Una morte di troppo

I've seen a handful of Chabrol films and have so far been impressed with all of them. This film is my first experience of Chabrol's work in the eighties and while I'm not surprised at the fact that it gets lambasted by some; and it's not quite up to the great French director's previous high standards, personally I found this to be yet another great example of Chabrol's moody and brooding direction coupled with an interesting plot line and some good performances. The plot is not quite as deep as the ones seen in previous Chabrol films, but there's still plenty to chew on. The base of the story is Madame Curo and her son Louis. They live in a house that is wanted by two unscrupulous people in the village, but what they don't realise is that the son can read their mail, owing to the fact that he works at the post office - which gives them an advantage. The plot kicks off properly when Louis puts sugar into the tank of one of the men's cars, which soon results in a fatal car accident. After the disappearance of the other man's wife, a hard nosed police officer is brought in to investigate.

This film has one of the strangest titles I've ever heard of - 'Poulet au vinaigre', translating literally as "Chicken with the Vinegar". Quite what that means, I have no idea. The film has a fair few different plots going on, but the one that Chabrol seems most interested in is the one surrounding Louis, who finds himself in the middle of a "war" that is a bit too big for him and has to deal with his needy, sick mother at the same time. The murder investigation does provide the film with one of its main narratives; but since it doesn't kick off until we're halfway through, it's clear that it wasn't Chabrol's main concern. The acting is very good all round, with Lucas Belvaux making a convincing lead and getting good support from Chabrol's ex-wife and regular muse Stéphane Audran, Jean Poiret; who is excellent as the formidable police officer and my personal favourite, the exquisite Pauline Lafont as the love interest. Chabrol seems to have a thing for ending his films abruptly, and that is the case here as while everything is wrapped up by the end, it is done in a matter of about five minutes. Overall, it's not hard to imagine why this film isn't as well liked as some of Chabrol's other work - but for my money it's still a more than worthwhile thriller and comes recommended.

Poiret worked with Michel Serrault on several films, and wrote the script for La cage aux folles, one of the most successful French films of all time. He's a veteran in the industry, so Chabrol must have figured Poiret could improve the box-office figures for this tight little noir. Here again, Chabrol is condemning the provincial bourgeoisie for all the venality and murderous lust they're capable of.

Poiret doesn't disappoint. He's very rough with some slimy characters in this small town; it's fun to watch him dunking the lawyer's face in the sink full of water as he cheerily goes through the interrogation. He's a lot more fun to watch than Clint Eastwood ever was. The expression "pince-sans-rire" could have been invented to describe this actor.

This is a pretty conventional crime thriller of the 1980s, with some criminally dull characterisation and limp acting performances. None of the principal characters, except the formidable Lavardin, appears to have any substance, and the end result is by and large lacklustre and plodding.

Thankfully, the film does have its saving graces. Firstly, the character of Lavardin is well played by Jean Poiret. The police inspector's methods and persona are so unconventional that he comes across as more frightening and sinister than any of the murder suspects. Then there is Mathieu Chabrol's eerie background music which imbues a sense of menace into even the (few) lighter scenes. But the strongest selling point is the camera work, heavily embossed with Chabrol's style. This film has some very chilling moments which are achieved through a clever combination of lighting and camera angles. The style is that of a very sophisticated suspense thriller, even if the content isn't.

Although the films does succeed to some extent at a technical level, the shallowness of the characterisation and the overly complex plot drag the film down to the ranks - almost - of a somewhat mediocre television movie.

It is true that Chabrol loosened his grip after 'Les Innocents Aux Mains Sales', possibly horrified by his own insights. This is probably a shame; but the light, comic mysteries and thrillers he has largely produced since are by no means negligible, always entertaining and full of Chabrolian irony and motifs. In this film, believe it or not, he seems to believe in the God of marriage. Normally that venerable institution is the site in Chabrol of repression, a (usually literal) stifling of humanity, a closed, rigid world not too far from hell. With the relaxing of his style comes a relaxing of his world view.

As ever with Chabrol, a young man is being emotionally strangled by his mother's dependence, her emotional paralysis somewhat unsubtly figured in her being crippled. Although the title punningly refers to the detective, and the film is nominally a mystery story, Chabrol seems more interested in his rites-of-passage narrative - the detective doesn't make his first appearance for forty minutes, and doesn't dominate the movie until the last third.

It would be wrong to claim that this is Chabrol in 'realistic' mode, but he certainly gets a sense of a rural town community, its unexpected connections, the malicious schemes of its most respectable citizens; pure soap opera, maybe, but the idea of a society turning in on itself, almost incestuously, is convincing. Louis Cuno is the unexpected centre of the town's secrets, a sullen, gangly, lovestruck teenager, but as postman he connects as no-one else can, betraying his civic trust as he takes home to his mother incriminating letters to peruse, as a defence against plans to demolish their property, destroy their home.

Chabrol usually deals with the threat to the home from within; the extending of focus here, leads to a more relaxed film. Because the film focuses of Louis, whose not always legal actions are treated indulgently by director and detective alike, the other characters are more shadowy, more like caricatures, minimising the mystery, making its potentially horrifying conclusions somewhat perfunctory. Chabrol doesn't let his hero off too easily, as we suspect Louis is exchanging one mother for another; his initiation into the delights of sex is in the grounds of a country house, a typically Chabrolian green space blighted by the surveilling eyes of the detective.

Spying is one of the main themes of the film, from the camera taking pictures at the beginning, to Louis' nocturnal amateur detective work. In such a community, private and public space are not so clearly marked, and one's identity is as much defined by one's public role (doctor, butcher etc.) as by any personal merit, so there is something creepy as well as comic about this police (the Law) spying on the sexual act.

There is something creepy about this policeman, anyway. Unlike the rooted, defined villagers, he is a rootless stranger, without motive, personality, role, except to solve the crime (he keeps insisting that he is the 'flic'), in order to do which he resorts to alarming thuggery, even more objectionable than Harry Callahan, whose heart at least was in the right place. Don't be fooled by Chabrol's autumnal cheerfulness - this is a vinaigre with a very bitter aftertaste.

Adapted by Dominique Roulet from his own novel it doesn't take long to realise that we are in Georges Simenon territory here. Sinister provincial undercurrents, skeletons in the closet and a collection of morally ambiguous, largely dysfunctional characters. It also enables director Claude Chabrol to take aim at his customary target of the beastly bourgoisie. Ingredient X comes in the shape of the truly extraordinary character that is Inspector Jean Lavardin.

He is a maverick who seems to appear from nowhere, is answerable to no one, assumes the role of judge and jury and has his own particular methods of extracting the truth! Jean Poiret is simply superb in the role.

The convoluted plot is almost as labyrinthine as that of 'The Big Sleep' but the performances carry us through. Great support here from M. Chabrol's former spouse Stéphane Audran as wheelchair-bound Madame Cuno and inveterate scene-stealer Michel Bouquet as a flakey lawyer. He had previously appeared in three of Chabrol's worst films and two of his best. Sultry Caroline Cellier, married at the time to Poiret, is the vamp. The nymphet is the enchanting Pauline Lafont who tragically met with a fatal accident at just 25.

Chabrol again utilises his favoured cinematographer Jean Rabier and the suitably menacing score is supplied by his son Matthieu.

Striking while the iron was hot, Chabrol and the excellent Poiret followed up the following year with 'Inspector Lavardin' after which the character was consigned to the small screen. Unsurprisingly Dominique Roulet went on to write a Maigret television series in the late 90's. It is indeed a cruel irony that the follow-up featured Bernardette Lafont, mother of the ill-fated Pauline.

Critics at the time welcomed this film as Chabrol's return to form and although nothing that he did thereafter could really compare with the ones he gave us during his Golden Period from 1968 to 1973, he still produced a few interesting, unsettling and slickly professional pieces, notably those starring super Huppert. Strangely, an actor whose persona seemed ideally suited to Chabrol's oeuvre, Gérard Depardieu, worked with him just once on 'Inspector Bellamy'. Not only Chabrol's swansong but a film which has more than a passing nod to Simenon.