Le Scandale
1967 Crime / Drama / Thriller
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Credits
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Summary
Paul Wagner has inherited a successful champagne business, but seems to have little interest
in either commerce or social etiquette. Some time ago, Paul suffered a severe head
injury and, despite extensive treatment, still shows signs of mental disorder. His
cousin Christine is determined to sell out to some American buyers, but Paul refuses to
hand over his stake in the company. Hearing that Paul will be staying in Hamburg
shortly, Christine appeals to her husband, Christopher, to try to win Paul round to her
way of thinking. In Hamburg, Paul spends an evening with a prostitute, Paula, who
is found dead the following morning. Unable to recall whether he killed Paula or
not, Paul returns to France. The same thing happens again, only this time it is
Paul’s English lover, Evelyn, who is murdered. Realising that he is going
mad, Paul finally agrees to Christine’s terms, provided she keeps her suspicions
about the two killings to herself. However, the nightmare is far from over…
Review
After the commercial failure of his early films – notably L’oeil
du malin (1963) and Landru
(1963) – director Claude Chabrol found himself straitjacketed into making
commercial films that would attract a sizeable cinema audience. The period 1964
to 1966 is not Chabrol’s greatest – it included such lowbrow fare as
Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche (1964) –
but it allowed him to continue making films and refine his technique, thereby cementing
his reputation as a serious director. This intellectually fallow period came to
an abrupt end when Le Scandale was released in
1967, marking the beginning of Chabrol’s “true” career as a filmmaker.
Thereafter, most of the director’s output was in the same vein: creepy, intelligent
psychological thrillers with a vicious anti-bourgeois underbelly.
Le Scandale is unlike anything which Chabrol made before (with the possible exception of L’oeil du malin) and serves as a template for a large proportion of his subsequent films. The characteristics that most define a Chabrol thriller are evident in this film, even if the end result is less polished and effective than in later works. First and foremost, we have the familiar upper middleclass setting. It is a seemingly well-ordered, rational world governed by simple status-quo-preserving rules and populated by seemingly civilised, rational people (the much-maligned bourgeoisie, those who acquire status through wealth alone). Yet just beneath this semblance of order we know that chaos, subterfuge and death lurk; when the balloon is pricked, these will break free, and the ordered reality of bourgeois respectability suddenly disintegrates. The world of the bourgeois elite is a fragile one indeed, but worse: it is apparently programmed for self-destruction. Another typically Chabrolian feature assumes prime importance in Le Scandale – the almost total lack of a reliable objective point of reference. This is what makes the film so baffling – some might say incomprehensible: seeing is most definitely not necessarily believing. As in L’oeil du malin, the viewpoint is primarily that of a single character, but what we are seeing isn’t necessarily reality, but rather his interpretation of that reality. In Le Scandale, this is the obvious thing to do, since we know that the central character suffered a head injury; what we don’t know is whether he is mentally deranged or not, hence the ambiguity, and hence the dramatic tension. Stylistically, Chabrol is being very daring, since the plot to Le Scandale assumes a far lesser importance than the filter by which it is related to us – that is, through a mind that could be in the process of gradual disintegration. There is a strong resonance with the films of Roman Polanski, although Chabrol somehow manages to sustain the sense of ambiguity for longer, and in a subtly different way. Even at the end of the film, the spectator is left wondering how much of what was seen was real or imaginary, and who, if anyone, was the villain of the piece. The most important thing though about Le Scandale is that Claude Chabrol finally found his voice as a film director. He had become the Alfred Hitchcock of French cinema. © James Travers 2006
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