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3 films by Claude Chabrol | Blu-ray Review

chabrolCohen Media Group resurrected five late period titles from French New Wave auteur Claude Chabrol in September, 2016. The one week engagement featured lesser known titles which unspooled from the early 1990s to early 2000s, beginning with the compelling Georges Simenon adaptation Betty (1992) to the tranquil thrills of Nightcap (aka Merci Pour le Chocolate, 2000). Each featuring lead performances from some of France’s most revered actresses (Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Emmanuelle Beart frequent this series marketed as Chabrol 5X5), they are all representative of Chabrol’s particular fascinations with psychologically troubled characters. Cohen Media Group releases three of these titles (Betty; Torment; The Swindle) as part of the restored collection.

Chabrol, dubbed the Alfred Hitchcock after rising out of the Nouvelle Vague, began his lucrative 1990s on a stunningly sour note with two films starring Andrew McCarthy, one a bizarre Dr. Mabuse remake, Dr. M. (released on VHS as Club Extinction), the other a Henry Miller adaptation, Quiet Days in Clichy. A year later, he would direct what stands as the most definitive cinematic version of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1991) to date before settling in on a deliciously offbeat character study with Betty (1992), a provocative character portrait starring Marie Trintignant, the daughter of famed actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and director Nadine Trintignant, and who was tragically killed following a violent altercation with rocker boyfriend Bertrand Cantat (of band Noir Desir) in 2003. An adaptation of famed French noir author Georges Simenon, it’s a deliberately paced portrait of a fallen woman, forced out of her bourgeois social circle thanks to her sexual proclivities resulting in a promiscuous reputation. Following a devastating turn of events, a kindly older woman assists her as we learn via intermingling and jumbled flashback the circumstances which have led to her ultimate undoing as a woman who has agreed to sell her children to her husband’s family in order to maintain her dignity.

Drunk and alone, the beautiful and distraught Betty (Marie Trintignant) chain-smokes through a boozy stupor one rainy Parisian night until a leering gentleman, claiming to be a doctor, picks her up and takes her to a seedy dive bar in Versailles. The man is a known drug addict, and Betty is rescued by an empathetic bar patron, Laure (Stephane Audran), who owns a hotel and puts the young woman up for the night. Over the next several days, we learn why Betty has ended up so seemingly destitute. After caught cheating on her husband, her bourgeois extended family demands she sign over custody of the children in exchange for an economic stability and leave both them and the home immediately. Emotionally wounded, Betty sets her sights on Laure’s lover, Mario (Jean-Francois Garreaud) while she shares memories of her past sexual experiences.

In many ways, Simenon’s Betty recalls the sullen and embittered heroine of Octave Mirabeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid (thrice adapted for film by renowned auteurs, including Renoir, Bunuel, and most recently, Benoit Jacquot), a woman whose beauty has the ability to usurp her assigned social order, but whose cynical personality and problematic conditioning perpetrate of her own downfall. Chabrol’s flashback structure also recalls the troubled Joe at the center of Lars Von Trier’s epic sex addition odyssey, Nymphomaniac (2013). Like those films, Betty isn’t so much concerned about narrative as it is characterization (the name itself carries a particular cinematic heft in French cinema, from Beinex’s Betty Blue, Miller’s Alias Betty, and even the con-artist played by Huppert in Chabrol’s The Swindle), and centering this scenario is not only Trintignant’s emotionally paralyzed, helplessly promiscuous titular character, but Stephane Audran’s mysterious Laure.

As a hotelier who wanders aimlessly throughout a life of transitory experiences (their chance encounter in a bar called “The Hole” couldn’t be more fitting), Audran actually balances a more complex performance as a woman whose motivations are almost inscrutable (it’s also interesting to note Audran not only used to be married to Chabrol, but also her co-star’s father, Jean-Louis Trintignant, which rather heightens her sense of a makeshift mother). Clearly sympathetic towards Betty, she often talks over the woman, an attempt to command the situation at all times, a complicated battle of personality and will. Jean-Francois Garreaud is the pawn in their strange scheme, their copulation flaunted in Betty’s, and the eventual prize which allows one to succeed and the other to fail. But at what, exactly?

Flashbacks of Betty’s sexual awareness and her understanding of a woman’s experience in heterosexual congress are brief but succinct in underlining her character’s faults, at least as the parameters dictated by the social oligarchy she’s ascended to by marrying into the Etamble clan against her better judgment. Another important female figure here is Madame Etamble, played with all the clichéd vicissitudes of manipulative matriarchs by Christiane Minazzoli in a role which would later be echoed in 2007’s The Girl Cut in Two with a Madame played by Caroline Silhol, another of Chabrol’s more tawdry exercises examining portraits of liberated female sexuality. Intriguing and potently administered, there are bounteous compelling elements both in and outside Betty’s frames, and should have more of a renowned reputation than it does from Chabrol’s later period.

The impetus behind 1994’s Torment (aka L’enfer) supersedes this grueling exercise in obsession and jealousy actually staged by Chabrol. Famously, the film was a project abandoned decades prior by Henri-Georges Clouzet as a vehicle for Simone Signoret (reconstructed in a 2009 doc Inferno from Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea) but Chabrol dials the narrative down into a lean, increasingly vicious meltdown of one man’s severe issues with jealousy. Francois Cluzet (who also appears in The Swindle) stars as Paul, a man who buys a sleepy lakeside inn to run with his beautiful wife Nelly (Emmanuelle Beart). Except, Paul becomes increasingly agitated about Nelly, a woman he is convinced is engaging in sexual liaisons with hotel guests, which leads to increasingly tense face-offs between both husband and wife and innocent bystanders. As much as it’s implied Paul may simply be imaging the infidelity and therefore torturing himself, Nelly’s behavior doesn’t always seem to assist in convincing him otherwise.

In 1997’s The Swindle¸ Chabrol reunites with his muse Isabelle Huppert for their fifth of seven collaborations. Huppert stars as Betty, one part of a small-time con artist operation in which she colludes with Victor (Michel Serrault), an older man whose relationship with the younger woman is at first unclear (eventually we assume they are either biological father and daughter or have simply assumed these conditioned roles). Together, they procure cash by having Betty drug lonely, single businessman at conventions and then making off with their cash or checks, although never in an amount which would make anyone suspicious of the swindle. But Betty wants out of the small time life of crime and sets her sights on Maurice (Cluzet), a courier for money launderers. When Maurice is dispatched to the Caribbean to transport an attaché full of cash, Victor and Betty switch the cases, leading them into a volatile situation when Maurice’s counterparts track them down.

Disc Review:

Cohen Media Group presents all three titles for the first time in HD, the transfers here in 1.66:1. The three disc set is a phenomenal new package for titles which were last made available a decade ago courtesy of The Kimstim Collection. Picture and sound quality are superb, particularly on 1992’s Betty. Additionally, audio commentary is available by critics Wade Major and Andy Klein on Torment and The Swindle.

Francois Cluzet Interview:
A forty minute interview with Francois Cluzet moderated by Kent Jones is included as an extra feature on The Swindle disc.

Final Thoughts:

Of the three titles included in Cohen Media Group’s collection, Betty is the most evocative, psychologically complex of the trio, although all three tend to deal with people in relationships with murky, complicated subtexts, the comprehension of which requires we watch Chabrol’s scenarios all the way to the very end.

Betty
Film: ★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

Torment
Film: ★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

The Swindle
Film: ★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.

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