A note on Chabrol

I wouldn’t even know where to start writing an obituary for Claude Chabrol, the French nouvelle vague master who passed away yesterday at the age of 80. His filmography is so vast — spanning 52 years and 54 features, many of which I have yet to see — and his influence so extensive that formal tributes are best left to those more learned than I.

Still, that’s not to say he hasn’t made a number of films that mean something to me, chief among them 1970’s “Le Boucher,” a character-study-as-thriller so perfectly and precisely formed it hurts a little to watch it. It was my first Chabrol, and indeed one of my first forays into the French arthouse canon, introduced to me in childhood by my dad — who counts it among his favorite films.

I’ve inherited his affection: the film’s simple set-up — shy young schoolteacher  strikes up a friendship with a lonely village butcher who may or may not be a killer — is an undercoat for a deeply compassionate study of emotional repression and moral judgment, with a for-the-ages lead turn by his then-wife Stéphane Audran.

Hitchcock was famously an admirer of “Le Boucher,” and it’s easy to imagine him having made a cracking suspenser from the same material — but it would likely have been a far nosier and more externalized film than the one made by Chabrol, who, for all “French Hitchcock” claims, was a storyteller far more interested in people than process.

“Le Boucher” is almost accidentally a thriller; you’re so compelled by fine-etched details of the characters that their increasingly perilous circumstances catch you off-guard. It’s hardly the only wonder on Chabrol’s résumé — among others, make time for “Les Biches,” “La Femme Infidèle” (remade recently as “Unfaithful”) and his latter-day chef d’oeuvre, the Huppert-starring Ruth Rendell adaptation “La Cérémonie” — but “Le Boucher,” for reasons both critical and personal, is the one I keep coming back to, and the one I’d gently advise any Chabrol novices to begin with.

Shortly after the news of Chabrol’s passing landed yesterday, the recollection floated into my head that I’d actually capsule-reviewed his final theatrical feature, “Bellamy,” at the London Film Festival last year. (Like so many of his Cahiers du Cinéma peers, the man knew not the meaning of the word “retirement.”) The film, a straight-arrow procedural serving mainly as a vehicle for a charismatic Gerard Depardieu, was a minor work by his (or most) standards. I admit a lump entered my throat as I re-read my closing sentence: “[W]e’ll hopefully get Chabrol in sharper form on the next go-round.” Sadly, we won’t; but there’s more than enough sharp form to look back on.

[Photo: The Constant Viewer]