Claude Chabrol

Fantômas: L’échafaud magique

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Fantômas in a mask

Fantômas: L’échafaud magique (aka Fantomas: The Magic Scaffold) is the first of four feature-length adaptations made in the 1980s for French TV. No less than Claude Chabrol directed this first one, with Juan Luis Buñuel (son of Luis) picking up numbers two and three, before Chabrol returned to round the series off. If you know Fantômas at all then it’s probably not through his TV outings. The infamous master-criminal appears in a vast number of novels and was famously turned into a rollicking silent feature by Jean Feuillade in 1913 (the first of five that appeared over the next year and a bit), returning even more famously on film in a series of … Read more

Hell

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Paul holds Nelly close

Strangely enough there are two films called Hell starring Emmanuelle Béart. This one is from 1994 and is directed by Claude Chabrol. The other (which also goes by L’enfer in the original French) is directed by Danis Tanovic. None too shabby, either of them. More strangely, both films are other directors’ movies. Tanovic took on the second of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Heaven, Hell and Purgatory trilogy after the director died. As for Chabrol, he was completing the film that Henri-Georges Clouzot started in 1964 with Serge Reggiani and Romy Schneider in the leads, which Clouzot abandoned when he got ill (he got better but never went back to it. You can see his footage … Read more

La Cérémonie aka The Ceremony

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Sophie and Jeanne with shotguns

Ruth Rendell didn’t like many adaptations of her books but she did like 1995’s La Cérémonie (The Ceremony), a reworking of her thriller A Judgment in Stone. She wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert put it on his Great Movies list, the Cahiers du Cinéma people named it the best film of 1995, and Bong Joon Ho says it’s one of the main inspirations for Parasite, his Best Picture Oscar winner from 2019. It’s a chilly, anxious thriller about a mouselike maid working for a rich French family who strikes up a friendship with a woman who runs the local post office. Sophie is cool, efficient, doesn’t say much and does her job so brilliantly … Read more

Que la Bête Meure aka This Man Must Die

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Hélène and Charles

Writing poetry doesn’t pay very well and so in the 1930s Cecil Day Lewis, father of Daniel, started writing detective fiction on the side. The Beast Must Die was his fourth crime novel. Translated literally into the French, it gave Claude Chabrol the title of his unusual 1969 thriller, Que la Bête Meure, which in English usually goes by This Man Must Die, and even sometimes Killer! As titles go all three are good penny-dreadful shockers but the film is anything but, even though it starts with the death of a child mown down by a car going recklessly fast and continues with the father’s quest to find and kill the driver. Michel … Read more

Cop au Vin

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Lavardin eyeballs Lavoisier

Bienvenue à Cop au Vin, a rare example of a French film that didn’t use its original title (Poulet au Vinaigre) in English-speaking territories when it was released in 1985 but instead went for a different French title. Poulet is slang for cop. Cop in vinegar? Shrug. Actually, it’s everyone else who’s in vinegar in this superficially straightforward policier set in a charming French provincial town where a trio of local notables are trying to corner the market for real estate and now just need one family to agree to sell up. Director Claude Chabrol opens the film with a quick scene at a party, which introduces the action. It drifts by but … Read more