WEDDING IN BLOOD (70)

Directed by: Claude Chabrol (1973)

Starring: Michel Piccoli, Stéphane Audran, Claude Pieplu

The Pitch: In a small French town, the corrupt Mayor's much younger wife is having an affair with her husband's Deputy.

Theo Sez: Masterly opening : very Bernard Herrmann score over placid, vaguely menacing shots of the near-deserted village, looking mute and stiflingly 'respectable' ; cut to a woman in a room, focusing on the back of her neck as she looks out the window ; a hand slowly sidles into frame, apparently aimed at her throat - but the hand drops, and the possible strangler merely pats her shoulder : it's her husband, and we suddenly know for a fact that he wants her dead. One of several glittering entertainments made by Chabrol in the late 60s and early 70s, its most marvellous aspect being perhaps the way it views its adulterous couple with detached sophistication - as if chuckling quietly at the film-noir familiarity of their predicament - then suddenly extends that sophistication to the narrative itself, with the cuckolded husband (and, we assume, prospective murder victim) proving quite blasé about the situation, all too happy to arrange things for his own ends. It becomes a tale of raw passion vs. civilised "arrangements", its subtext (and the reason why it was banned in its native country) being a tale of Leftist idealism vs. the mutual back-scratching of corrupt Gaullist politics-as-usual. Chabrol's eye for human foible is as mordant as ever, his stylistic flourishes (like the motif of portraits "commenting" on the action) carried out with sly understatement ; only the final, rather one-dimensional act is disappointing, but maybe it's a consequence of the film's origins in reality : facts do tend to be rather unambiguous things.