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"Nobody wins in this mess." "Nobody wants to, I hope." The simple image for toxic relationships is a crab on a hook, the man does it for the squeamish woman and grins patronizingly, another woman does it herself and he weeps. Cracks materialize on the pastoral idyll long before the anxious brunette (Danièle Gégauff) pricks her finger on a rose, her fellow (Paul Gégauff) favors cigars, shirtlessness, and insulting her intelligence. Libertine openness is a veil for macho possessiveness, he encourages infidelity only to rage about neglect, paranoid less about controlling her body than her mind. ("Gandhi killed more people than Hitler and Stalin," he spits at her philosophical colleague in a soiree.) The move from bohemian countryside to suburban Paris further exacerbates matters, her path of independence and his of resentment are braided brutally. Husbands and wives, spiders and junebugs: "Quelle horreur!" "C'est la vie." A family affair for the screenwriter of Les Biches and Que la Bête Meure, before the camera with real-life spouse and daughter he reveals a Klaus Kinski side, silver-haired and square-jawed and simmering with cultured malevolence. Claude Chabrol wraps the self-laceration in gliding pastels, the better for raw emotions to burn through. As people drift apart and violence erupts, the idealized household gradually emerges as the fruit of pathology and mania. Varda's Le Bonheur harrowingly parodied, then, Beethoven and Schubert and all, until it resembles nothing so much as Buñuel's Él. "Bovary the hick" crops up as nasty party chatter, Landru at the wax museum gets a defense, sort of. "I believe in transcendence," declares Gégauff at the cemetery, still the bars at the close aren't Bresson's but Lang's, peering through them is a little girl who already has a little boy pestering her. With Clémence Gégauff, Paula Moore, Giancarlo Sisti, Michel Valette, and Cécile Vassort.
--- Fernando F. Croce |