Claude Chabrol

A pharmacist's son in the Creuse

Claude Chabrol was born in Paris on 24 June 1930 into a family of pharmacists. His father and grandfather both kept chemists' shops, and the assumption was that he would do the same.[1]

When war came he was sent to his grandmother at Sardent, a village in the Creuse in central France, and he spent the occupation years there. He was twelve when he set up a film club in a barn in the village, charging admission and running whatever prints he could get hold of. He later said that this was where he learned what an audience does.

Back in Paris after the war he enrolled to study pharmacy, as expected, and also read law and literature at the Sorbonne. He finished none of it. He spent the time in the cinemas of the Latin Quarter instead, at the Cinémathèque française and the film clubs, where he met the people he would work with for the rest of his life.

Cahiers du cinéma

Chabrol joined the young critics writing for André Bazin's magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the early 1950s. The group — Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol — argued that a film's real author is its director, and that American studio directors dismissed as entertainers were among the greatest artists working.

Criticism paid almost nothing, so Chabrol took a job in the publicity department of Twentieth Century Fox in Paris, writing press material for films he often disliked. He was sacked, by his own account, for insubordination.

In 1957 he and Éric Rohmer published Hitchcock, a book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock's films. It was one of the first serious critical books on a director then regarded as a maker of thrillers. It set out the reading of Hitchcock that most later criticism has worked from: the transfer of guilt from one character to another, and the Catholic structure underneath the suspense.[1]

Le Beau Serge and the money

Chabrol's first wife, Agnès Goute, received a large inheritance in the mid-1950s. Chabrol used it to make a film.

Le Beau Serge was shot in the winter of 1957 in Sardent, the village where he had spent the war, with Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain in the leads. A young man comes home from the city to find his childhood friend a drunk, and sets about saving him. It was released in February 1959 and won the Prix Jean Vigo.[2]

It is usually called the first feature of the New Wave, or at least the first from the Cahiers group, and it arrived before Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless. What mattered as much was the money it made. Chabrol set up a production company, Ajym Films, and put its money into films by his friends, including Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us and Rohmer's first feature, The Sign of Leo.[3]

Les Cousins and the lean years

Les Cousins, released later in 1959, reversed the first film: a studious country boy comes to Paris to live with his cynical, wealthy cousin, and is destroyed by it. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin and did strong business.

The films Chabrol made after Les Cousins did not sell tickets. Through most of the 1960s Chabrol worked for hire and had failures, and by the middle of the decade he was making spy spoofs with Roger Hanin as a secret agent called the Tiger. He never apologised for them. He said repeatedly that there is no difference in kind between a commissioned picture and a personal one, and that a director who waits for perfect conditions does not work.

The great run, 1968 to 1973

Between 1968 and 1973 Chabrol made the films his reputation rests on, most of them with his second wife, the actress Stéphane Audran, and the cinematographer Jean Rabier.

Les Biches, in 1968, began the run. La Femme infidèle followed in 1969, in which a husband kills his wife's lover and the marriage improves. Que la bête meure came the same year, about a father hunting the hit-and-run driver who killed his son. Le Boucher, in 1970, has a village schoolteacher slowly understand that the butcher courting her is murdering local women.

The pattern is consistent. A settled middle-class household in a French provincial town is shown in detail — the meals, the money, the manners — and something violent is already inside it. Chabrol filmed the surface calmly and at length, and let the audience see the crack before the characters do. Critics began calling him the French Hitchcock, a label he accepted and mocked in equal measure.

Isabelle Huppert

From 1978 Chabrol's principal collaborator was the actress Isabelle Huppert, who appeared in seven of his films.

Violette Nozière in 1978 cast her as a real figure, a Paris teenager who poisoned her parents in 1933, and won her the best actress prize at Cannes. Une affaire de femmes in 1988, released in English as Story of Women, cast her as Marie Latour. The character is built on Marie-Louise Giraud, who was guillotined in 1943 for performing abortions in Vichy France, and the part won Huppert the acting prize at Venice. They made Madame Bovary together in 1991, and La Cérémonie in 1995, in which a housekeeper and a postmistress kill the family who employ one of them.

A working life

Chabrol worked constantly and made no secret of enjoying it. He shot fast, kept the same crew for decades, cast his family — his son Matthieu Chabrol wrote the music for most of the later films, and his son Thomas acted in them — and ate well. His interest in food was a running joke in French press coverage, and it is visible in the films, where dinner scenes carry a great deal of the plot.

He was married three times: to Agnès Goute, then from 1964 to Stéphane Audran, then to Aurore Paquiss, who had been his script supervisor and who remained his wife until his death.

His last decade included Merci pour le chocolat in 2000 and La Fleur du mal in 2003. L'Ivresse du pouvoir, in 2006, follows an investigating magistrate pursuing a corrupt industrialist, and was widely read as a version of a real French corruption case. His final film, Bellamy, with Gérard Depardieu as a police inspector on holiday, came out in 2009.

Death

Claude Chabrol died in Paris on 12 September 2010, aged eighty. He is buried in the tenth division of Père Lachaise cemetery.[4]

The French government and the film industry treated the death as a national loss. The obituaries agreed on the same point. He had made more films than anyone else of his generation, kept working through decades when the others stopped, and never separated his commercial pictures from his serious ones.[5]

Why Claude Chabrol matters

Chabrol made the first New Wave feature. Le Beau Serge is the film that showed the Cahiers critics that they could actually make films, and the company he built with its profits paid for work by Rivette and Rohmer that would not otherwise have been shot.

The larger achievement is the body of work. Over fifty years he built a portrait of the French provincial bourgeoisie — its houses, its money, its meals, and the violence that runs under all three — that no other director attempted at that length. He did it without ever raising his voice, and the films look plainer than they are.