes the era's free-spirited sexiness and playful wit, is wonderful; I would recommend this film more to her fans than to Chabrol's. His most frequently used actress, Stephane Audran, has a fun cameo as a scandalously provocative dancer. ** out of 4.
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gridoon20248 January 2014
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dbdumonteil20 December 2009....or almost nothing of this old Nouvelle Vague.For these who are still believing that this cinema was uncompromising,revolutionary and saved us from the old drivelers (However,Truffaut once said that he would give his whole filmography in exchange for "Les Enfants Du Paradis" ;I would too),they will be probably disappointed when they learn that Chabrol had not even read the book when he accepted to transfer it to the screen(Cinema D'Auteur,my foot!) ;he did it just because "Les Bonnes Femmes" had been a flop and his producer urged him to repair the breach by releasing a more accessible effort;it was much better but even so displayed no sign that Chabrol had genuine creativity to offer .Among his already big output -compared to the other directors of his school- ,there's only one good movie ("Les Cousins" ) and a handful of watchable ones ("A Double Tour " "Le Beau Serge " " L'Oeil Du Malin" ).It would take him ten years to produce really great movies in the late sixties /early seventies :but then he had forgotten the precepts of the N.W. and worked on terrific screenplays.
Chabrol himself told "Les Godelureaux " was a futile movie about futility.It bears all the scars of the time : a succession of desultory scenes,some funny,some much less so,cult of youth, young people busy contemplating their navel ,exchanging fortune- cookie philosophies ,blaming bourgeois charity (the scene when Stephane Audran,later Chabrol's wife and his best actress ever, performs an erotic dance before the ladies' deeply shocked eyes and the gentlemen salivating like Pavlov's dogs is perhaps the highlight of a terrible hodgepodge ) and singing "La Carmagnole" ,the revolutionary anthem ,in their sports car:in most of the N.W. works ,the characters can always make both ends meet .
Jean -Claude Brialy portrays (even if the story is not very clear on that point for good reasons)a bisexual playing a two- bit Vicomte De Valmont ("Dangerous Liaisons") whose motto is probably "revenge is a dish best eaten cold" .Charles Belmont ,an actor who quickly fell into oblivion ,is his victim.Bernadette Laffont ,an actress either outstanding or exasperating ,depending on whom you ask , serves as the instrument of this revenge .
Only the Nouvelle Vague students -and God only knows how many they are here there and everywhere- should pick up this flick among Chabrol's monumental filmography;to people who would like to discover him,I 'd simply say : try "Le Boucher" or "Que La Bête Meure" instead.
Like this? try these.......
"Les Bonnes Femmes ",Claude Chabrol
"Les Copains" ,Yves Robert
"Vacances Portugaises" ,Pierre Kast
"Et Satan Conduit Le Bal" ,Dabat. -
boblipton27 March 2023Charles Belmont and pals discover a car parked in their usual space. They move it onto the sidewalk. The car belongs to Jean-Claude Brialy. He vows vengeance on Belmont for this slight, using the seductive Bernadette Lafont.
When you look at a movie by Claude Chabrol, you will be confronted with an array of expensive European brands that will make you think that there is some product placement going on. There may be, but usually Chabrol uses them as short hand to show you these people are not only wealthy, they're noveau riche. Here, Belmont and Brialy define themselves by their wealth and brands; Belmont is impressed that Brialy has a Roll-Royce; Brialy cites other owners of the model by name, rich and creative people, as if his possession makes him creative. As part Brialy's vengeance, he holds a destructive party in Belmont's quarters in his uncle's house. Belmont, on seeing the damage, is aghast at losing his uncle's patronage, and having to work for a living.
And so forth. Such details often seem to lurk in the subtext of Chabrol's movies. Here, they are the main text, resulting in characters who are utterly insulated from the lessons they might learn from their folly. But by the end of the movie, they may have moved on, but they have not changed, and they are pleased by that. -
The movies Claude Chabrol made in the first ten years of his career are vastly underrated nowadays with the film under review being, arguably, the most obscure of the lot; admittedly, LES GODELUREAUX – an unwieldy single-word title if ever there was one (literally meaning "the popinjays") – could not have endeared it much to audiences. Consequently, it seems rather hard now to believe that Chabrol's more renowned colleague at the "Cahiers Du Cinema", Jean-Luc Godard, once named it among "The Top Six French Films made since the Liberation"(!) alongside Robert Bresson's PICKPOCKET, Jean Cocteau's LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE' and Jean Renoir's LE TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR CORDELIER (all 1959)!!
Thematically, the film is basically Bresson/Cocteau's masterful LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (1945) reworked for the "New Wave" set – though the revenge this time around is triggered by a petty incident between strangers, making the whole scheme an even more cynical one. Apart from the director himself, the film also finds some choice performers at somewhere near their best, notably the two leads: Jean-Claude Brialy (genuinely Mephistophelean, he displays a remarkable flair for melodrama throughout) and an entrancing Bernadette Lafont (peerlessly epitomizing earthy sensuality) – though some, like the reviewer of the "Films De France" website, actually felt their characters to be caricatures! Equally imperative to the success of the film is Jean Rabier's glossy black-and-white camera-work, a typically fine score by Pierre Jansen and also a clever use of overlapping sound (actually one of the revolutionary cinematic techniques characteristic of the French "Nouvelle Vague" movement).
The plot – oozing with the hedonistic/nihilistic outlook of Chabrol's regular scribe Paul Gegauff – sees the seemingly bisexual bourgeois fop Brialy sending out coquettish seductress Lafont to attract the attention of a young man (well-played by virtual unknown and future director Charles Belmont) who had spited him at the very start of the film. Subsequently, the newly-minted trio becomes virtually inseparable ensuring an invasion of the latter's domestic life (which embarrasses him no end, since he is still in the custody of a strict and wealthy uncle) – as much as they force him into their own private chaos (which involves not only an omnipresent homosexual valet by Brialy's side but a nerdy soon-to-be-wed cousin whom Lafont has no qualms about seducing in front of her current boyfriend, Belmont)!
Although at one point a ménage-a'-trois between the three leads is implied, some of their shenanigans are fairly harmless – such as disrupting an art exhibition with the dissemination of sneezing powder, or an upper-class soiree' by incorporating into the program both a sultry dance (performed by none other than a dark-haired Stephane Audran!) and an eccentric ditty sung by a pathetic ex-vaudevillian lady. However, the bacchanal in the style of Ancient Rome, togas and all – held at Belmont's house, having charged Lafont with its upkeep while he is away on business (in the same vein, Luis Bunuel's contemporaneous VIRIDIANA [1961], would feature a famously blasphemous parody of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper") – has more severe repercussions; this sequence is cleverly, and amusingly, cross-cut by Chabrol with the most formal of restaurant dinners being consumed by the oblivious Belmont and his uncle!
Eventually, the schemer feels vindicated and confesses to having taken the young man 'for a ride' and that Lafont (whom the boy had genuinely fallen for and was even planning to marry) had been his tormentor's mistress all along. However, in keeping with the film's darkly humorous tone (boasting a couple of bona-fide howlers along the way), the coda shows that, though obviously broken-hearted at first, Belmont has picked himself up by the time we next see him a year later and is consoling himself with a plain-looking girl; in fact, running by chance into Lafont on a pier, it is rather the latter who is unable to mature – being seemingly involved in yet another romantic scam (with a high-ranking Naval officer, no less)