Que la bête meure (1969) - film review

When his young son is killed in a hit-and-run car accident, writer Charles Thenier resolves to hunt down and murder the killer.  By chance, he makes the acquaintance of an actress, Helène Lanson, who was in the car which knocked down his son. Initially suspecting that she is the author of his personal tragedy, Charles pretends to be in love with her, but he soon realises that she is an innocent party.  The real culprit is her brother-in-law, Paul Decourt, an unpleasant character who runs a thriving garage business in Quimper.  Charles persuades Helène to take a break with him in Brittany, and they end up as guests in Paul’s large country house.  Paul turns out to be just as revolting as Charles had imagined - he hurls abuse at everyone and intimidates both his wife and his son.  Killing this horrible man will be a pleasure, but Charles is not the only one who wants Paul to die...

A chilling study in obsession and revenge, Que la bête meure stands at the artistic apogee of Claude Chabrol’s long and distinguished filmmaking career, not only one of his biggest commercial successes but also one of his most perfectly crafted films.  This, and the masterpiece that followed it, Le Boucher (1970), came at the exact mid-point of Chabrol’s most inspired and productive middle phase, which ran from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, and are among the director’s finest achievements.  Both films exemplify not only Chabrol’s distinctive cinematic style but also the themes that predominate in his oeuvre, in particular his almost pathological disregard for the hypocrisies and barely concealed venality of the bourgeois milieu of which, ironically, he was very much a part.  The film takes on a more pungent aspect once we realise that the bête of the film’s title refers not to an individual but to the complacent class for which Chabrol had an unreserved disdain.

Que la bête meure is based on the 1938 novel The Beast Must Die by the crime writer Nicholas Blake (a pseudonym of the celebrated Anglo-Irish writer-poet Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis), one of his books in the popular Nigel Strangeways series.  In his adaptation of the novel, screenwriter Paul Gégauff structures it less as a familiar crime investigation story and more as a classical revenge tragedy, in which a father sets out to execute the man who thoughtlessly killed his son.  At the outset, our sympathies are very much with the bereaved Charles (Michel Duchaussoy in one of his most memorable screen roles), but it isn’t long before the waters begun to muddy over and the nice cosy Manichean demarcation between good and evil is obliterated.  How satisfying it would be if the object of Charles’ hatred turned out to be a thoroughly heartless fiend  who enjoys persecuting women and children.  Such a man naturally deserves to die.  Paul certainly lives up to our expectations when he enters the fray, spraying all and sundry with foul-mouthed abuse.  Yes, we tell ourselves, the world would be better off without this kind of monster.  But then our perceptions begin to shift.  Paul is no more the Devil incarnate than Charles is a blameless saint.  The black-and-white conceit we were initially presented with, a just retribution for an unpardonable crime, turns out to be a mirage, and a dangerous one at that.

Far from being the villain of the piece, Paul (superbly portrayed by Jean Yanne in one of his very best screen performances)  is actually the victim - a victim of class prejudice.  It is not because he killed a child that he must die, but because he is an unwelcome intruder in a world to which he clearly does not belong, that of the well-heeled bourgeoisie.  His actions may sometimes be repugnant but they are always spontaneous, the result of bad breeding rather than a natural predisposition for evil.  Contrast the roughly hewn Paul with the characters who surround him, the delicately chiselled models of bougeois respectability who silently ruminate on his destruction.  If the accusing finger should point anywhere it should be at Charles, who exercises supreme cunning in the pursuit of his idea of justice whilst allowing himself to be overtaken by a single-minded desire for revenge.  And what of the beautiful Helène?  Is she as blameless and guilt-stricken as she appears, or is she secretly manoeuvring Charles into the position where he can strike at the man she has grown to hate?

Que la bête meure is not only a masterfully composed psychological thriller (one of the few Chabrol films that does bare comparison with those of the director’s personal hero, Alfred Hitchcock), it also serves as a potent morality tale, reminding us of the folly of taking things at face value and acting accordingly.  It is only in children’s stories that good and evil are immutable and readily identified.  In the real world, there are no moral absolutes, only constantly shifting shades of grey.  This is an idea that Chabrol would return to many times in his subsequent films, although perhaps not with the razor-sharp acuity that he shows here, in one of his most virulent expressions of anti-bourgeois sentiment.

© James Travers 1999-2011

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