Bellamy (2009) - film review

As is his custom, police commissioner Paul Bellamy takes his annual summer break in the south of France, staying with wife Francoise’s family in Nimes.  Bellamy, a workaholic, would rather be back in Paris fighting crime and certainly has no enthusiasm for his wife’s holiday plans.  Fortunately, he is rescued by the unexpected intrusion of two men – his good-for-nothing brother Jacques and a 40-something stranger, Noël Gentil, who is in desperate need of his help.  The former takes a perverse delight in raking over old family grievances whilst the latter intrigues Paul with a bizarre tale involving a murder and faked insurance claim.  This is the kind of holiday Paul Bellamy prefers...

Claude Chabrol chose to commemorate his fifty years of filmmaking by paying homage to the world renowned Belgian writer Georges Simenon and his most famous creation Commissioner Jules Maigret.  As it turned out, this was the last film that Chabrol made before his death and it feels an appropriate way to end his illustrious career, exploring as it does the dark perversities of human nature within the framework of a twisted murder mystery.  Although Bellamy has received mixed reviews in some quarters, it stands as one of Chabrol’s most complex and perceptive works, somewhat less accessible and less stylish than the director’s well-regarded thrillers but offering a more profound insight into the workings of the human psyche.

Bellamy is an intricately woven psychological drama which revolves around three main characters - the ageing cop Bellamy, his dipsomaniac brother and a mysterious stranger with a suitcaseful of secrets.  The Simenon-inspired crime mystery is the bait which lures the spectator into the guts of the film, an exploration of the troubled relationship between Bellamy and his brother, two wildly contrasting characters who look increasingly like two facets of the same personality.  The deceit and duplicity that are exposed in the course of the crime investigation are nothing compared with those which Bellamy discovers in his own life.  Once the film is underway, it relies less on the machinery of the classic crime mystery and becomes a darkly melancholic study in identity.   

Chabrol’s mise-en-scène may lack the edge that it once had but this is amply made up for by the quality of the screenplay and some faultless performances from an exceptional cast.  In his one and only collaboration with Chabrol, Gérard Depardieu turns in one of the most intense performances of his career, an arresting portrayal of restless late middle-age that appears to be riven with burgeoning existentialist angst.  Clovis Cornillac and Jacques Gamblin are privileged to play characters that are just as intriguing and well-drawn, and repay this compliment with performances that are just as gripping and authentic as Depardieu’s.  Cornillac is moving as the habitual drunk who appears to have made a complete mess of his life whilst Gamblin - the memorable lead in Chabrol’s previous Au coeur du mensonge (1999) - is suitably cast as the ambiguous and slightly sinister stranger who sets the drama in motion.

Anyone who expects Bellamy to be a slick thriller of the kind that Chabrol is particularly renowned for risks being disappointed by this film.   Neither is it strictly a detective drama, even if a summary of its plot may suggest otherwise.  Rather, this film is better categorised as a character study of a similar kind to the director’s earlier Betty (1992), one that sets out to dissect a complex personality in an attempt to work out what makes him tick, only to conclude that the human soul is too unfathomable for the human mind to grasp.  One of the most intelligently scripted of Claude Chabrol’s films, and with performances to match, Bellamy is a darkly compelling meditation on human frailty that serves as a pretty respectable end to a truly remarkable filmmaking career.

© James Travers 2010

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