Poulet au vinaigre

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.

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.

The first half of "Cop Au Vin" is kind of muddled, and even borderline dull at times: lots of characters and backstories are thrown at you as if you're supposed to know them already (you may need a second viewing to take it all in). Things start to get more interesting when a vengeful prank misfires into something much worse, and then get even more interesting when Inspector Lavardin arrives on the scene. Lavardin is like a strange cross between Hercule Poirot (in his eccentricity and intuition), and Dirty Harry (in his unorthodox and occasionally even violent methods of investigation and interrogation). Another character I really liked was the hero's girlfriend (played by Pauline Lafont, who tragically died in an accident only three years later): every boy should be so lucky to get his emotional / sexual maturing via such a beautiful, affectionate and playful girl. The (good-looking and well-acted) movie ends with a couple of Agatha Christie-type twists: two of them blindsided me, but the one about the mother (Stephane Audran), for some reason I suspected it from the beginning. Leonard Maltin gives this ***1/2 out of 4 stars, but IMO he's overrating it; I'll give it **1/2.

I have sometimes written in some reviews about some Claude Chabrol's flicks that I didn't find "Poulet Au Vinaigre" a memorable work. However I watched it recently and it's not that bad after all. Of course, it is several notches below such incomparable works as "La Femme Infidèle" (1969) or "Le Boucher" (1970) but it remains thoroughly watchable. Congratulations to the English film distributors who found an equivalent for the translation of the French title into English. It is perfectly well translated.

When in 1984, Chabrol starts the preparation of this "Poulet Au Vinaigre", he endured three fiasco in a row. The eighties didn't look a fruitful decade for him. "Le Cheval D'Orgeuil" (1980) got bogged down in a spate of clichés about Brittany and betrayed Pierre-Jakey Hélias' book. "Les Fantômes Du Chapelier" (1982), his first venture in Georges Simenon's universe was well received by French critics but hardly anybody went to see it. "Le Sang Des Autres" (1984) was a turgid and impersonal film in his spotty but riveting career.

So, what could Chabrol do to get things back on an even keel and to be reconciled with both critics and his public? Very simply, to cook them a typical Chabrolesque dish to the core with a minimum of money (the filmmaker wanted to show that it was possible to shoot good films with a modest budget in times of inflation) and time (a few weeks of shooting were sufficient for him to shoot his film). Thus, he kept turning over the staple ingredients which made his hallmark recognizable. He needed the apparently peaceful scenery of a small provincial town. Here, he chose Forges-Les Eaux in Normandy which isn't very far from I live in Rouen! The perfect backdrop for his story. Then, precisely a solidly structured story with several functions. First, to grab and entertain the audience and his fans with a certainly derivative but catchy storytelling. Louis Cuno is a timid postman who lives under her mother's thumb (Stéphane Audran). They refuse to sell their house to a trio of perfidious, perverse bourgeois, the doctor Morasseau, the butcher Filiol and the notary Lavoisier (Michel Bouquet) who want to set up a momentous and shady estate business. As he is a postman, Louis gets information about this trio of upper-class people At night, Louis spies them and one night, he kills the butcher by pouring sugar in the essence of his car and the maverick inspector Lavardin (Jean Poiret) keeps on harassing him... Then, Delphine Morasseau, the doctor's wife seems to have absconded while Anna Foscarie (Caroline Cellier) a prostitute is found dead in a car crash. With his unconventional methods, Lavardin will find the truth...

It is at this reading that we fully understand Chabrol's mainspring for the last function of his scenario and perhaps the most essential ingredient: to unearth skeletons in the closet of his trio of bourgeois and to shatter the respectability of the provincial bourgeoisie which has usually been Chabrol's trademark. He tapped it again with gusto here. But his scenario also encompasses a dash of psychology to better construe the persona of his characters and it gives more substance to his work.

Chabrol served his film (and his recipe) with ingenious camera work too. It encompasses neat camera angles and fluid camera movements which can only rejoice the gourmets. To enable them to fully savor the film, Chabrol shot his story on an unhurried pace. There was also effort on the lighting and framing which are up to scratch to the aura the film conveys according to the circumstances. And the director didn't put aside his pronounced taste for gastronomy. The inspector Lavardin is nutty about paprika eggs. He has eaten 30,000 of them in his life! At last, the chef Chabrol spiced up his work with a soupçon of deadpan humor essentially provided by the apparently nice Lavardin. By the way, is it innocuous humor? One has to admit that Lavardin's methods to make the suspects speak aren't really reassuring.

Maybe the cast contains a few little drawbacks. Lucas Belvaux is not bad but often bland. Pauline Laffont's acting is sometimes annoying. Jean Claude Bouillaud acts a caricatured character. But Stéphane Audran (once Mrs Chabrol) is excellent as usual. Like in "la Rupture" (1970), she was Michel Bouquet's enemy. This is precisely Bouquet who dominates the cast at the level of the quality of the acting with of course Jean Poiret.

In the end, the chef Chabrol concocted the audience and his fans an eatable even tasty "Poulet Au Vinaigre" which pleased a lot to the chef's connoisseurs. It was succulent enough to prompt Chabrol to do it again with a sequel which opened the next year: "Inspecteur Lavardin" (1986). That said, Chabrol's "pièce De resistance" in the eighties came with the contemporary "Masques" (1987) which stood the test of time quite well.

After another undue interruption in my ongoing Chabrol tribute – incidentally, I messed up the date and he will only turn 80 on the 24th of June rather than last May! – I plan to tackle it in earnest now, a task which will occupy me till the end of the month (to go along with a parallel Dennis Hopper tribute).

Anyway, this proved to be another stepping-stone in the French director's erratic but prolific filmography; by the end of the 1970s, his career had suffered a decline but it got back on track with this enjoyable award-winning thriller (incidentally, the hybrid retitling for U.S. consumption was an unusual touch), one that was successful enough to warrant a sequel – INSPECTOR LAVARDIN (1986; a viewing of which is to follow this one) – and a brief TV series made between 1988 and 1990 which seems to be unavailable for re-appraisal.

Still, for all the film's typical elements of detailed setting, nuanced characterization and ironic outlook, it does not quite scale the heights of Chabrol's finest work due to an essentially flimsy plot: indeed, even such later – and ostensibly lower-profile – efforts as the recently-viewed THE CRY OF THE OWL (1987) involve a denser and more gripping narrative! This is not to say that COP AU VIN lacks suspense or surprise: actually, the latter concerns most of all the iconoclastic Inspector himself – in spite of a dapper facade, he is blasé, forthright (even referring to a character's effeminacy as "AC/DC"!) and not above breaking into premises sans warrant or intimidating suspects to get at the truth – belatedly called in to investigate a murder, only to be met with a very similar one soon after and, later, the disappearance of a woman, all of whom are tied to a property development company whose methods are not the most ethical either.

Jean Poiret, ideally cast here and who would of course reprise the central role in the sequel(s), had garnered a reputation as a playwright and even secured an Oscar nomination for co-writing LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (1978); then in 1992, the same year he died of a heart attack (at 65), he stepped into the director's chair with LE ZEBRE (which won him a posthumous Cesar for Best First Film)! Incidentally, later on in the decade, he married one of his co-stars here i.e. Caroline Cellier (who, years before, had been the leading lady in arguably Chabrol's masterpiece THIS MAN MUST DIE [1969]); besides the latter, the film under review featured two of the director's frequent protagonists in supporting roles: ex-wife Stephane Audran (playing an invalid) and a very slim Michel Bouquet. Also on hand is amiably kooky Pauline Lafont (daughter of Bernadette, another "New Wave" regular and who would actually co-star in INSPECTOR LAVARDIN) – whose promising career was brought to a premature end when she perished in a fall, at just 25 years of age, in 1988!