the
unnecessary savior
by Douglas Messerli
Claude Chabrol (screenwriter and director) Le
Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) / 1958
Le Beau Serge, Claude Chabrol’s sudden entry into the French film-making scene, as many
critics have suggested, contains a great many mirror-images that would later
become a thematic issue in Chabrol’s prolific contributions. But this movie,
itself, is also a kind of mirror-image to his second film, Le Cousins.
Both stars Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain, representing a city dweller and
a kind of country bumpkin, Brialy the innocent city-dweller, François,
returning to his hometown of Sardent in the first film, while Blain stands in
for the country cousin come to town in Le Cousins.
In
that film, I argued, the heterosexual domination of women is actually a deep
statement of the unexpressed homoerotic sexual relationship between the two.
And in Le Beau Serge, the same undercurrent is even more clearly
established. Serge, the handsome one, has been the best childhood friend of
François’ as they were growing up. And now, upon his return to Sardent,
supposedly to recover from his vaguely diagnosed tuberculosis, cannot stop
asking others about his former “beau” friend, demanding to know why this future
architect has become the town drunkard.
The
reasons are those of many a small town hero. He has gotten a girl pregnant,
and, instead of being able to realize his dreams, has been destined to remain
in a world that offers him little else but the bleak confines of provincial
life. His first child, a mongoloid, has died quickly, and what may have been a
superficial enchantment with Yvonne (Michèle Méritz), has faded. Although he
clearly loves her, his treatment is that of a brutal peasant marriage. When he
isn’t drunk, he cheats on her, even with her own sister, the town slut Marie
(Bernadette Lafont), and abuses her, we perceive, occasionally even striking
out at her, although she is now once again pregnant. If nothing else, Yvonne is
the subject of his verbal abuse. From once being a potentially brilliant young
student, he now works as a local truck driver, and, along with his drunkenness,
he is bitter about the situation.
François’ return certainly does not make life for Serge better, knowing
how his now apparently refined friend must see him. If, at first, the two
embrace one another with all the love of the past, their relationship soon
becomes a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—battle between them that involves
education, class—and, inevitably, sex.
François, moreover, is a kind of self-righteous prig who criticizes the
local priest for not having worked more closely with his now straying flock,
and takes it upon himself to attempt to reform not only his constantly drunken
friend, but to alter the entire community. “I think they need me,” he
self-righteously proclaims. Yet, François is so visibly confused that he
quickly begins an affair with Marie, as in Chabrol’s The Cousins perhaps
an attempt to “take over” his would-be male lover’s bed.
What begins as a possible resurrection of their childhood friendship,
quickly turns sour, when, one by one, the so-called ignorant citizens of
Sardent begin to perceive that François is perceiving them like insects,
desperate to find a way to alter their ordinary patterns of living. The
intruder even goes so far as to suggest that Serge leave his wife and return to
his youthful dreams.
When Marie is raped by her own “supposed” father (it is clear that she
is not his child), whose house she cohabits, the prudish François drops
her—particularly after Serge seemingly sides with the old man, who, he claims,
had waited for years for the “chance”—and with total disgust hides out in his
room at the local inn, realizing that he has caused more devastation than his
hoped for “salvation.”
Reappearing at a local dance—itself such a grim affair that it is almost
painful to watch—he rejects Marie, with whom Serge dances, but worries over
Yvonne, now quite close to childbirth. But, of course, the inquisitive viewer
can only ask whether this might not be yet another attempt to get closer to
Serge through his women friends.
Indeed, Serge brutally beats his former friend in what is clearly a
psychological response to François’ intrusions upon his unhappy life. In a
sense, the bloody face he rewards François is not so dissimilar to the beatings
of women he has given to his wife and others. Violence and murder are always,
in Chabrol’s films, intimately interconnected.
The film attempts to “save” both of its heroes, ultimately, by Yvonne
asking, during the final moments before her child’s birth, that François drag
in both a doctor and (quite literally) her drunken husband to her through the
snow. Her new baby, a boy, is a beautifully “normal” child, and perhaps will
grow up to be just as handsome as his “beau” father.
So
does Chabrol’s bleak film offer some sort of spiritual resolution; even as we
perceive that, perhaps, François will not survive the winter to be able to
return to the clinic in Switzerland and to a normal life. The hardy drunkard,
in this case, is the survivor, as opposed to the country boy’s death in The
Cousins. But we now also know that their fates will always in intricately
interlinked.
Le
Beau Serge is often described as the earliest film of the Nouvelle Vague or
the French New Wave. Certainly, despite its on-site filming, it looks and
behaves unlike like many of the New Wave’s later films by Godard, Rivette, and
others. But there is some subtle humor throughout, particularly when “handsome”
Serge introduces his friend, filmmaker Philippe de Broca to another New Wave
filmmaker friend, Jacques Rivette. Clearly Serge keeps better company than the
wan city-dweller scolding the rest of them.
Los Angeles, September 6, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2017).
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