Masques

I have to hand it to Claude Chabrol. He certainly has an eye for casting his leading ladies. For 'Masques', here we have Anne Brochet in her first feature film. From the moment we first lay eyes on her, she comes over both mysterious and enigmatic. Chabrol cleverly does not allow us to see her eyes -- she is wearing sun glasses due to still convalescing from a past medical condition. When her eyes are finally revealed, we indeed see Chabrol's casting astuteness. Oh-La-La ... such wonderful peepers. Brochet is very reminiscent of Emmanuelle Béart here.

This is one of the more conventional mystery/thrillers from Chabrol. Essentially a detective story of Roland, who's sister has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His investigations lead him to her last known whereabouts -- the country home of game show host Christian Legagneur. Roland poses as a journalist under the pretext of interviewing Legagneur for a book. Here he meets, and falls in love with, Legagneur's god daughter Catherine. Is it she who holds the key to the disappearance of Roland's sister? Watch the film to find out.

'Masques' is probably not one of Chabrol's finest but interesting none the less. Certainly worth a look for both Anne Brochet as the child like Catherine and Philippe Noiret's wonderfully over the top performance as the game show host. As in all Chabrol films, people are never quite what they seem. Unfortanately, the villain of the piece is revealed a tad too early in this one. To be fair tho, Chabrol does salvage the film in the final act.

Full of the usual fair of fine food .. fine wine .. and a few cigars smoked. Worth a look.

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This Claude Chabrol film is notable for being the occasion of the film debut of 21 year-old Anne Brochet. She does an absolutely brilliant job, but that was but a prelude to her magnificent performance in the later TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE (ALL THE MORNINGS OF THE WORLD, 1991), where she was unforgettable as the daughter of Saint-Colombe, the viola da gamba composer. The word brochet means 'pike' in English, so that if she were English or American, she would be Anne Pike. I cannot resist pointing out that my mother's best friend at school was named Annie Pike. A pike is a very large fresh-water fish, for those who are unacquainted with such matters. I wonder how Anne Brochet would get on with the British actress Rosamund Pike. They are opposite types, but equally inspired. It seems to me that in an ideal world, all pikes should swim together as friends, but then a pike can be a ferocious fish which not only eats up all the small fish, but will fight great battles against rival pikes. However, back to the film. This film features a powerful tour de force performance by Philippe Noiret, but I do feel that he went slightly over the top and that Chabrol might have held him back just a bit. Nevertheless, as an egotistical and exhibitionist television game show presenter on French television, the character was meant to be well over the top, so maybe it was OK to emote with such force. The film is about a writer (played excellently by Robin Renucci, who specialises in bemused and quizzical looks) who pretends to write a biography of Noiret, whereas he is really interested in investigating the disappearance of his sister Nathalie, as she had been living in Noiret's large house and then vanished suddenly. The story is very hackneyed in that something like it has been made into a film so many times, especially in Britain, and the basic tale goes back to the Victorian 'Uncle Silas'. Noiret is the guardian of pale, innocent and waiflike Brochet, her parents having died in a car crash when she was 5. (Noiret may even have caused that.) She is very rich, or was, before he systematically began stealing all her money. Soon she will 'come into her majority', i.e. be 21, so things are reaching a climax and he is feeding her poison slowly. She is thus the imprisoned victim who is being killed off by her ruthless guardian. Brochet had been close to Nathalie. Renucci and she become close, and Renucci discovers what the dastardly Noiret is really up to and the struggle is on to save Brochet from being murdered, and Renucci from being killed as well. Will evil win? Trust Claude Chabrol to know.

Masks is a gothic mystery of antique origin, successfully updated for a world a century later. To breathe new life into a well-worn story takes style, inventiveness, and brio - all of which Chabrol, co-writer Odile Barski, and a well-chosen cast bring in spades. The traditional shadows and spandrels of the genre are discarded in favour of a uniquely saccharine creepiness.

Philippe Noiret fits his role as smarmy TV show host Christian Legagneur (literally "the winner") like a glove. His program - in which elderly romantics compete in dancing and singing - feels eerily plausible. We spend most of the film at his country estate, populated with familiars, where he has invited a young biographer to hear his story. This biographer, however, has a secret mission that only reveals itself gradually. The setup sounds implausible, but Legagneur is just egotistical enough to be seduced by the flattery of a biographer's attention, and just manipulative enough to welcome an extra puppet into his theatre, even if he suspects the ruse.

Robin Renucci, as the fake writer Roland Wolf, brings youthful brashness and self-assurance to the role, making him a worthy opponent in this quiet battle of wits. Other notables include Bernadette Lafont, gleefully hamming it up as the voluptuous tarotist-in-residence Patricia, and Anne Brochet as Catherine, Legagneur's ailing god-daughter.

It's tempting to think of Chabrol as a New Wave pioneer who drifted into less promising genre territory. But dig deeper, and you find a filmmaker with a remarkably acute grasp of the upper middle classes - particularly the collusive, self-perpetuating nature of class power. Legagneur is no rogue individualist. He gregariously surrounds himself with like-minded confederates who share in the spoils. To put it more simply: the rich don't rock the boat - they eat veal cutlets on the boat and sip fine wine.

Legagneur laughs easily, with his inner circle and at society. He is a law unto himself, creating a hermetically sealed, ideologically baroque world of his own. This is captured in a memorable image: he sleeps beneath an Arcadian tableau, recessed into ornate panelling - the physical manifestation of his dreams. We glimpse the structure he inhabits whether awake or asleep: a world entirely of his own invention and control. He is a dreamer wide awake. Or, to put it plainly: a powerful fantasist. Years before the world came to understand the true nature of TV host Jimmy Savile, Chabrol had already drawn the silhouette.

The 1980s were a relatively fallow period for Chabrol, but Masks - this opiated flower from an unmapped canyon of dreams - stands out.

Intriguing, somewhat old-fashioned thriller where no one is quite who he seems to be (though the revelations in themselves are hardly astounding); for what it is worth, I had to make do here with a TV-sourced version sporting French subtitles! In any case, the film virtually hinges on Philippe Noiret's excellent central performance as a larger-than-life TV presenter with a weakness for luxury. Evoking Walter Matthau to a striking degree, he manages all of the protagonist's various facets (transmitting in this way his talent for manipulation) – going from the charm he exercises on audiences and collaborators alike, to the tenderness he demonstrates towards his young female charge (whom he ostensibly took on out of compassion after both her parents perished in a car crash), the ruthlessness he eventually adopts in order to achieve his goals, and ultimately the breakdown he suffers 'on air' exposing him for the contemptuous bully he really is.

The plot sees a young reporter apparently approach Noiret for the purposes of writing his biography (he is actually investigating the disappearance of a woman who had been the old man's guest). At the latter's country-house, he meets and is attracted to the girl (leading a sheltered life due to her 'delicate' health), who even reciprocates his feelings – to Noiret's obvious chagrin (incidentally, Chabrol resists making him a lecher since he is only after the heroine's money). Bland Robin Renucci is only adequate as the amateur detective, but Anne Brochet's classical beauty (looking quite a bit like Emmanuelle Beart!) is ideally suited for the rather melancholy girl he determines to save from the evil clutches of her guardian. Also involved is Bernadette Lafont (middle-aged but still looking good and with hair dyed blonde) as a hanger-on at Noiret's estate who professes to tell fortunes.

MASQUES basically resolves itself in a battle-of-wills between Noiret and Renucci (and eventually the former and Brochet, when it finally dawns on her that what the young man – and the lady who went missing – had been telling her all along was true). In its expose' of bourgeois double standards and numerous scenes of carefully-built suspense, then, the film emerges to be extremely typical of its director (as well as being reasonably representative of his vast body of work).

A writer comes to a TV personality's country estate ostensibly to write his biography, but seems to take a special interest in the man's goddaughter, as well as another young woman who had lived there before disappearing. He's brought a gun and snoops around from the beginning, setting up a cat and mouse game between the two men played behind the politest of French manners. Chabrol is a bit by the numbers in the sense that this plays out as expected and could have done with a twist or two, but the tension with some of the scenes involving the goddaughter is pretty good. I wasn't as convinced about the love story which develops, which didn't seem realistic or even necessary to tell the story. It was fun watching the mask fall during the TV show though, with Philippe Noiret really leaning in to the performance.