En El Corazón De La Mentira

Claude Chabrol had directed about 50 movies since 1957. Sometimes, he's very good, but when he's bad, he's really boring. This movie is boring, despite the good efforts of asking the spectators who had killing the little girl and the writer. It's too long, too low key. But the biggest problem of the movie is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. I never saw such a weak actress. She don't have any credibility in the role of the police inspector. She's inexpressive and had an horrible voice. She can't articulate and most of the time, we don't understand or hear what's she's saying! Sandrine Bonnaire seems to be anywhere except in her role, but Jacques Gamblin is good. Too bad for Chabrol's fans!

Although Claude Chabrol has worked predominantly in the crime genre, and adapted much mystery fiction, very few of his films are straight whodunits. Crimes may be the central feature of these films, or the catalyst at least, and investigations may shape these narratives and bring them to their conclusion, if not resolution. But Chabrol is usually more interested in focusing on point-of-view, of the killer, the victims, the suspects, the community, than in any who's-the-killer games. So 'Au coeur du mensonge' belongs to a relatively marginalised (and recent) position in Chabrol's filmography; its most famous predecessors are 'Cop au vin' and 'Inspecteur Lavardin' (although there are important echoes of earlier Chabrol classics like 'Que le bete meure' and 'Le Boucher').

However, just because we don't know who committed the two murders until the end, this doesn't mean Chabrol is only interested in artifical games. The limits of the whodunit paradoxically give Chabrol the freedom from delineating the psychology of the criminal, to something much more interesting to him; in other words, the unknowability of other people, especially those we love, live with and think we know best.

Chabrol's films are so self-contained and remote, that it's rare to find him concentrating on 'topical' issues. Here the subject is the all-too-familiar paedophile rape and murder of a young girl in the woods. She was last seen at a lesson with her art teacher, Rene, and suspicion immediately falls on him, in one of those oppressive small towns where the Internet will never outpace malicious gossip. If we didn't know whodunits, we might think so too - he is lame, shifty looking, whiny, and a failed artist experiencing mental breakdown who thinks his masseuse wife, Vivianne, is having an affair with a slick media personality, G.R.

There are other suspects: G.R. himself, his criminal go-between, and Rene's friend, Regis, even, as the coroner cheerfully suggests, a woman with strong hands and gloves - an exact description of Vivianne earlier. But it is Rene everyone suspects, especially the new Chief Inspector, Lesage, whose personal stake in the case (she has a daughter of the same age as the dead girl) makes her determined to bring him to justice.

'Mensonge' is a psychological study in the guise of a mystery thriller. We are asked to follow Rene's reactions to the murder, social ostracism, artistic failure etc., and yet we're not told whether he's the murderer or not, or any of the other characters, which would surely be a crucial element in anyone's psychology! so these two impulses - towards psychological truth and towards a mystery story which necessarily precludes the audience having any access to the character's psychology, puts it with the same level of knowledge of characters as the other characters, making for an effectively tense film, which, beyond its mystery trappings, asks whether we can ever know anyone, when trust, or self-confidence, or faith in 'reality' is gone.

The film links the idea of lies (characters concealing truths, making realities out of lies), with art (painting - Jacques revels in panoramas and trompes d'oeil; the second murder is 'composed' like a painting). Throughout, various media for the diffusion of truth - painting, TV, books, recitals - as well as the police investigation, with its need for artistic resolution, are highlighted, interrogated and undermined (even a last minute confession is suspect, and the denouement, appropriately, takes place in a deep mist). Chabrol's blithely elliptical narrative style further compounds our uncertainty. As with every Chabrol, the surface every character sees, or creates, is as treacherous as a trompe d'oeil. As the child-murder in the forest, echoing 'Diary of a Chambermaid', suggests, Chabrol is letting out the closet Surrealist in him.

This is a typical Claude Chabrol study of the intricacies of human deception, betrayal, failures of self and of others. It weaves a wide web of intrigue, and who is the murderer is a question which almost drowns in the mire of human weaknesses which Chabrol's relentless scalpel peels away, layer by layer, in his surgical manner. The film, set on the coast of Britanny, is brilliantly directed, as usual. And the actors in this ensemble film are all superb, also as usual. Probably the outstanding performance is by Jacques Gamblin as the limping artist suffering from a prolonged case of painter's block. His wife is sturdy Sandrine Bonnaire, a district nurse. Her performance is excellent, as usual, but the makeup person overdid her eyebrows far too much! Ever since his serious accident some years before, he has experienced a collapse of morale, and she keeps him going and also brings home the bacon. Meanwhile, she is flirty with an odious, arrogant man who is a visitor to their town, with whom she then commences an affair. Where would a Chabrol film be without an affair? Who killed the young girl? Who is sleeping with whom? Who has the hard heart of a killer and who merely seems to? Will the Gamblin and Bonnaire marriage crack up, or will it survive? Chabrol has his usual fun mystifying us, perplexing us, teasing us, depressing us, and putting us in our place. His main purpose often seems to be to prove to us, with almost mathematical precision, that we are all in the grip of an incomprehensible Fate, that there is murder around every corner or behind every bush, that no alliance or marriage is safe, that betrayal lurks in every heart, that we all have terrible secrets (and if we don't, what's wrong with us?) which will devour us from within, and that every situation is so complex we need to be able to solve partial differential equations for non-linearities even to begin to figure out anything at all. And even then we will still be lost and wandering in a maze of extra dimensions! The amazing Jacques Gamblin of this film appears in Chabrol's last film before his death in 2010, INSPECTOR BELLAMY (2009, see my review), where he plays three characters at once. But Gamblin's performance here is even better than those.

In this and some other of Claude Chabrol's movies, it is as though he sets out to defy himself and his audience to feel any emotion. The pace is even; characters rarely raise their voices or lose their tempers; there is no on-screen violence; and the sex is minimal and decorous. The colour is carefully orchestrated, with cool blue predominating; and though the film is set by the sea, this is not the warm, seductive Mediterranean, but the cold, off-putting Atlantic; when the weather deteriorates, there are no violent storms, simply thick fog.

Though superficially a drama about the rape and murder of a young girl, the real subject of the film is deceit and lying. From the trompe l'oeil paintings of the main suspect René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), through marriage infidelity, to the smug hypocrisy of TV celebrity G-R Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), all is a sham. Nor does Chabrol shy away from reminding us that the film medium itself is based on illusion - a character reassures another "that's the sort of thing you only see in movies".

But for all the movie's careful construction, and despite my trying hard to suspend disbelief, some elements of the film remained deeply unconvincing and even ludicrous. In particular, I found it impossible to accept Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as a police chief with an ultra-mild demeanour and a penchant for pink knitwear. Also, the film ended so abruptly that I for one missed any final point made by Chabrol. Nevertheless, there may be viewers more discerning than I who will find more value in this movie.

Hi :) I've just seen 5x2 and I was stricken by the main actress's voice and was so sure that I had seen this actress before. I'm french and live in Australia for many years now. Here we have SBS (special Broadcasting Service) A TV station broadcasting many different countries movies) All I could remember from this movie was that voice...Then... this was of a police woman. It gave me a very strange feeling as if something was wrong, but I watched the movie and to be honest remembered little about it either good or bad beside my earlier comment. I would like to thank IMDb for the power of their database as in desperation I input "Valeria Bruni Policiere" and I came to this movie which I'm pretty sure is the right one. Please if you were put off by Valeria then, do not miss 5x2 on this account. So was the movie so forgettable or my memory failing me, I'll let you be the judge of this. Unlike the first comment chosen to describe it I can't remember being bored but,yes, I had to get use to that voice!