The Beautiful Swindlers

Widely credited as the founding father of the French Nouvelle Vague movement, Claude Chabrol is responsible for a body of work that is as prolific as it is boldly defined. A master of the suspense thriller, Chabrol approaches his subjects with a cold, distanced objectivity that has led at least one critic to liken him to a compassionate but unsentimental god viewing the foibles and follies of his creations. Inherent in all of Chabrol’s thrillers is the observation of the clash between bourgeois value and barely-contained, oftentimes violent passion. This clash gives the director’s work a melodramatic quality that has allowed him to drift between the realm of the art film and that of popular entertainment.

Born in Paris on June 24, 1930, Chabrol was educated at the University of Paris, where he was a pharmacology student, and at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. Following some military service, he developed an interest in the cinema and worked for a brief time in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox’s French headquarters. Chabrol’s true film career began during the 1950s, when he became one of a legendary group of critics for Cahiers du cinéma. Writing alongside the likes of Eric Rohmer (with whom he wrote a groundbreaking study of Alfred Hitchcock), Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and François Truffaut, Chabrol developed theories of authorship that are still influential today, and attempted to revolutionize the cinematic value system.

One of the founders of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement, Chabrol began his filmmaking career in 1958 as the director, writer, and producer of Le Beau Serge. Modeled after Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, the film charted the visit of an ailing city-dweller (Jean-Claude Brialy) to his hometown, where he is reunited with his childhood friend (Gérard Blain), who is now a self-pitying alcoholic. Their transference of personal guilt, and then, in the words of Chabrol scholar Charles Derry, “exchange of redemption,” gave audiences an initial taste of the deeply-psychological situations Chabrol would continue to examine with chilly objectivity throughout his career, and established him as an important new talent.

Chabrol’s next film, Les Cousins (1959), proved to be another great critical success, earning a Best Film award at the Berlin Film Festival. Reuniting Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain as two cousins who are polar opposites, the film continued to develop Chabrol’s distanced approach to his subjects, and also introduced the director’s use of the names “Charles” and “Paul,” names he would continue to use in a number of his films to represent, respectively, the more serious bourgeois man and his pleasure-seeking counterpart. The same year he made Les Cousins, Chabrol released his first color feature, À Double Tour; a crime drama centering on the effects of the murder of a woman upon a dysfunctional family, it contained a measured critique of bourgeois moral values and the social and familial causes of violence.

These films, as well as L’Oeil du malin (1962) – which revolved around another triangle formed by a bourgeois couple and an outsider – constituted what many critics refer to as the more “personal” works of Chabrol’s early period. When they failed to do well at the box office, he turned to more commercial assignments (such as Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraiche, 1964) that tended to alienate the critics who had championed his previous efforts. The director again won critical favor in 1968 with Les Biches, a psychological drama that addressed one of the central themes of his work, that of an outsider affecting a relationship between two people. The film, which revolved around the intrusion of a man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) upon a lesbian relationship, was a critical success, and heralded a new, more mature phase of Chabrol’s career. The film also starred Stéphane Audran, an actress who was both Chabrol’s muse and, for a number of years, his wife. That same year, the director released another tale concerning a relationship fractured by external forces, La Femme Infidèle. One of Chabrol’s most celebrated – and, to a number of critics, self-assured – film, it starred Audran as Helene, a woman whose marriage to Charles (Michel Bouquet) is drastically altered when Charles kills Helene’s lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet).

Time and again, Chabrol would revisit the theme of the simmering, potentially dangerous passion that chafed against the constraints of bourgeois repression – as well as those of a disrupted relationship – and did so through triangles formed by characters called Charles, Paul, and Helene. Que La Bête Meure (1969) saw Charles hunt down the hit-and-run killer of his son, and in doing so interrupt the relationship between the killer, Paul, and his sister-in-law Helene. In Le Boucher, released the same year, Poupaul, a possibly homicidal butcher, tries to have a relationship with uptight schoolteacher Helene, who has displaced her sexual energies onto Charles, one of her young students. Further conundrums of passion are on display in Juste Avant La Nuit (1971), when Helene, the wife of the adulterous Charles, must resort to an act of violence to squelch the passion that threatens her ordered bourgeois existence.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Chabrol began making television films and international co-productions, something that marked a departure from the nature of his previous work. His team of regular collaborators, who included Audran, Jean Yanne, Michel Bouquet, composer Pierre Jansen, producer Andre Genoves, and cinematographer Jean Rabier, also changed – with Chabrol’s son, Matthieu, replacing Jansen, and new actors such as Isabelle Huppert starring in his films. Huppert essayed the title character in Violette Nozière (1978), one of Chabrol’s most acclaimed films of the 1970s. Based upon the true story of a 19-year-old girl (Huppert) who was convicted of poisoning her father and attempting to kill her mother, the film achieved the remarkable feat of lending its unlikable protagonist a degree of three-dimensional sympathy, and drew favorable comparisons to Hitchcock, whose work provided Chabrol with a constant source of inspiration.

Chabrol’s films of the 1980s and ‘90s largely suffered in comparison to his earlier work; some critics noted that they lacked the unity and quality that gave the director’s films of the 1950s and ‘60s such enduring resonance. Still, he continued to work prolifically, earning particular international acclaim for Une Affaire de Femmes in 1988. Starring Isabelle Huppert as an abortionist who ends up holding the dubious honor of being the last woman guillotined in France (by the Vichy government), the film – like Chabrol’s earlier Violotte Nozière – succeeded in painting a complex, sympathetic portrait of a fairly unlikable woman, and offered one of the most insightful and balanced looks at abortion ever recorded on celluloid.

Chabrol’s subsequent collaborations with Huppert formed his most celebrated films of the 1990s: 1991’s Madame Bovary was a great success in France, while the 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie earned transcontinental plaudits. Boasting a strong cast that included Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, the César-nominated film provided an incisive look at class tensions, jealousy, and the politics of murder. Many critics declared that Chabrol was back at the top of his form. Although his next two major thrillers, Rien Ne Va Plus (1997) and Au Coeur du Mensonge (1999), were not as warmly received, there was no denying the director’s continued impact on both French and world cinema. —AllMovie guide

The son of a Polish Jew and a Russian immigrant, Polanski was born in Paris on August 18, 1933. When he was three, his family moved to the Polish town of Krakow, an unfortunate decision given that the Germans invaded the city in 1940. Things went from bad to worse with the formation of Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, and Polanski’s family was the target of further persecution when his parents were deported to a concentration camp. Just before he was to be taken away, however, Polanski’s father helped his son escape, and the boy managed to survive with help from kindly Catholic families, although he was at times forced to fend for himself. (At one point, the Germans decided to use Polanski for idle target practice.) It was during this period that Polanski became a devoted cinephile, seeking refuge in movie houses whenever possible. Shortly after sustaining serious injuries in an explosion, Polanski learned of his mother’s death at Auschwitz. His father survived the camps, and moved back to Krakow with his son. Following his father’s remarriage, the adolescent Polanski left home. Following a near-fatal incident at the age of 16, which involved Polanski nearly becoming the next victim of a man who had just killed three people, his father enrolled him in a technical school. He left in 1950 to attend film school, concurrently becoming an actor with the Krakow Theater and made his onscreen acting debut in Andrzej Wajda’s 1954 Pokolenie/A Generation.

That same year, Polanski was one of six applicants accepted into the rigorous director’s course at Lodz’s prestigious State Film School. Polanski’s second student film, Dwaj Ludzie z Szafa/Two Men and a Wardrobe, proved to be one of his most famous, winning him five international awards. This and subsequent shorts such as Le Gros et le Maigre/The Fat and the Lean (made in 1961 after his graduation) all featured the black humor that would characterize his later features. Polanski made his feature film debut in 1962 with Noz w Wodzie/Knife in the Water; as with most of his subsequent features, he also worked on the screenplay, in this case collaborating with Jerzy Skolimowski and Jakub Goldberg. A suspenseful, symbolic psychological drama set aboard a sailboat, the film told the story of a husband’s misbegotten attempts to impress his wife and a potential rival, a young hitchhiker they bring aboard on a whim. It is considered the first Polish film not to deal with World War II, and was applauded for its visual precision.It was also the only full-length feature the director made in Poland.

Polanski moved to England to make his next two films, the first of which, Repulsion, became a cornerstone of contemporary psychological thrillers and, despite poor box-office returns, is said to be the director’s favorite film. Polanski made his Hollywood debut in 1968 with the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby. As with his earlier works, the film was more concerned with psychological terror than cheap shocks, creating a sense of foreboding terror that many directors have since tried to emulate with limited success. Polanski’s next film, Macbeth, was a faithful but controversial adaptation of Shakespeare. Made shortly after his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the Manson Family, its graphic violence was said to reflect the director’s grief and outrage. Polanski then shifted gears, making a sex comedy (What?)in Italy before returning to Hollywood to direct one of his finest efforts, Chinatown (1974), a film that revitalized the nearly dead film noir movement and earned Polanski an Oscar nomination and a British Academy Award. He followed up this success in 1976 with the suspenseful and surrealistic Le Locataire/The Tenant; a sinister, paranoid tale of madness, manipulation, and vengeance.

The next year, the director made the news for a disastrous reason: While in Hollywood working on a project, he was charged of having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Barred from working in Hollywood, Polanski fled the country and resettled in Paris and did not make another film until 1979. An adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel, the three-hour long Tess, starring 17-year-old Nastassja Kinski, was the most expensive film made in France at the time. But despite its cost, it proved to be a success, netting Polanski an Oscar nomination and a César award for Best Direction. Polanski’s next film, Pirates (1986), was an all-out spoof, which was not a success. Frantic, his 1988 thriller with Harrison Ford, failed to garner either critical or commercial favor, and his next effort, the perversely erotic thriller Bitter Moon (1992) received notice mainly because it starred a then-unknown Hugh Grant. Polanski found greater critical success in 1994 with Death and the Maiden, his adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s play, starring Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver. Two years later, he branched out with the experimental Gli Angeli, and, in 1999, returned to mystery-thriller territory with The Ninth Gate, starring his third wife Emmanuelle Seigner. His next film, based upon the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman and admittedly inspired by his own shattering childhood experiences, Polanski’s The Pianist told the heart-wrenching tale of a brilliant pianist who eludes his Nazi captors by hiding out in the ruins of Warzaw. The film began collecting accolades from its premiere at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where it received the top prize, the Palme d’Or, to the Academy Awards, where it snagged seven nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Although the latter prize went unclaimed, as Polanski was still a fugitive from Los Angeles County and therefore unable to enter the country. Over the years, Polanski also continued to nurture an interest in the theater. In 1981, he directed and starred in the Warsaw production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which he re-staged successfully in Paris in 1982. In 1988, he played the leading role in Stephen Berkoff’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (again on the Paris stage). He’s also contributed some occasional film acting, playing opposite Gerard Depardieu in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Una Pura Formalità/A Pure Formality in 1994, as well as appearing in his own films.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:106743~T1)