Film Review
Henri-Georges Clouzot's follow-up to his masterful suspense thriller
Le Salaire de la peur (1953) is
an equally gripping thriller and his best known work, the deliciously
devious
Les Diaboliques.
Although Clouzot later became somewhat dismissive of the film and
considered it a trivial crowd-pleaser rather than a serious piece of
cinema art, it was to be his most commercially successful film and won
him the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1954. As in Clouzot's
previous film,
Les Diaboliques
starts out at a languorous pace but it isn't long before the
tension is slowly ratcheted up, building to what is assuredly one of
the most harrowing and unpredictable climaxes of any French film.
Even by today's standards, the denouement of
Les Diaboliques is shocking and
memorable, a blood-chilling excursion into pure terror. In stark
contrast to the film's lacklustre American remake
Diabolique (1996), which starred
Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani, this is a fiendish masterpiece of
tortuous intrigue and audience manipulation, intermittently lightened
by some unexpected jolts of black humour.
Les Diaboliques is based on
the popular crime-thriller novel
Celle
qui n'était plus by the celebrated writing team Pierre
Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (their first collaboration). A
groundbreaking film, it proved to be highly influential in the
development of both the psycho-thriller of the 1960s and '70s and the
slasher movie of the 1980s. Several important examples of the
psycho genre - notably Seth Holt's
Taste of Fear (1961) (one of
the finest films made by Hammer) - were a wholesale rip-off of
Les Diaboliques, whilst others were
content to take the basic concept of a vulnerable woman in danger and
replay the film's nerve-wracking final ten minutes ad nauseum.
Alfred Hitchcock was so impressed by the film that immediately after
seeing it he bought to rights to Boileau and Narcejac's novel
Sueurs froides: d'entre les morts,
which he later made into
Vertigo (1958). Hitchcock
would also adopt Clouzot's edict not to allow anyone into the theatre
once the film's projection had started for his subsequent film
Psycho
(1960), which is itself clearly influenced by (if not a direct homage
to)
Les Diaboliques.
As the principal villain of the piece, Simone Signoret gives a
portrayal of female villainy that makes Lady Macbeth and Lucrezia
Borgia look like the acme of feminine virtue. In what was a
complete contrast to her star-making femme fatale turn in Jacques
Becker's
Casque d'or (1952), Signoret
instantly and irreversibly transformed her screen persona with her
chilling interpretation of the cold-hearted murderess Nicole
Horner. This is Signoret at her most compelling, butch and darkly
sensual. But whilst her character is thoroughly evil, there is
sufficient humanity in her portrayal for us to sympathise with
her. By contrast, the other two diabolical members of this
infernal trio - Christina and Michel (expertly played by Vera Clouzot
and Paul Meurisse) - are considerably less sympathetic, the former
because she is a weak hypocrite, the latter because he has no redeeming
features at all. Whereas Nicole is morally blind, a
conscienceless lost soul for whom the taking of life has no deep moral
significance, Christina is a devout Catholic who alone realises the
enormity of her crime, and so she perhaps gets what she deserves.
Michel Delasalle is the worst of the three, a natural-born sadist who
delights in tormenting those around him (even forcing his pupils to
eat stale fish). Surely his wife is justified in murdering
him? Even when he is so obviously dead, Michel continues to
inflict misery on his victims...
And then there is the supremely creepy Commissaire Fichet, an unkempt
police inspector (the original model for Lieutenant Columbo), who makes
a habit of hanging about mortuaries so that he can presumably pick up a
case and fulfil his role in life, that of the human limpet.
Played by the excellent Charles Vanel (who went to Hell and back in
Clouzot's previous
Le Salaire de la
peur), Inspector Fichet is probably the most unsettling
character in
Les Diaboliques,
a man who appears from nowhere, has no background, and who is so
shrouded in mystery that he might just as easily be an axe-wielding
psychopath as an emissary from the Vatican. There is something doggedly
sinister and yet darkly comedic in the way Fichet keeps cropping up in
the latter half of the film, looking like a slightly
over-earnest Yorkshire terrier with a stick in its mouth as he presents another clue that
may or may not unravel the mystery of the missing corpse.
The wonderfully vile Signoret and Meurisse certainly have a nice line
in twisted inhumanity and demonic venality, but it is Vanel who is the
scariest thing on offer in
Les
Diaboliques - mainly because we haven't the faintest idea who he
is or what he is doing here. In fact, there is scarcely a
character in the film who isn't at least slightly sinister. The
dilapidated old school which Meurisse runs as a down-market Japanese
prisoner-of-war camp is staffed by teachers whose primary asset is to
look suspiciously like a closet child killer. The child pupils
are also a pretty demonic little bunch who look like psychopaths and
evil estate agents in the making (watch them carefully and you may
catch a glimpse of a very young Johnny Halliday, making his screen
debut under his real name Jean-Philippe Smet). Perhaps the main
reason why
Les Diaboliques
continues to shock is that it offers such a relentlessly grim
assessment of human nature, as bleak perhaps as that seen in Clouzot's
earlier misanthropic masterpiece
Le Corbeau (1943). Those
characters that are not obviously tainted by evil are just plain weird,
the kind that are most at home in a Harold Pinter play or presenting
children's TV.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the complete absence
of music (apart from during the opening and closing credits, a haunting
piece composed by Georges Van Parys). It is a popular belief
these days that music is essential for building tension and creating
atmosphere.
Les Diaboliques
proves the contrary, that music can be completely superfluous and that
it is possible to achieve the same result, arguably more effectively,
through careful camerawork and editing. Often the lack of
music can be more atmospheric than its presence. Indeed, it is the
oppressive stillness, violently ruptured by unexpected sounds such as
the tapping of a typewriter, that makes the film's last ten minutes so
utterly terrifying.
With its compelling performances, faultless mise-en-scène and a
truly gruesome ending,
Les
Diaboliques deserves its reputation as a classic of French
cinema and one of the greatest of all suspense-thrillers. Despite
the film's shamelessly populist subject matter, Clouzot tackles it with
the same artistic rigour as his more serious films, and in doing
delivers his darkest and most cynical exploration of the worst in human
nature. The tragic irony is that his beloved wife Vera would die
just a few years later, from a heart attack...
© James Travers 2000
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Henri-Georges Clouzot film:
Le Mystère Picasso (1956)
Film Synopsis
Michel Delasalle and his wife Christina run a private boarding school in
Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris. Delasalle is a tyrant not only
to the youngsters under his care but also to his wife and his mistress Nicole,
who works at the school as a teacher. In the end, Nicole can take no
more of her lover's brutality and decides the time has come to rid herself
of the abusive fiend once and for all. She confides in Christina, her
closest friend, and persuades her to help her murder the man who has ruined
both of their lives. The two women hatch a diabolical plot which involves
them luring Delasalle to the boarding house where Nicole lives and drowning
him in a bath tub.
The murder proves to be more of an ordeal than either woman had imagined
but their perseverance pays off. Convinced that Delasalle is dead,
they load his body into a laundry basket, before taking it back to the school
and dumping it into the outdoor swimming pool. It will look as if the
vile man got himself drunk and accidentally drowned in the pool. It
isn't long before this brilliantly conceived plan starts to come unravelled.
The day after they disposed of their tormentor, Christina and her accomplice
are surprised that their victim's corpse hasn't yet been discovered.
Anxious, they have the swimming pool drained and are stupefied when they
find no trace of the body. The next shock comes when the suit Delasalle
was wearing at the time he was killed is returned from the cleaners.
As a police inspector, Fichet, begins his investigation into Delasalle's
mysterious disappearance, it soon becomes apparent to him and the two killers
that someone is playing a very nasty game. For all the support she
receives from Nicole, Christina becomes increasingly paranoid, her mental
and physical deterioration aggravated by a heart condition she has long suffered
from. Is it possible that Michel Delasalle is still alive and has embarked
on a cruel campaign of revenge against his supposed murderers? Or has
someone discovered the murder and is now teasing the killers, perhaps with
a view to blackmailing them at a later date? The truth turns out to
be far more fantastic - and infinitely more horrible - than Christina could
ever have imagined...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.