Les Belles manières (1978)
Directed by Jean-Claude Guiguet

Film Review

Les Belles manières was a remarkable debut for first-time director Jean-Claude Guiguet.  A regular critic on La Nouvelle revue française, Guiguet began his film career by working as an assistant to Paul Vecchiali on Change pas de main (1975), and it is Vecchiali's distinctive style and approach to filmmaking that were perhaps the strongest influences on Guiguet's work.  Even though he made only four full-length films and three shorts in a career spanning 22 years, Guiguet is highly regarded, a committed auteur who brought some unique insights to his bleak and often haunting portrayals of human relationships.  In addition to being an accomplished filmmaker, he was also a wise and articulate social commentator.

Les Belles manières is arguably Guiguet's best film, an intensely brutal and yet remarkably subtle examination of class separation that bears a more than vague resemblance to Robert Bresson's later films - notably Mouchette (1967) and Une femme douce (1969) - in its gently disturbing portrayal of an innocent driven to destruction by social forces that harbour an indefinable but powerful malevolence.  The apparent friendliness that the two main protagonists - the wealthy widow Hélène and her young male domestic Camille - show towards one another is a convenient blind, a mask of civility behind which their social prejudices are held in check.  It is the inability of these two characters to link hands across the class divide that makes the film's tragic outcome horrifyingly inevitable.  Guiguet's concise modern fable concludes with a jolt of despair, reminding us that there is nothing that divides people more than class.

Hélène Surgère, an auteur diva and favourite of Paul Vecchiali, and Emmanuel Lemoine, a non-professional actor whom Guiguet literally dragged in from off the street, could not be more different but they are perfect for their respective roles.  With her Dietrich-like allure, Surgère is the very personification of bourgeois refinement, an impeccably mannered picture of elegance.  What could possibly connect this divine creature with the stocky Lemoine, whose lack of poise and clumsy utterances (not helped by a speech impediment) mark him out as a member of the smelly hoi polloi?  Such is the quality of the writing and acting that Hélène and Camille strike us as being far more real than the trite archetypes they represent, yet they effectively symbolise the rift between the classes that was firmly embedded in French society at the time, and remains so to this day.

Les Belles Manières has some similarity with Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends (1975) and Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995), all three films depicting a class collision that ends in a more cruel and bitter way than we might have anticipated, although, had we been more aware of the seismic possibilities of class alienation, the ending would have been entirely predictable.  Hélène's unrelenting succession of little kindnesses towards her employee may appear innocuous but, for the one on the receiving end, it is a never-ending barrage of ice-lacquered condescension, intended to remind him of his lowly place in the scheme of things.

There is nothing inherently bad in either character.  Hélène believes her generosity to be genuine, but Camille resents it because he sees it as phoney.  It frustrates him that he is incapable of arousing genuine feelings in his employer (even desire), but what hurts most is his inability to hurt her.  They are like two species of animal that simply cannot understand each other, let alone communicate with one another.   By making such a show of forgiving Camille his crime against her, Hélène merely reasserts her superiority over him.  She even offers him a box of chocolates to show there is no ill-feeling - another insult, and one that promptly gets flushed down the toilet.  In the end, Camille ends up like Hélène's reclusive son, incapable of accepting his place in the social hierarchy.  Even this final act of rebellion leaves his well-mannered employer unmoved, and her indifference does her credit.  Society cannot function unless everyone knows his place.

Film Synopsis

Camille, an uneducated young man from the provinces, arrives in Paris to take up the post of housekeeper for the wealthy Hélène  Courtray and her reclusive son Pierre.  Not used to comfort, Camille soon makes himself at home in his employer's substantial Parisian residence and is treated kindly by Hélène, more as a distant relative than a servant.  Despite the kindness he is shown, Camille becomes increasingly aware of the immense gulf that separates himself and his employer.  One day, he can bear Hélène's synthetic generosity no more and commits a crime that should leave her in doubt as to how much he despises her.  Even when her young protégé is arrested and thrown into prison Hélène cannot bring herself to blame him...