Reviews

There is a thin line between melancholy and mawkishness, and the best directors know that this gossamer thread must be handled with extreme delicacy. This movie played hopscotch across this boundary multiple times. Lean, like De Sica, is a man of capacious spirit and broad passions. As such, he is not especially good with nuances. The question to ask when you watch his films is: to which end of the spectrum does the film incline? What a polar director- good and bad range along opposite sides of the gulf. "Summertime", to my mind, is a far superior film, though much of that can be attributed to Lean's exuberant use of color and Hepburn's shattering fragility. This, in comparison, is a cloying, pseudo-Woolfian melodrama without Woolf's surfeit of ideas.

Despite P&P's insistence that the Tales of Hoffmann was 'made in England', it is clear that their obsessions are continental in nature. Clear parallels can be drawn to Thomas Mann, whose 'Tonio Kroger', 'Death In Venice' and 'Doktor Faustus' all probe the Nietzschean-Freudian intersection between art and death, as well as the work of Georges Bataille, the premier French theorist of excess and expenditure. Bataille's appropriation of Freud, alloying Freud's mature work with Nietzsche and Maussian anthropology, sought to merge the Eros-Thanatos couple: at its fullest intensity, life is indiscernible from death. This is the sovereign principle of a Bataillean ethics- dedicate yourself to the immediate, for the eternal resides in the instantaneous. For Bataille, as for Nietzsche, nature is inherently unconcerned with conservation and duration, all-too-human provisions for the future- energy desires to vent and spend itself, beauty desires to flaunt itself in all of its naked splendor.

Tales of Hoffmann is effectively a companion piece to The Red Shoes, extrapolating some of the central concerns of said film- passion is a sickness, an entropic force that marks the lover for death. This is not because the lover has some sort of congenital debility, some biological lack, far from it- desire, insatiable and voracious, suffuses the lover with an abundance of life, the intensity of which cannot be contained in the lived body. This violent, lacerating urge, the fullest possible expression of life, is truly beyond good and evil, transcending the strictures of polite society in favor of recklessness and abandon.

This is the source of P&P's somewhat mechanistic fatalism. Humanistic trifles such as 'free will' are jettisoned in lieu of an unflinching Lacanianism: at the core of humanity is a monstrous, inhuman energy that overrules any conscious attempts to contain or domesticate it. This is the lesson learnt from P&P's transposition of Hoffmann's classic 'Der Sandman'- Hoffmann is scarcely less of an automaton than Olympia. As an extension of The Red Shoes, the final tale is perhaps the most beautiful of the film's formidable troika: the final set piece is a delirium-inducing, shattering crescendo to the proceedings. I don't know anything about P&P's biographies or their working lives, but they seem intensely interested in Mann's idea of creativity as a faustian curse, a consumptive disease that places the artist outside the pale of 'healthy' society.

Formally, the film is a consummate masterpiece, its wantonness commensurate to its content - the sheer gratuitousness of the spectacle reminds one of Max Ophuls' "Lola Montes" and Fellini's "Satyricon". It is all very beautiful, and the colors are all very hypnotic, but the film remains profoundly disturbing- the pleasure I derive from watching this film is directly proportional to the horror I feel when Antonia hits her final note...

Teshigahara has never shied away from examining the more unsettling dimensions of human experience. With the trilogy of full-length collaborations with Kobo Abe, Teshigahara encapsulated the Kafkaesque hellishness of quotidian life, the yawning, gaping chasm of emptiness that lies beneath the veneer of stability.

The ubiquitous influence of the French absurdists/existentialists, Kafka and Dostoevsky looms large here- one is reminded most often of Sartre's "No Exit", R.D. Laing's "Knots" and Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment". Sartre, Laing and Abe all underline how little autonomy we really have over constituting our own identities- often, we may find that we exist only as beings-for-others, entirely 'encrusted' within personas not of our own making, but assigned to us. For Okuyama and the unnamed scarred woman, they are imprisoned in their vulgar corporeality. Met with revulsion everywhere, they come to accept ugliness as an indelible mark of their being. Trapped within the oppressive confines of flesh, they cannot evade the pity and repugnance that their countenances arouse. It is little wonder that Okuyama becomes self-lacerating and embittered.

Throughout the film, the viewer confronts how precarious identity truly is- the assumption that selves are continuous and linear from day-to-day rests entirely on the visage. The doctor's paroxysm of inspiration in the beer hall affords a glimpse into the anarchic potential of his terrible invention, one that would rend civilization asunder. Indeed, the final epiphany is particularly unnerving- "some masks come off, some don't". We all erect facades, smokescreens of self that we maintain with great effort.

Beneath the epidermis, as Okuyama discovers, is vacuity and nihility. This is likely the explanation for Okuyama's gratuitous, Raskolnikov-esquire acts of crime at the conclusion of the film- faced with the frontierless void of freedom, he desires to be apprehended and branded by society. Integration into society, after all, requires a socially-assigned, unified role, constituted by drivers licenses, serial numbers and criminal records. Without such things, Okuyama is a non-entity.

Aesthetically, the film exhibits all the rigour and poetry of Teshigahara's other work. Cocteau, Ernst and Duchamp, in particular, are notable wellsprings for the film's visual grammar. Literate, expressionistic and profoundly disorienting, this might be my favorite Teshigahara work.

Beyond being one of the most singularly brilliant directors in film history, I suspect that Jean-Luc Godard is also one of the most erudite. His best work (Masculin Feminin, Band Of Outsiders, Week End, Pierrot Le Fou and this film) all display a very keen grasp of postmodern crises and express a seizing urgency to confront and address them. All, of course, while referencing (unabashedly) the kaleidoscopic spectrum of Godard's cinematic influences and refracting them through a Brechtian prism. Given that we really haven't navigated out of the postmodern impasse (and in fact are much closer to realising the absurd realities capture in this movie), films like "Alphaville" are no less salient to our age than Godard's tumultuous sixties.

The issue grappled with here is logocentrism, the apocalyptic (and ominous) nightmare that Jacques Derrida prophesied early in his philosophical career. Everything is subordinated to reason, and life's mercurial caprices are reduced to nought by an exact calculation of their probabilities. Alphaville's lexicon is precisely defined and canonized as intractable scripture, subversive terms being systematically erased on a daily basis. Clauses such as "why"s are replaced with terse "because"s, the word "conscience" has become anathema to Alphaville life, so archaic and outmoded in discourse that it has been relegated to the oblivion of history. Public displays of affection are punishable by firing squad, as are tears. Sex is reduced to a vulgar and base urge, satisfied by slavish and automaton-like pleasure drones. A society of informants and "M"-like mutual suspicion is engendered, completing the totalitarian Panopticism of the project. The worst thing, of course, is that people *enjoy* the chimerical certainty that this Of course, there are avenues of escape from this sordid debacle. Suicide is encouraged as a reprieve, but crestfallen types who withdraw from economic production and idle about in maudlin reveries are discovered and put to the guillotine. It all sounds like an unfathomable dystopia, but I doubt that we, lest the meaning of "conscience" escapes us as well, can smother the resonances Alphaville has with our own mechanized information age.

What separates us with the Alphavilleans is a delicate precipice, and we are close to fashioning the despotic mega-computer that will drain life of all its mystery and poetry. Why should we surrender the freedom of impulse to the unfeeling dictates of logic? History has shown us what happens when rationalism takes the helm- Nazism (whose logic is identical with that of the bloodthirsty Alphavilleans: "It's illogical for superior beings to refrain from attacking lesser ones!", and whose disdain/subsequent revision of history is again echoed here), Hiroshima, among other abominations.

Among Godard's (seemingly innumerable) detractors, I assume that most decry Godard's maverick style- breakneck pace, self-conscious melodrama, Brechtian 'epic theatre' reflexivity, occasionally academic and seemingly impenetrable dialogue. Yet, I think that for all his intellectual rigor in Alphaville, Godard also poses an extremely important question- why do we always expect transparency in cinema, and a necessary correlation between reality and art? Why should we expect meanings to be evident without effort, or for there to be didactic meanings at all? This egoistic pragmatism would reduce the poetry of cinema to the same level as a toothbrush, an object whose worth is determined entirely by its "being-at-hand" (as Heidegger would say). People who obsess about meanings in films have no respect for the beauty of life itself, which is opaque, inscrutable, and endlessly enigmatic. In an epoch where Man is little more than a vessel of capital, laboring for immaterial/impossible/insatiable financial ideals, poetry restores him to himself. Godard is often regarded as a political figure, and though his Marxist sympathies obviously seem retrograde now, his sentiments regarding the function of art surely are not. The philosophy here is as crucial to our time as that of Georges Bataille, that of "poetry for all"....and "cinema for all".

Godard is right to indicate his concerns about the totalisation of language- as the semiologists have told us, the structures of language and the relationship between signifier/signified are illusory and arbitrary. All texts, in Derrida's thinking, undermine and contradict themselves from within- to insist that language is always transparent and self-revealing, and that only ONE discernible meaning can be discerned, is to be fascist and suppress public discourse and democratic discussion. Words unfettered from their everyday contexts, as Stephane Mallarme, the immortal symbolist poet has illustrated, reveal beautiful new horizons for meaning and the endless multiplicity of experience. If language, as Heidegger says, "speaks man", why should we settle for threadbare definitions that have been inherited and taken for granted? Language should not merely be a functional apparatus used to propagate our mundane everydayness, because it is not a static "thing". Godard expresses this throughout his entire corpus of work, defying the quotidian with unprecedented brio.

Whether you like Godard or not, his quest to refashion film grammar created new frontiers and possibilities for film-making, and Alphaville, in some ways, is his thesis defence in front of po-faced classicists. This is also one of his most vigorous clairon calls for true liberty. Let us resist the fascist inside us, and refuse the humiliation of a society that reduces us all to slaves of commerce.

Some might regard this as propagandistic, Marxist, a garrulous sermon. I perceive it as one of the creative summits of Samuel Fuller's incomparable career, a masterpiece of subversive and incisive cinema. Here, Fuller transforms a relatively straightforward yarn into a sociological allegory, a violent and Kafkaesque dystopia that threatens to collapse under the strain of seemingly infinite tensions. Above everything, this is a film that attests to Fuller's inexhaustible courage and fidelity to truth, as well as his singularly fierce intellect.

The asylum here, of course, is a thinly-veiled metaphor for America at large, a police state touting phantom ideals of democracy and equality. The inmates are the detritus of the American dream, those rendered unfit for the Darwinist struggle of capitalistic life. Some, like the jaundiced altruist Dr Boden, have opted for a flight from reality, and it's hard to blame him when reality constitutes the absurd oneupmanship of the Cold War. Others have retreated from a climate of hate and xenophobia- African-Americans are driven to self-loathing (one thinks of Fanon and Sartre's "The Anti-Semite Makes The Jew") and wayward Bible Belt youths are unable to reconcile their idealism with the zealotry of Southern fundamentalism and bigotry. Indeed, how "mad" are these folks when juxtaposed against a reality obsessed with nuclear armament, murder, racial purity, sex (Cathy betrays her intellectual aspirations for a well-paying stripper job) and the like? Seen in this light, absconding from reality seems like the only sensible option.

Though Fuller satirizes Freudian essentialism and psychological determinism throughout the film, lampooning the jargon and inauthentic categories that are used to assimilate, institutionalize and dehumanize these wretched victims, he seems to fully endorse the post-Freudian constructivism of psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, who further developed Freud's "metapsychology" and theories on neurosis as a social product. The inmates here are the "discontents" of Freud's civilization, the miscreants and deviants expelled from the ratrace.

Fuller has never been shy about his indictments, and the didactic thrust of this film is plain- his America facilitated the production of such "neurotics", and their removal from society was legitimized and justified simply on essentialist myths of perversion and degeneracy. The greatest scene in the film, Johnny's encounter with the haunted Trent, yields a timeless insight (feel free to castigate me for horrid paraphrasing): "I don't blame the white kids, they've been taught since they were toddlers to hate us colored folk". The legacy of the South for Trent is a heritage of brutality, proliferated ad infinitum, to the point where he is turned against himself and consumed in neurotic self-hatred, a stranger to himself.

In characteristically fearless fashion, Fuller debunks and deconstructs madness as a manufactured, socially-enforced mythology- a sane Johnny gradually becomes trapped in his role as madman. Sundered from voices that will affirm/confirm his lucidity, he assumes the identity mirrored to him by his situation. This is Fuller's horrifying commentary on the tentativeness and fragility of identity- social recognition is bestowed and revoked by the society we live in, it is impossible to construct and maintain it without the sanction of everyone else. Our normative notions of "madness" and "reality" do not exist a priori, they are erected and agreed upon by the civilization we inhabit. Each of the characters in this film must grapple with a host of irrealizable chimeras, the mirages of meritocracy and the "self-made man" being but two.

This fluid conception of identity is profound, but what is even more interesting is Johnny's ambiguous character- are we to read him as a man in dogged pursuit of truth in the face of censure and hypocrisy (his loss of voice being yet another bald metaphor on Fuller's part), or as a monomaniacal neurotic whose arbitrary 'truth' (in this case a sordid obsession for murder and making said murderer answer to contemptible 'justice') blinds him to the nightmares that afflict his fellow inmates? One must think of the goal that impels him to this undertaking in the first place- the Pulitzer Prize. Again, Fuller identifies the inadequacies of a society that quantifies success in concrete terms, where all and sundry slave under the yoke of money, titles and awards.

Sure, there are complaints that may be levied against this film. There are no likable characters, for one, unless you take kindly to the maudlin and mawkish Cathy. Yet, the more I meditate on this film, the more I am convinced that it is one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. It is decidedly less "pulpy" in feel than most Fuller I have seen, and assuredly one of his wisest productions, one that remains germane to our times as a diagnosis of capitalistic ills. Though the Cahiers crowd revered Fuller, I am certain that this packs more of a punch than Godard's entire corpus of work. Complex, visionary and incredibly rewarding, this one will sear your retina and quicken your pulse.

It's not so surprising that this film originally bore the working title of "Les Nuits Blanches", as it certainly shares more than a passing resemblance to Dostoevsky's timeless tale and Visconti's mesmeric adaptation. "Pepe Le Moko" is, more than anything else, a love story, though it functions more as a commentary on the dynamics and nature of love than an exultation in its virtues. Like Dostoevsky's hapless dreamers, Duvivier's characters are in love with phantoms, incorporeal fantasies that they project onto canvas of flesh. Naturally, idealism and reality are hopelessly estranged, and efforts of reconciliation can only precipitate frustration and tragedy.

Pepe le Moko is a tormented fugitive and exile, liege lord of a vice-ridden, sweltering microcosm and crown fool. Like the swaggering, stolid gangsters of Jean-Pierre Melville, Pepe is a victim of himself, prisoner of arbitrary codes of masculinity and honor. His hauteur are undermined by the minuteness of his empire, itself infested with conspirators eager to sell him to the police. His "freedom" itself is pathetic enough to be risible, venturing outside the insular sanctuary and he is fair game for the police. Clinging doggedly to whatever semblance of liberty he has left, Pepe acts out a tragic comedy within the confines of his circumscribed universe, his roles of Don Juan and Capone underscored by pathos and ennui.

When a flighty Parisienne catches a glimpse of the fabled kingpin, she becomes instantly infatuated with his imperious manner, seeing him and the bloodthirsty world he represents as salvation from her stuffy bourgeois existence. In Aeschylean fashion, neither Pepe nor said femme fatale love one another, they merely love effigies, ideals. The female is Pepe's solitary conduit to his beloved Paris and the only confidante for his crippling homesickness. His indifference to her extravagant jewelry reveals the absolute arbitrariness of his criminal pursuits, a mere pretext for action in such boring climes. Yet, the viewer is acutely aware that the Paris Pepe longs for no longer exists, if it is represented by the addle-brained, vacuous Sybarites that his lover surrounds herself with. The mere fact that a Parisienne would exalt him as her liberator should itself alert him to the folly of his reveries. Sustained by his illusions, Pepe withdraws further from reality. Everything about Jean Gabin's character makes me want to cry- his fragile stoicism, his crestfallenness, his obsessive delusion, his self-destructiveness.

There are some who would take issue with the implicit ethnocentrism in the "Casbah" imagery. Note that this was an adaptation of a novel written in the midst of fervent pro-colonial sentiment, and that, in Duvivier's hands, the Casbah becomes mythic, poetic, allegorical. The impenetrable veils of smoke are almost Cocteau-esquire, giving the film the sensuous richness of Scheheradze's chambers. At the same time, the mists accent Pepe's self-deception- his entire persona is fictive, as are his illusions of freedom and escape. The sequence of Pepe's fevered sprint toward the harbor may be maligned nowadays for its visual sloppiness, but I think it's absolutely marvelous, masterfully capturing Pepe's childlike impetuousness. As Pepe courses onward, the surrounding Casbah gradually blurs around him, the juxtaposition of back/foreground indicating his flight from one fantasy into another, as well as highlighting the sheer depth of his delusory monomania and tunnel-visioned myopia. As psychology transformed into image, this one works.

Beyond everything, Pepe Le Moko is a deeply cynical film, its slightly jaundiced perspective on human nature reminding one of Clouzot, Hitchcock and Joseph Conrad. The entire film is a tight lattice of interwoven self-interests- look at the Parisienne's corpulent, autocratic husband, the obsence, oleaginous Regis and the servile, serpentine Slimane for some fine examples of the vile characters on display. Even the character who loves deeply and truly, the forbearing Ines, would rather betray Pepe than be estranged from him...a commentary on the covetous, self-serving nature of love, perhaps?

I haven't seen any other Duvivier films, but he doesn't seem to be the humanist that Becker and Renoir are, and I can appreciate him all the more for that. Like Becker, he seems to have been largely misunderstood and under-appreciated in his time, at least on these shores, and the interview appended on the Criterion disk suggest that he was a retiring and modest sort, never garrulous about his art (and hesitant to even think of it as art, which it assuredly is). What a film this is....a terrific achievement. I love the golden age of French cinema, and this affirms and reinforces that affection.

...lascivious, resentful old storekeepers, effete "toughs", thieving winos, crestfallen, impecunious artists and other downtrodden types. Like Duvivier's incomparable "Pepe Le Moko", "Port Of Shadows" is shrouded in mist. The fog here, however, doesn't evoke a sensual surrealism, but envelopes everything with a graven pallor and dampness. Indeed, everything here screams asphyxiation- Gabin is INCREDIBLE as a well-intentioned Byronic figure embittered by the realities and absurdities of war, whose near-consummate weltschmerz is offered salvation...until inescapable tragedy strikes. As a tragic poet of the cinema, I believe Carne was nearly unrivalled in the Golden Age of French film.

The thick veils of smog give the amplify the film's preoccupation with solitude and opacity- dialogue here is often barbed, strained and bitter, the world-weary cynicism of the characters betraying their immense suffering. Principles are a luxury in an age of disenchantment- the proprietor of Panama's is impassive towards the suicide of his resident Werther (his existentialist exclamation "What's the use?" accenting the futility of suicide- far from offering a reprieve from superfluity, it merely confirms it) while loyalty amongst Leguardier's posse is dispelled briskly after his humiliation. Superfluity is the order of the day- "The world is better off with one less good-for-nothing"..."He needs an identity...I can give him mine.". Each character is acutely aware of his own gratuitousness, and each of them tries desperately to cobble together a raison d'etre in the face of nothingness. When these collapse, as in the case of Michel, Zabal and Leguardier, they are driven to murder or suicide.

As with Les Enfants Du Paradis, Carne's forte lies in sculpting exquisitely intricate characters- the sheer HUMANITY of this movie warrants multiple viewings. Michel Simon's grotesque, graceless Zabal is brilliantly rendered- scorned doubly for his money and his cosmetic deficiencies, Zabal's resignation to a cruel fate (soul-corroding loneliness and a burgeoning moral ugliness) culminates in a death as clumsy and maladroit as his demeanor. His reverence for beauty, as exhibited in his adoration of Nelly and religious hymns, is severely at odds with his environs.

Leguardier, petty hoodlum, imitates American gangster archetypes gleaned from film and hardboiled novels, but his seemingly cocksure swagger is a poor facade for his suffocating ennui and moral cowardliness. Nelly, forbearing and forlorn, is prey to reveries of love, fantasies that promise fulfilment until the film's heartrending conclusion. Looming ominously in the background of the movie are questions on the purpose of art in this grim epoch- the characters on display are all victims of quixotic myths: of war, patriotism, love, crime, masculinity. The incongruities between these fables and cruel reality, the hideous gulf between romance and fact, these are perhaps the saddest truths the film yields.

The ending, seen in this light, is bittersweet- Jean, the tragic character par excellence who has said Yes to all that is absurd and obscene in his life, relinquishes all illusions about the impermanence of all things, including love. Nelly and Jean have achieved true communion, true intercourse, if even for an ephemeral moment. His death is a noble one, an affirmation and acceptance of transience. This is the happiest conclusion that Carne can offer, and even in the film's unrelenting fatalism there is fortitude and life-affirming courage. Camus would've given the thumbs up! In the absurd quandary of life, there is room for sentiment and fraternity, as long as we accept its temporal nature. In Proustian fashion, memory renews all things, so let us embalm these precious moments!

Kelly, like Fassbinder's Lola and Maria Braun, is well-intentioned enough, an enigmatic and altruistic woman ardent to find some equilibrium and stability after an itinerant life. Much like Bunuel's Celestine (Diary Of A Chambermaid), she is also a tabula rasa upon which the patriarchal universe projects its conceptions of femininity- they note the dissonance between her erudition and her beauty, and universalize her beauty as an indicator of loose morality. The overwrought acting, hammed-up dialogue and use of soliloquy (Kelly's episode with the clothes-horse) is more Shakespearian and, well, Brechtian than Douglas Sirk, and the uncomfortable self-awareness of the film jolts the viewer out of any indolence or passivity. Like Sirk, Fuller unravels the sordidness, brutality and perversion beneath the suburban idyll. Obviously, Godard took notes.

Kelly, as cinematic catalyst, illuminates the threadbare mythology of woman as conceived by the Other, man- coquet, housekeeper, nurse, mother, wife, subordinate. While pompous pedant Grant can jet to exotic locales, Kelly can only do so in reverie. Little wonder that she breaks into tears when standing in front of an injured toddler- she weeps for the dubious future of this infantile woman, the crippling fate she must assume as a sentient being bereft of legs to run with. For all her fiery spirit, effusive rants on "the duty of woman" and joie de vivre, Kelly is no less victim of the Woman Question- she can only find transcendence and fulfillment through marriage to the Rock of Gibraltar, Grant. In her flight from autonomy, she becomes no less objectified than the prostitutes that she scorns. It's not surprising that for all his fawning affection, Grant remains a modern Mr Rochester, Byronic like his idol and unwittingly misogynistic, regarding Kelly more as a curio than a companion.

In a succinct hour and a half, Fuller presents an incisive commentary on the dilemma of woman (in his age, at least)- to choose between being a "kept" woman and a sex object. He examines how female narcissism necessarily germinates in such conditions, and offers another stunning diagnosis of social ills. Loaded with subtleties (the little girl in the children's ward is assigned "ship's cook" while "first mate" and "captain" are naturally distributed to the rather creepy looking boys) and beautifully shot, this may not be for everyone, but it's worth watching nonetheless.

If this film represents a faithful adherence to Clouzot's original script, one would have to say that the story may be regarded as the absolute apex/exemplar of Clouzot's understanding of psychology. At the same time, L'Enfer is absolutely a Claude Chabrol film, and the fact that it rests comfortably in either canon attests to the lasting parallels between the two masters.

As with all of Chabrol's foremost creations, this is incisive social commentary masquerading under the banal tag of "psychological thriller". Though the film can be enjoyed without any deeper engagement with or meditation on its themes of Othello-esquire obsession/jealousy, I think some thought will reveal it to be a far more rewarding film than a superficial viewing might suggest.

Situating/contextualizing the film in Chabrol's vast corpus of work, one finds in "L'Enfer" another nightmarish journey into the hazards of bourgeois sterility. Though one might say that the work is naturalistic in some respects (the intense violence that simmers beneath the genteel exterior is revealed in his disdainful disparagement of the neighboring competition), that the overreaching, emotionally volatile and profoundly sensitive husband is particularly prone to this type of neurosis, the telling proclamation of "sans fin" that closes the film suggests that the narrative is not one of isolated particulars, but a general affliction, a self-perpetuating tragedy engendered by flawed social mechanisms.

Throughout his career, Chabrol has been especially critical of the life-denying entropy and suffocating claustrophobia of bourgeois marriage, a plight where the insatiably voracious woman feels her haplessness and subordination most acutely. This, in some respects, might be his finest evaluation of marriage and erotic love in general. The tensions explored throughout the film are far from novel, again we bear witness to the irresolvable Romantic preoccupation, the desire to possess and identify with a subjective other. Again, as with "Les Bonnes Femmes", we see the carnivorous, destructive male principle, eager to subdue, asphyxiate, smother and ultimately devour irrepressible femininity.

Yet lest we distance ourselves from Paul's evident psychosis, Chabrol implicates marriage as an institution endorsed by society at large. Note Paul's perverse, masochistic pleasure in fabricating these outlandish fantasies, particularly the wild reverie of Emanuelle Beart entertaining the entire hotel in the attic. Is this the only way to preserve erotic love in the nauseating ennui of marriage, to continually reinvent the Other and, through wild imaginings, make him/her a stranger so as to escape the concreteness of conjugal reality? On another level, the film might be read as an Adlerian representation of modern neurosis, of a nervous man who is inadequately equipped for the rigours of social expectation, whose overreaching demand for absolute order and unity invariably drive him to dementia and a flight from reality. Chimeras of success and masculine authority elude him, undermined by personal insecurities and a willful, independent wife. How then, does he compensate for his lack of control? Refuge in the sadistic alternate reality that he manufactures throughout the movie.

Technically, this movie is almost immaculate, featuring outstanding performances (Emmanuelle Beart is a force of nature) and repeated viewings affirm that it is a movie of great understanding. I'm not sure if this review made any sort of sense at all, but at the end of the day all I can do is urge you to immerse yourself in "L'Enfer".

As a study of solitude, this almost ranks alongside "Le Samourai" and "The American Friend". Indeed, there is something of Jean-Pierre Melville and Wim Wenders throughout this evocative tale of morality. Throughout the film, one can't help but be reminded of Joseph Conrad's immortal "Lord Jim"- like Conrad's Jim, Paul Decourt is a monomaniacal, haunted man, a self-alienating man in fervent pursuit of redemption. For Paul, regeneration and reprieve from his torment can only be achieved through murder. Like Jim, Paul refuses a prospect of lasting happiness (alongside the captivating but somewhat juvenile Helen) in order to fulfill his somewhat arbitrary notions of ethics and honor. This single-minded obsession cripples all his capacities for sincerity and love, and if Paul's self-imposed loneliness is not evident to you throughout the movie, Chabrol closes the film with an overwhelmingly Conradian image- that of Paul's paltry minuteness in a vast sea. Is Chabrol trivializing Paul's monomaniacal mission, and underlining his inflated self-importance? What are Chabrol's own conceptions towards forgiveness and memory?

Though I've always found it difficult to stomach the parallels between Hitchcock and Chabrol (another user on this site highlighted the similarities Chabrol shares with Clouzot, a comparison that I concur with, Chabrol sharing Clouzot's moral ambiguity/overall weltschmerz), it would be foolhardy to deny the broad Hitchcockian flourishes here. Dipped and dredged in LSD, the hallucinatory sequences in here nod reverently to "Vertigo" and "Marnie". Yet, unlike some hitchcock staples (no gripes with Hitch here, he is after all my all time favorite director), there is nary a hint of escapism here. Instead, Chabrol plunges us head-first into the depths of modern complacency, a project that we are all complicit in.

The story itself is another virulently acerbic "thriller of manners" for Chabrol, capturing with Flaubertian honesty the farce upon which class distinctions are built. Other than Clouzot, I've always felt that Chabrol's work comes closest to Bunuel's (no surprise that Cassel and Audran would also feature in Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie)- he brings a blowtorch to insipid, self-satisfied, hypocritical civilization, and dares to gaze into the vacuous abyss beneath. Like Bunuel and Fassbinder, he does this with consummate style and infuses his films with cruelly ironic wit.

Chabrol's films are always unnerving to watch because they come too close for comfort, and never allow us to be self-satisfied. He asks some terribly important questions: at what price are bourgeois myths of propriety, morality and civilization bought? In "The Unfaithful Wife", murder is necessary to sustain the idyll, while this movie offers a profound dissection of bourgeois identity- in order for bourgeois "decorousness" and privilege to survive, it must posit an Other, the sordid, vulgar, ill-educated boor, even if it doesn't exist. Throughout "La Rupture" the viewer witnesses the creation of these supposed "absolutes", the unfurling of the absurd narrative that legitimizes bourgeois entitlement- sully, tar and feather the peasant, the Other. Like homophobia, class prejudice is only an expression of the precariousness of identity, without an opposite to define oneself against, the suppositions invariably crumble.

Chabrol is an acutely intelligent, courageous and singularly brilliant film maker. Don't miss this deconstructive masterpiece...as an examination of class, I think only "La Ceremonie" would surpass this one.

ps i can't help but wonder if the eccentric, insular boarding-house here is an homage to balzac's maison vauqeur in his incomparable "Old Goriot"- both the altruistic doctor (Bianchot) and the moustachioed, absurdly eloquent tempter (Vautrin) are parodied/mirrored here