À double tour (1959) - film review

Henri Marcoux is a fully paid up member of the French bourgeoisie.  He owns a large private estate in Provence, where he lives with his wife Thérèse and two grown-up children, Richard and Elisabeth.  Having come to despise his wife, Henri has begun an affair with a neighbour, Léda, encouraged by his future son-in-law Laszlo.   Thérèse is determined to preserve her family at any cost and threatens to destroy Henri’s reputation if he does not end the affair.  She then turns against Laszlo, whom she sees as the cause of all this unrest, and drives Elisabeth to break off her engagement with him.  Henri is on the verge of walking out on his wife when the unthinkable happens.  Léda is murdered.  But by whom?

Claude Chabrol’s third film showed a significant departure from his two previous films, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, being markedly different both in style and in subject.  This was the first of Chabrol’s psychological thrillers, the genre which would come to predominate in his oeuvre. The film introduces themes and motifs which recur repeatedly in his work, particularly a morbid interest in mental derangement and bourgeois duplicity.     

With its garish colour photography and fluid camerawork, to say nothing of its subject matter, À double tour looks as if it was heavily influenced by the films that Hitchcock made in the late 1950s.   Like Vertigo (1958), the film has an eerie dreamlike feel and conveys the same sense that invisible poison-tipped evil fingers are propelling the plot.  Evil lurks at the heart of all of Chabrol’s thrillers, and here we sense its presence in the stifling bourgeois setting long before the crime is committed.   

À double tour represents one of Chabrol’s most scathing assaults on bourgeois values.  Thérèse Marcoux (superbly played by Madeleine Robinson, a major star of French cinema in the 1940s) personifies the middleclass matriarch who is confident in her moral superiority and yet totally blind to the moral putrefaction that surrounds her.  How ironic that she should be the source of all the malign tensions which pervade her household and which ultimately lead to a brutal killing.  It is much easier to blame the outsider, the troublesome foreigner, than accept the painful truth that malignancy begins at home.  

Chabrol’s inexperience as a filmmaker still shows in this film, which could account for the bad press it received on its initial release.  Of the New Wave directors, Chabrol was the one who had the hardest job finding his voice and an audience.   Ironically, it was the success of some sub-mediocre action thrillers that he made in the mid-60s which gave him the freedom towards the end of the decade to develop his distinctive brand of psychological thriller.   À double tour may look naïve compared with some of Chabrol’s later achievements - Que la bête meure (1969) and Le Boucher (1970) - but it has all the essential ingredients and prefigures the treats that are to follow.

À double tour offered the first major role to an actor who would, before the end of the decade, become one of the most popular and sought-after actors in France.  Jean-Paul Belmondo was a last minute replacement for Jean-Claude Brialy (the star of Chabrol’s previous two films) after he fell ill.  In what is virtually a career-defining role, Belmondo gives an impressive (and typically unrestrained) performance as a likeable anarchist, although it was not until his next film, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, that he became widely recognised by the public and other filmmakers.

© James Travers 2010

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