Claude Chabrol's The Champagne Murders

In Fritz Lang's Fury, twenty-two members of a lynch mob on trial for their lives, presumably cleared by the perjured testimony of their neighbors, are proven guilty by the camera. A newsreel filmed during the height of the mob violence containing the indelible record of their faces is presented in court. The scene is cathartic, as Lang presents the camera per se as an instrument of fate, the omniscient agent of grim truths. It is even more cathartic in its simplicity, for the concept of film-as-evidence recalls the very motives for the genesis of the medium, that of stopping time--freezing and thereby capturing an ever-undeniable reality.

Godard calls cinema "truth twenty-four times a second," a debatable point when we consider that the foundation of film technique, both narrative and experimental, is still that of montage, the art of putting shots together to convey something other than that conveyed by each individual shot--an art of illusion. But the truth of the image itself is beyond question; regardless of the motivations of the men who create films, and their skill at suggesting connections which metaphysically must not exist, film-making is supremely pure: a recording by the camera of that which stands before the lens, a reality regardless of the subjective interpretations often demanded of us, and usually given freely in return.

When we deal with movies, the reality of the image rarely coincides with our own image of reality. Although cinema-verite film-makers attempt to capture life as we know it, the presence of the camera alters reality, affecting the spontaneity of those conscious of being filmed. The greatness of Jean Rouch's Chronicle Of A Summer rests largely in its being a deliberate study of how lives change in the prolonged company of a camera. On another level, editing and use of subjective techniques, from point-of-view shots to the optical changes defined by the variations in different lenses, defeat any attempt at total simulation of reality--even in the best work of the best documentary film-makers, and those early works of Rosselini and Visconti which attempted to subordinate stylization to realism.

There are no rules to be drawn from any of this, but film history supports one or two generalizations. Most of the great films transcend a primary level of visual reality, that of superficial "slice of life" recording and, aware of the magical power of the image to convey an absolute truth, move toward dramatic metaphor in subject and theme, in order to convey ideas that will affect us, living in the one reality film cannot reproduce. The meaning of great film exists ultimately not in the script mechanics but in the treatment of script mechanics by distinct camerawork and editing. All worthwhile analysis of film, however literary in appearance, must hinge on our own interpretation of already interpretive images. But, children of media, inured to psychedelia and fearful of "verbalization," we must in tackling the narrative film understand some distinctions of literary-dramatic form in order to understand this transcendence of the first levels of visual reality.

In the commercial narrative, concerns are conveyed chiefly through genre films: westerns, war films, science-fiction and detective melodramas, among many others. The critical consensus has always been that genre restricts, an attitude shared still by condescending, if blind, people like Pauline Kael or Bosley Crowther. But for all the mediocre westerns churned-out which reaffirm genre as tantamount to cliche and formula, we have Hawks's Rio Bravo or Ford's The Searchers, both of which use genre background as a means of allowing their protagonists the fullest range of individual expression. For all the cheap detective thrillers, we have Lang's The Big Heat with its articulate vision of urban corruption and the need to fight evil, or Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and the fascinating conflicts between man and a hostile environment. Hitchcock's commercial suspense thrillers discuss serious questions of the nature of guilt and redemption; even Hawks's funniest "screwball" comedies treat with equal gravity the need for self-respect in an emasculating world.

Turning to camera styles, those conflicts quickly established in a melodrama, for example, allow a director like Hitchcock to bare to an audience the senses and emotions of a character through cutting, just as romantic abstraction allow a Sternberg to light experimentally with a daring inconceivable in plainer films. Themes and preoccupations as serious as these would be substantially unbearable treated in the context of everyday life--all films would resemble Judgment At Nuremberg. And, just as Poe and Hawthorne made their statements through the heightened reality of romance, the master film-makers are invariably liberated by the specialized contexts and specific characteristics of their chosen genres.

All of which brings us in a round-about sort of way to The Champagne Murders (Le Scandale), a wonderful film by Claude Chabrol which I submit to you, over the hisses of Wednesday night's audience at the Harvard Square, as the best film yet released in 1968. Chabrol, whose Les Coursins is famous as one of the first accomplished works to emerge from the French nouvelle vague, has had a troubled career resembling Lang's and Welles's. The films after Les Cousins grew increasingly serious, tended toward morbidity, and lost both money and the critics. In order to keep working, he made cheap melodramas, among them Le Tigre Se Parfum Avec Dynamite and Marie-Chantal Contre Docteur Kah, to list the two most outlandish titles. Le Scandale, financed by Universal, is the fifth and perhaps last: it enabled him to make a more ambitious dramatic film (Les Biches) which has restored him to critical favor and substantially renewed his career.

A comparison of Les Cousins with Marie-Chantal (you can see it dubbed on TV as The Blue Panther every so often) reveals the latter film ludicrously written in contrast yet wildly more mature stylistically, a riveting blend of calculated camera movement in sensual decor with brilliantly cut sequences of action employing the zoom lens. Far from stagnating in the world of commercial mystery films, Chabrol has emerged the finest new stylist in France, far superior to Truffaut (whose Bride Wore Black pales in comparison), and in many ways surpassing Godard and Resnais.

Chabrol describes himself as "not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live." The background of his films show an avaricious and innately destructive world of monstrous and banal people. It is, for the most part, only background, and the films are more specifically about complex relationships and interaction of characters. But where Lang's or Hawks's characters will confront their directors' vision of society-gone-wrong head on, Chabrol's retreat a little from it to defensive personal eccentricities. Both Chris (Anthony Perkins) and Paul (Maurice Ronet) are warped in Chabrolian high-style: bored and restless, willful and given to practical jokes. Chris thinks nothing of using his body to promote money from his wife or stealing from her purse, and Paul destroys a television set in a fit of rage after having terrified a dinner party with a toy mechanical mouse.

Spoken references to that unfilmed past which set up the plot premise provide an idea both of Chabrol's pragmatism and the point at which his imagination begins to make connections and build strange relationships between the characters: Paul is the legitimate heir to the Wagner champagne firm, an old and fabulously respected French wine. His father was swindled out of ownership by a man whose daughter Christine (Yvonne Furneaux) now runs the company. Paul has only rights to the name Wagner, this preventing Christine from selling the company to crass American industrialists who won't buy the firm without its famous trademark. Paul has calculately engineered the marriage of Christine and his close friend Chris, a beach boy "working" the Riviera whose singular passion appears to be yachting. Consequently, Paul and Chris live as neighbors, idle because of Christine's income from the company, money she dispenses (a) to keep Chris a dutiful husband and (b) to maintain Paul's friendship which she hopes will result in his selling the rights to his name. When the film opens. Paul and Chris pick up a girl; they take her to a lonely park and are attacked by a gang who rape and kill the girl, leaving Paul in a state of shock requiring intensive therapy (seventeen shock treatments) before he can return to his opulent, if tense, domestic menage.

Chabrol's films rarely offer this much insight into events of the unfilmed past--another requirement, in this case, of melodramatic genres. The grotesque levels of thievery and sexual blackmail implied make understandable an exhibited malaise (Chris generalizing supremely about all of Hamburg: "This place is dead. On Saturdays it's worse than France."), leading to a cynically Darwinian attitude toward self-preservation (Christopher: "I do have her interests at heart--as long as they're the same as mine."), leading to strange personal mannerisms (Chris's habit of repeating words and grimacing).

Les Godelureaux< and The Third Lover, Chabrol's fourth and sixth films, were exercises in confrontation between the malevolent Chabrolian eccentric and an order he found intolerable: in both cases one of beauty and harmony. When a Chabrol character cannot become a part of whatever natural tranquility he is observing, he sets out to destroy it. In The Third Lover, Mercier, a writer jealous of the marriage of a more successful author, ruins their lives by unmasking the wife's infidelity, thus indirectly causing her death. The Champagne Murders, while sharing this theme, is immensely more complex, mind-bendingly hard to fathom. Substituted for the romantic dream-world of the student in Les Godulereaux or the marriage in The Third Lover is this harmony of tensions between Paul, Chris, and Christine. Perhaps only unconsciously aware of the degree to which they thrive on it, Paul and Chris work to preserve the status quo, while at the same time bitterly complaining about the need for change.

Opposing pulls are acting on them. The working reality they have made for themselves comes dangerously close to cracking, filmed by Chabrol with the violent surrealism of a nightmare. Competently handling guests at party, Chris suddenly finds himself virtually assaulted by a grotesque woman who knew him as a Riviera stud. Chabrol distorts the sound, the background suddenly jumps from people in the room to a back projected screen of people in the room. The objective reality of the camera has shifted imperceptibly to the subjective perception of an unstable mind. Similarly, Paul, ambiguously scarred by the opening accident, strives to keep a control on himself but loses grip as he suspects himself of two murders he has no memory of committing.

But for every pull that threatens to destroy the menage, Chabrol inserts with instinctive rightness suggestions of its permanence. The duplication of names--Chris and Christine--assumes relevance when Paul picks up a girl named Paola, who is prompt-murdered. No possibilty is allowed for Paul's reversing or breaking-out of his role in the trio. His sexuality has been effectively destroyed in the opening accident. Although Chris and Paul are introduced as inseparable, interchangeable companions, wearing the same plaid jackets, Chabrol slowly separates them, Paul entering a world of shadows, Chris existing in a private world of secrets.

Chris's secret life adds the final layer of complexity to The Champaigne Murders. He is having enough trouble reconciling his past with his marriage with his friendship with his dreams of yachts with his furtive restlessness, and from all of this he retreats to yet another world, his secret affair with the woman played seductively by Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran. His dilemma is that of the Chabrolian malevolent driven to selfishly seek expedients, and that of the Chabrolian romantic clinging to an intangible yearning for love and friendship. The synthesis results in Chabrol's most complex and fascinating character but, with pragmatic pessimism, Chabrol makes Chris incompetent to deal with the schizoid existences he leads. Too many other people are involved, for one thing, and his warped vision is too limited to see beyond the immediate mechanics of juggling wife, mistress, and friend. There is a glorious scene when, after the announcement of the second killing, Chris goes to Paul's house to tell Paul they must "stick together, that's the main thing," that Chris will shield Paul who he assumes has committed the crime. The door is locked and Chris must deliver the speech from outside; he is suspended in geographic limbo outside both houses. He walks nervously about Paul's house half-looking for an entrance, then turns to look at his own house with its connotations of handling a wife and mistress. We must assume at this point that somewhere in Chris's soul he feels all security begin to crumble. But rather than enter either house, metaphorically to solve his many problems, he walks to a pond where he sits watching his toy yachts, retreating like Norman Bates in Psycho into his private thoughts.

The final breakdown of the worlds comes in a violently sensual display of color. Audran, coming out into the open, crosses the barriers Chris has established between his lives, destroying forever his success as a hidden prime mover. The lush blues we identify with Christine and, we realize in retrospect, with the dead Paola, are disrupted by Audran's red dress, then by the blackness of the stocking with which Christine and the other girls are strangled. The violence of the deed is muted by the awesome lushness of the images, textures of decor which make murder a forbidden ritual of the insane. Paul's awakening to the knowledge that he is innocent of murder, and his brilliantly-edited compressed journey through the two houses, shows Chabrol repeating in quick succession the camera movements and color patterns (yellow-browns and wine colors) which have dominated the film; it is as if we are living it again in one and one-half minutes, all its energy compressed into that time, building to the inevitable release of seeing from Paul's point-of-view Audran's red dress against Marnie-green wallpaper. The clash of red and green is foreign to the film's established color scheme, and its psychological impact is cathartic.

The revelations of the last scene display a highly sophisticated use of narrative exposition. On a content level, the truths of The Champagne Murders derive from scrupulous honesty--a retrospective look at the film resulting not so much in our remembering hints dropped conspicuously in early scenes as places where Chabrol didn't cheat. When Jacqueline the secretary types up the letter of transfor turning Paul's name over to Christine, she is shown in screen-left fore-ground in focus, with Paul and Christine out of focus in the background. Our eyes watch Paul and Christine because we think that they are more important; when we realize later that Jacqueline's seeing the deed provided the motivation for the final killing, we also remember that Chabrol did show her reactions in close-up--that our watching screen-right instead was not a product of directorial manipulation. In the Hamburg bar, a pan down to black nylons on the neck of a champagne bottle first resembles an adequate scene transition--the camera moving to a place from which to cut away--later takes on the meaning of honest foreshadowing.

But exposition (all the answers we've been waiting for) is relegated to an importance secondary to the meaning of the shocking last dozen shots. Realizing that Audran's secret world has brought about the destruction of his own ephemeral constructs, Chris reacts violently to destroy her, just as she (in Chabrolian fashion recalling The Third Lover) selfishly destroyed the tense harmony in which she was an outsider. Chris realizes spontaneously that Christine's unrequited love nonetheless was the center of his barren life; Audran screams about money; and Paul, innocent of crime but isolated from his familiar life-style for the first time, struggles half in confusion and half to prevent Chris from murdering Audran on the spot.

The implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away from the luxury of watching action in sharp focus detail. The effect is one of ultimate suspension, in every sense of the word, and the greatness of the ending is a consequence of the perfect optical realization of attitude and theme.

Finally, a camera style of slow and balanced moving shots is, successfully executed, one of the great joys of narrative film. When Chris goes to Paul to reassure him in a scene discussed earlier, Chabrol cuts together shots already in motion, joining a shot moving left in a circular are, a crane down from high angle, a forward track moving left, one moving right, and a pull back to wide-angle. The effect is again one of montage--the creation of masterful rhythm from smaller individual rhythms -- and again the illusion gives way to the truth of the image on the film. An eye-opening shot of Paul lowering blinds in his living room gives us in one static set-up three different perspectives, three different lighting conditions: truly an amazing revelation.

The simple moral of all this, and one Chabrol would probably agree with in his humble fashion, is that plot and script content, always captivating, seductively able to sustain our need for entertainment, is limitless in its capacity for excellence yet always a subordinate. The discipline we must cultivate is that of understanding statements of edited images. As in all high art, great film teaches. Even on the lowest level of its excellence, The Champagne Murders teaches us to see better