Claude Chabrol | Les godelureaux (Wise Guys) / 1961

endless revenge for a perceived slight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Gégauff and Claude Chabrol (screenplay, based on a fictional work by Éric Ollivier), Claude Chabrol (director) Les godelureaux (Wise Guys) / 1961

 

I have long been an admirer of the early new wave-like films of Claude Chabrol, who I believe to be much more talented than the endlessly vaunted François Truffaut and often even Jean-Luc Godard, the latter of who I very much admire. Chabrol, moreover, was not at all afraid of including gay figures in a great number of his films, even, obviously, if sometimes they represent the evil or disorienting forces, or, as in this case, an almost satanic force, akin to Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of [the] Demon Brother. They are, at least, paid attention to and given force in his films, in this case, as we shall see, for a better result for all the heterosexual individuals involved.

     In Wise Guys it is Arthur (Charles Belmont) and his group of rowdy boys and girls who represent the new wave youths, who push their way through the Paris streets on their way to Café de Flore on Blvd St. Germain only to discover that someone has taken their sacred parking space in front of the café. The hot roadster parked there belongs to Ronald (Jean-Claude Brialy), a foppish, quite clearly wealthy gay slightly older man. With others inside the café, they pick up the car (the film is in black-and-white, but in my imagination it is red) and quickly move it onto the sidewalk so that they can park in their usual spot.

      These young men are also privileged, both by their youth and hot temperament and, in Arthur’s case, through living with his rich uncle (Jean Galland). One might argue that there are later incarnations of Arthur and his gang in the American wiseacres such as those in John Landis’ Animal House (1978) and Canadian director Bob Clark’s Porky’s series of films of the early 1980s. Yet there is none of these work’s adolescent humor in the French film, and Chabrol’s work, in general, feels much more sophisticated than the American crawls through drink, violence, and sex, even if while all of these are very much present in the French film.

     The outrage, moreover, of Ronald, discovering his car has been pointlessly moved, results in his swearing private, almost Satanic revenge, plotting, along with his clearly queer and creepy "le jeune homme à tout faire’ (his working companion, played by André Jocelyn). The odd manservant is often seen carrying a metronome that reminds his lover-boss of time, something about which Arthur and his friends have no conception.

     Meanwhile, he uses the lovely street girl Ambroisine (Bernadette Lafont) as bait to begin his revenge on Arthur. She quickly gets the young man’s attention, he forcing her to join his retinue, and by night’s end joining him in his room at his uncle’s house for sex.

      So begins Arthur’s long love-affair with Ambroisine, who weaves him back into Ronald’s orbit, first with visit to a store to buy stink bombs on their way to attend a showing of a bourgeois artist who paints women’s bodies before demonstrating his own works. Ronald has just purchased all of the stink bombs, but invites Arthur and Ambroisine along as they enter the crowded gallery space, where even before the bombs go off some gay men offended by the artist’s display of female bodies, turn up their noses and quickly leave. Soon after Ronald and Arthur set off their stick bombs forcing everyone to immediately flee. The rapport he establishes with Arthur in this scene permits his growing friendship with the younger boy and his torture of the previously carefree boy.

     Commentator Shawn Grenier has noted on Letterboxd that the figure of this artist was probably based in Yves Klein, who recognizing himself in the caricature, attempted to sue the filmmaker.

      The next step is an invitation for the two of them, Arthur and Ambroisine, to join him for a luncheon at his aunt’s house. There is insists that Ambroisine attempt to flirt with his cousin Henri, a mathematician-musician who is about to marry his fiancé (Sascha Briquet) in two long years, when she finishes her education. Meanwhile Henri falls madly in love with almost every woman he meets, and cannot resist an hour or so with the lovely Ambroisine. Ronald agrees to decorate and arrange the charity event for his aunt’s support of orphans.

     The interior decorator in him comes into full play as he completely redoes her rooms, provides delicious canapes and even ballerinas and servants dressed up in 18th century garb. Once “Le president” (Jean Tissier) arrives, however, he settles down to business, presenting a wild modern female dancer, dressed scantily and showing off her body in the best possible manner (Stéphane Audran), followed by an older performer from the Folies Bergère, both completely scandalizing the elderly attendees. Finally, after lecturing them for their hypocrisy he introduces Satan, once more represented in a flow of stink bombs that sends the entire audience including his aunt out of the rooms.

      In so doing, of course, Ronald has again set his coils around the young, innocent Arthur, who now is completely infatuated with Ambroisine. But upon one of their visits to Ronald’s house, which have begun to be regular, they stay overnight, Ambroisine sneaks off to bed with the apparently bisexual or convincingly multi-sexual Ronald, furthering a divide between Arthur and his now passion.

     So far, he has brought the young boy into his snare through bad behavior against the elderly, ruling class, but now Ronald advances, in his most egregious acts, upon Ronald’s own life, jeopardizing his uncle’s largesse, his support to college, and even his possibility of having a place in which even to live. While Arthur accompanies his uncle for a couple of days to the country concerning family property, Ronald, with Ambroisine’s help arranges a true toga party, in which most of the celebrants are dressed up in the usual sheets, while he does truly dress up like a Roman emperor, cape and all. It is clear that he is a kind of Caligula, in this case demanding of his fellow revelers that they do not bother this time with sex, but in the pure destruction of the world around them. Slowly they destroy the furniture, objects, and precious valuables, including windows of Arthur’s uncle’s estate, dumping women into tubs of milk and, finally, tossing cream pies in one another’s faces all alternating with a totally polite but also somewhat course dinner at a provincial restaurant with Arthur and his uncle, who chows down a great many dishes on the menu with gusto and often a lack of recognition of even the ingredients; for example, he must ask the waitress / owner even what is the object lying next to his meat, which appears to be a grape.

     When Arthur returns before his uncle he discovers the chaos, Ambroisine pouting for her evil doings and Ronald promising to even pay for the destruction. Yet Arthur can only forgive Ambrosine for her behavior since he has become so absurdly in love with her.

     And even these actions do not keep him from seeking out Ronald. 

     Given Ronald’s advice to stop telling her he loves her, Arthur and Ambroisine temporarily break up, but do come back together, taking a lovely trip to the Pyrenees. But there they also discuss whether or not they are truly ready to marry, as they have insisted they are about to do back in Paris. She still commits to marriage, but when they are ready to return, she insists that she must go first to visit her daughter, of whom she has never spoken to Arthur.

     Actually, she is running away to Cannes for a prearranged meeting with Ronald, who evidently quite satisfies her sexual desires, so much so that she falls asleep on the beach, when Ronald creates a large sign explaining that it is time for him to leave. He grabs a large stick with a small bag attached as if he was a hobo, meeting up again with his manservant with a car waiting in the woods to drive him back to Paris.

      When Arthur can no longer explain Ambroisine’s absence to his friends, he again visits Ronald, who admits to him, as a “civilized gentleman,” as he assures him, although still lying like the Devil, but admitting honestly that he no longer knows where she is. But he does attempt to assure our young love-sick fool that Ambroisine was never the right woman for him, and in a short while he will some appropriate woman and everything will have changed.

      Indeed, just such a situation eventually occurs, as we see him with a quite attractive younger girl. Afterwards, he meets up with Ambroisine on the pier. She has just been brought into port by a crew of US Navy seamen. She is now married to an American head of a destroyer, and does even permit a kiss beneath her veiled hat. She quickly tells him of her situation and leaves with the vessel on which she so suddenly appeared. Composer Pierre Jansen’s driving opening score begins all over again. The end.

     Evidently, Ronald has successfully not only realized his revenge but, quite amazingly, forced a new direction for his “little Arthur” to realize that having fun at the expense of others is not what life is all about. In other words, he has stolen his youth from him. Ronald and his male companion’s endless metronome has forced Arthur to grow up, an unimaginable conclusion for the American bad boys who will perhaps never quite grow up.

     If there is something very sad about this film, it never becomes tragic, and I, having now watched it two days in a row, would gladly see it all over again. Here we see events that Truffaut’s naughty Antoine Doinel could not even have imagined, and which are far more radical, in some respects, than what Godard’s American gangster-based Breathless has to offer. The new youth in Chabrol’s world survive to become adults who have learned their lessons. At what cost is for the viewer to decide.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).