Summary
Henri Marcoux, a respectable middle-class man living in Province with his wife and two
children, is having an affair with a younger woman, Léda. His wife, the redoubtable
Thérèse Marcoux, is determined to avoid a scandal at any price, even to
the extent of breaking off her daughter’s engagement when she learns that her future
son-in-law Laszlo has been sympathising with her husband. Then the unthinkable happens
– Léda is found dead. But who is the killer?
Review
Claude Chabrol’s third film shows a marked departure from his two earlier films,
Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins. For one thing, it is his first film
to be made in colour, but, more significantly, it is his first attempt at a psychological
thriller. Whilst not as polished as Chabrol’s later works in this genre, À
double tour contains many of the hallmarks with which fans of his thrillers would
become familiar in future years.
On closer examination, À double tour is not so much a thriller as a cruel,
even cynical, portrait of bourgeois life. The Bourgeoisie come in for some pretty
rough treatment in Chabrol’s cinema, but in this film Chabrol is perhaps at his
most vitriolic and condemnatory. The narrative could only have taken place in a
bourgeois milieu, with its double standards, obsession with respectability and dangerously
repressed tensions. Chabrol’s evident lack of restraint earned him some
very negative criticism and, like many of his early films, the success of À
double tour was compromised by bad press.
The film features an actor who would, before the end of the following decade, became one
of the most popular and sought-after actors in France. Jean-Paul Belmondo was given
the part of the Hungarian fiancé Laszlo Kovacs when Jean-Claude Brialy fell ill
and had to pull out at the last minute. Belmondo gives an impressive – and
typically unrestrained – performance, in what was to be his first major screen role
(although it was not until his next film, Godard’s À bout de souffle,
that he became widely recognised by the public and film-makers).
© James Travers 2002
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