Film Review
The failure of
Les Bonnes Femmes
(1960) came as a severe blow to director Claude Chabrol, so predictably he
pulled in his
enfant terrible horns and contented himself with much
less controversial subject matter for his next film, a caustic satire on
youth. Adapting a novel by Eric Ollivier, Chabrol came close to virtually
remaking his earlier film
Les Cousins
(1960), with a supremely dapper Jean-Claude Brialy once again camping
things up disgracefully as a self-loving member of the bourgeois élite
who blithely sets about destroying an innocent who falls under his Mephistophelian
spell (Charles Belmont replacing Gérard Blain in his first credited
screen role).
Les Godelureaux (a slang term referring to self-satisfied
young folk who like to seduce others) does at times look like a crude parody
of
Les Cousins, but despite the obvious similarities these are two
very different films. Underneath the playful surface hi-jinks (which
culminate in an anarchic toga bun fight inter-cut with a sedate meal in a
restaurant), there are much darker and murkier undercurrents to
Les Godelureaux
- indeed, it is one of Chabrol's most cynical films, one that casts the most
contemptuous and unforgiving eye on the shallowness and moral deficiency
of modern youth.
Les Godelureaux was not a success. Widely panned by the
critics (few of whom had any idea what the film was meant to be about), it
was one of Chabrol's biggest commercial failures and added to the prevailing
view at the time that the Nouvelle Vague had run its course. To this
day, it is overlooked and regarded as one of the director's biggest misfires,
and yet the film is not without interest. In addition to being a humorous
(albeit far from subtle) piece of social commentary, it presages so much
of Chabrol's subsequent work, both in style and substance. Helped by
Pierre Jansen's score (which has more than a touch of the Bernard Herrmanns
about it),
Les Godelureaux has an unmistakably Hitchcockian feel and
its theme of a man completely deceived by love (and unwittingly lured into
a devious plot) has an obvious resonance with
Vertigo (1955). But it is
Chabrol's burning contempt for the savage cold-heartedness of the bourgeoisie
- crystallised in the form of the cruelly manipulative and emotionally barren
character played by Jean-Claude Brialy - that is the film's most striking
feature. In this we have the foundation stone on which so much of the
director's subsequent work would be built.
At first glance, Brialy and Belmont's characters appear to be the most grotesque
caricatures of the central protagonists in
Les Cousins, and we can
see at once how the drama will play out, with Brialy luring the unsuspecting
Belmont into his velvet web, relishing the exquisite moment when he is ready
to inflict the coup de grâce. Looking like some queer amalgam
of Oscar Wilde, Svengali, Fu Manchu and Dr Frank N. Furter from
The Rocky Horror Show,
Brialy's Ronald is childish malignancy personified and the only thing that
could account for his victim's willingness to be duped by such an overt sociopathic
freak is an overwhelming homoerotic attraction. Bernadette Lafont is
ostensibly the bait in Brialy's Machiavellian intrigue, as wild a temptress
as any French filmmaker of the time could ever hope to lay his hands on,
but whilst the over-sexed Arthur is throwing himself at Lafont whenever an
occasion presents itself, you can hardly mistake the seedier, more subtle
and intense bond that is growing between him and his male tormentor.
Ronald's vigorous bisexuality isn't dwelled on (for obvious reasons) but
it is pretty blatant, for wherever this totem to elegant youth stands his
pretty houseboy is not far away - as demure and decorative as a Geisha -
and it isn't too great a strain on the imagination that the latter is as
much Ronald's bedtime playmate as his obedient servant. Of the three
principals, Lafont's canny Ambroisine is the only one who seems to be
aware of what is developing between Ronald and Arthur - it's a virtual replay
of the infernal triangle in René Clément's
Plein soleil (1960), with just
as much destructive potential. It seems plausible that it is Ronald's
repressed yearning for Arthur, rather than a damaged ego, that is fuelling
his malice - and how else can we account for the his apparent show of remorse
once the plan of vengeance has run its course? In the climactic scene
where Ronald confront Arthur with the truth of his deception he is in his
bath and wearing an oriental mask - naked and hidden at the same time.
The evil that has taken hold of Ronald reveals itself when the mask is lowered
and the poisonous confession is uttered, more as a ritual of absolution than
a gleeful show of victory. This is point at which our sympathies are
suddenly reversed - Arthur is bound to recover from his disappointment and
will surely find true love at a later date (the film's coda confirms as much),
whereas Ronald is condemned to a loveless existence, filling his empty hours
with childish pranks, futile games of deceit and sybaritic orgies - all because
he has no capacity for love. This unhappy, self-serving, pitiful wretch
is the fullest embodiment of a particular form of cancer, one that thrives
only in the bosom of the bourgeois class. It is this malignancy, the
stimulus for so much selfishness and unthinking cruelty, that Claude Chabrol
would assiduously study in later films, probing with a pathologist's keeness
as he tries to comprehend the vileness that lies within us all.
© James Travers 2016
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Next Claude Chabrol film:
L'Oeil du malin (1962)