The Moviegoer Les Biches

at the Orson Welles Sunday and Monday

IN 1968 Claude Chabrol, fresh from three years of relatively impersonal cheaper projects, made a picture which restored him to critical favor. The film, which directly embodied his ideas about perception and morality, was called Les Biches.

"Why," the film's central character, sees things like a child. She wants the objects around her and the places she lives to be soft, friendly, and permanent, When people treat her roughly she is hurt and confused, for she wants to be loved by everybody and tries to make herself as lovable as she can. If this description makes her sound passive and dull, it must in continuing stress that she is the film's strongest person. With her need for security goes a determination to keep people as they are. All Why's efforts come to focus on her "family," and her struggle to keep the affections of Frederique and Paul gradually reveals itself as an obsession to make them hers. She gives herself completely to the universal urge to preserve earlier states of time and their ideal personal relationships.

Chabrol realizes Why's childlike outlook in a phenomenology of sensation. The objects of Les Biches melt into the soft-colored fields on which they are placed. Though Chabrol's compositions have a lot of spatial depth. the camera penetrates the spaces before it with such fluidity that one thing is not sharply distinct from another: changes of position in space occur so smoothly and continuously that people, objects, and setting appear to merge.

The film's phenomenology of sensation applies to the objects Why notices as well as the mode in which she perceives them. Poison daggers, animals' heads, all the exotic furnishings of Frederique's house in St. Tropez assume an irrational importance because Why, like a child, has an experience limited to that home. The content and mode of her experience dictate. like the phenomenology of voyeurism in L'Oeil du Malin and the phenomenology of emotion in La Femme Infidele. the actions of the protagonist.

The mingling colors and sensuous personal relationships of Les Biches give it a deceptively tranquil mood. Beneath its apparent softness lie a morality and visual style of steel. The fundamental principle of Chabrol's view of the world is the inevitability of change in the ordering of relationships. In his films the positions of objects in space are altered, often via camera motions, over time. Chabrol carefully organizes other types of change-the evolution of personal relationships being the most explicit-around this basic kind.

To change he then opposes a personality determined to preserve or achieve an ideal, static set of relationships. The romantic determination of his protagonists, to fashion the world according to their subjective demands, becomes destructive as it opposes itself to an evolution that time necessitates. Children like Why reveal this existential truth in a particularly extreme form.