beauty and the beast
by Douglas Messerli
Claude Chabrol (screenwriter and director) Le boucher (The Butcher)
/ 1970
Despite the statements of numerous critics that
Chabrol's film Le boucher is filled
with questions that are slowly answered over the course of the movie and, as
Netflix's site quotes Adam Gai, "The audience is kept in suspense up until
the last shot," I would argue that in this work Chabrol has created his
most unthrilling thriller. For it is a work that has utterly no surprises, and
because of that fact Chabrol is freed to show us film-making at its most
abstract. We witness the process without having to be emotionally involved in
plot.
Some
of this lack of suspense occurs because, basically, there are only two
characters in the film. The young married couple of the first scenes appear
only briefly, despite the fact that the male is supposed to be a teacher in the
same school where the central character, Helene Daville teaches.
Although
some of her students are more memorable than others, particularly the young man
to whom she is trying to teach mathematics one late night, they are,
nonetheless, as are the inhabitants of the small village near the Cougnac Caves
where she lives, ancillary figures, unimportant to events. Even the mildly
bothersome Police Inspector Grumbach offers little in the way of substance.
Other than the beautiful and emotionally reserved Helene (Stéphane Audran)
there is only her suitor, Popaul (Jean Yanne), a war-veteran who has just
returned to his hometown to take up his father's business as a butcher.
From
the earliest scenes in the film, we recognize Popaul as being facile with
knives—at the wedding ceremony with which the film begins he insists upon
slicing the large roast by himself—and early on we recognize that he has been
embittered by the gruesome violence of his war experiences:
Popaul: I've seen a corpse
or two—their heads in the wind, cut in half, mouth
open. I've seen three or
four piled together. Kids with their eyes punctured.
Indo-Chinese as old as
Madame Tirrant completely torn to bits. I've seen pals
of mine rotting in the sun,
being eaten by maggots.
Were we to encounter Popaul today, I would
guess that many of us might suggest he seek help from a psychiatrist for
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Accordingly, despite his gentle demeanor with Helene, when word of a
brutal murder reaches the village, we have no choice but suspect Popaul. There
is literally no one else to suspect, and any "reader" of such a work
knows that it would a ridiculous and absurd tale if the murderer was someone
whom he had never met. It is as if Chabrol has taken the old whodunit story and
emptied it of all save two figures, one of whom we cannot imagine as the
murderer, and whom we know cannot have committed the second murder since she is
on an outing with her students when she and they discover the body, its blood
dripping from it, almost comically, upon a young girl's sandwich.
Chabrol takes this even further by having Helene discover at the scene
of the crime a lighter (or one exactly like it) that she has given as a gift to
Popaul. Since we know it must therefore be Popaul who has committed the two
murders, any suspense of the film must depend less upon the discovery of the
killer than the gradual discovery of who these two people are. It is their
inner selves, not their grand actions that bring any meaning to the work.
Chabrol carries this idea of "no surprises" even further,
comically commenting on it when, at the funeral of the second woman killed,
Popaul, exiting the church, looks up at the rainy sky to say, "What a
surprise!" Helene may have been surprised; she does not have an umbrella.
But he and everyone else does, which they simultaneously open, recalling a
similar scene from Hitchcock's Foreign
Correspondent, a parallel to the earlier reference, with the discovery of
the lighter, to Hitchcock's Strangers on the
Train. No, it is no surprise that at such a sad occasion, rain should fall.
And the natives have expected it.
What
is surprising in this film is that
Helene pockets the lighter without mentioning it to anyone. She is not only
tampering with evidence but, by squirreling away the object, she is endangering
her own life.
She
has already spoken of the importance of Cro-Magnan man to her students, noting
that if he had not brutally killed out of a need to survive that modern man
would not be there today. We can only suspect, accordingly, that she sees her
courtier-murderer, Popaul, as a necessary evil, someone who must do what he
does in order to save the world, perhaps restoring the love she has
relinquished.
Yet
it makes no logical sense, and when she does encounter him that same evening,
she is clearly terrified. Only when he produces a lighter exactly like the one
she has found, can she again breathe easier, laughing behind her tears in
relief.
If
Popaul is psychologically disturbed, we now perceive that, in her inability to
begin another relationship, she is psychologically scarred by her past as well.
While she remains emotionally and sexually aloof from Popaul, she is also a
kind a seductress, a woman seeking love despite her denial of it. As she quite
straight-forwardly answers Popaul's challenge:
Popaul: But, shit, if I kissed you now,
what would you say?
Helene:
I'd say nothing, but please don't.
In short, she will not out rightly reject love were it to make its
demands; she is simply attempting to protect herself so that love will make no
demands. She is, in other words, a passive being; unlike Popaul, who makes
things happen, who brings her food, fixes her lights, paints her rooms, who, in
fact, admits that he wants to "look after her," Helene can do nothing
but exist, glowing in her beauty much like the light(er) she gives him. It is
no accident that she provides the fire for the cut of meat he has brought her.
It is not her murder he seeks, but out of embarrassment for being the
beast, ritual death. Even his sudden plunge of his knife into his own belly is
not a surprise as much as an inevitability. It is only now that Helene can
truly come into her own, reaching out to save him, to protect him from himself,
just as she has mothered her students.
This time she allows him the kiss, but it is the kiss of death—despite
her lifting and carrying him to the hospital, her dress remains untouched by
his blood—too late to redeem the animal within.
Los Angeles, November 20, 2010
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2010) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer,
2012).
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