Claude Chabrol (1959)
A double tour[1] is noteworthy as Claude Chabrol’s first colour feature and first thriller. It’s more impressive as the former than as the latter. Set mostly in the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence, the film was shot by Henri Decaë whose lighting and colouration are ravishing, especially the fields of poppies. Chabrol’s almost gleeful misanthropy is in full bloom too.
Wealthy vineyard owner Henri Marcoux (Jacques Dacqmine) is having an affair with the much younger Léda (Antonella Lualdi), a designer who lives alone in the house next to the Marcoux mansion and grounds. Henri’s wife Thérèse (Madeleine Robinson) is no more accepting of her husband’s adultery for being well aware of it. The couple have two adult (the adjective ‘grown-up’ seems wrong) children – Richard (André Jocelyn) and Elisabeth (Jeanne Valérie). One Sunday morning (the action takes place in the course of this single day), Thérèse, her son and daughter return home from mass. Shortly afterwards, Henri comes back from a drive with Léda. He could hardly be more blatant about his liaison: Thérèse sees Henri’s lingering embrace of his mistress and reproaches him.
Léda isn’t the sole cause of Thérèse’s permanent bad mood. When Henri returns home, she’s already engaged in a dispute with Elisabeth’s fiancé Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo), of whom Thérèse strongly disapproves. The blithely louche Laszlo, in contrast to his prospective mother-in-law, is evidently enjoying the argument they’re having, as well as sympathetic to Henri’s infidelity. Anything that annoys the resentful, proper Thérèse appeals to Laszlo. He even makes the effort to unravel her knitting while he awaits the family’s return from church.
Although the bare feet of a motionless body are visible during the opening titles of A double tour, the killing in the story doesn’t occur until nearly an hour into this ninety-four-minute film. While that needn’t detract from its effectiveness as a thriller, it is symptomatic of Chabrol’s approach. His priority is skewering the values and behaviour of the affluent bourgeoisie; the suspense plot is relatively minor. In the opening-credits sequence, the camera pans across a room full of curious objects (the corpse’s feet appear in the background). As a result, once we’ve seen inside Léda’s home we have a pretty good idea she’ll be the murder victim. By the time news of her death arrives, the identity of the culprit is clear too.
The first we see of Richard Marcoux, he’s looking through a keyhole – watching the Marcoux’s maid Julie (Bernadette Lafont) in her room, in a state of undress. In the scenes that follow, Chabrol quickly builds a portrait of Richard as a peculiarly warped Oedipal type. For most of the film, he continues to wear the suit and tie he put on for mass. He spends a lot of time in his own room, where he plays, or even mimes conducting, classical music. Mozart and Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet (Richard’s special favourite) are emblems of culture that Chabrol uses for almost comically melodramatic effect, and as a stick (or baton) with which to beat the runtish heir to the family fortune. In the extended flashback that eventually describes the murder the main interest comes from wondering how short, unprepossessing Richard will be able to overpower imposing Léda. It’s not entirely credible that he does so. In the climax to the story, it’s even harder to believe he puts up a good fight before he’s subdued by Laszlo, his physical and spiritual polar opposite.
Chabrol can’t be said to have failed to make an involving whodunit – making one clearly wasn’t what he set out to do. But his often derisive treatment of the dramatis personae means he also denudes A double tour as a psychological thriller. It’s not just that Richard is the only credible candidate to be the killer; it’s obvious too soon what his hang-ups are. Nor is it the case that Chabrol reserves his mockery for the moneyed characters. In the prologue to the main action, Julie parades around in her bra and pants for so long that she’s a tedious exhibitionist. Her audience includes a gawping gardener (Raymond Pélissier) and the milkman (Mario David) who’ll be suspected of Léda’s murder until Richard finally decides to own up. In the film’s closing, God’s-eye-view shot, he heads towards the victim’s home to put the investigating police inspector (André Dino) in the picture. The word ‘investigating’ is pushing it: the inspector interviews Thérèse but, as far as we see, no other member of the Marcoux household. As he goes to talk with Thérèse, he walks straight past Richard. I wasn’t sure if this was a satirical touch (Richard is such a wimp he’s bound to be ignored) or a piece of carelessness on Chabrol’s part.
In the early stages, the acting is cartoonishly emphatic – Julie flaunting herself, the verging-on-Carry-On choreography of the milkman’s reaction, sober-suited Thérèse marching disapprovingly across the grounds. This film offers the unusual spectacle of overacting even from Jean-Paul Belmondo, albeit that the disruptive hedonist he’s playing often means to be outrageous. This continues up to and including an episode in the centre of Aix, when Laszlo and his pal Vlado (László Szabó) get extravagantly drunk. Still, Belmondo has sensational presence. He’s far from the first name on the credits here but if A double tour had appeared a year later (it opened in French cinemas a few months before A bout de souffle), he’d have had top billing. And would have deserved it: he commands the screen.
Madeleine Robinson expertly delivers what Chabrol surely wanted. Thérèse, intensely dislikable at first, is hardly less repellent even when she becomes pitiable. The most nuanced acting in the film comes from Jacques Dacqmine and Antonella Lualdi in a flashback to Henri and Léda’s last outing together. It can’t be a coincidence that this is a rare instance of Chabrol’s showing his privileged characters – or anyone else, Laszlo and Vlado excepted – a bit of human sympathy.
3 August 2020
[1] This is the original French title, which translates as ‘double-turned’ or ‘double-locked’. Chabrol’s source material was an American novel by Stanley Ellin called The Key to Nicholas Street. In the English-speaking world, the film was released as Léda or Web of Passion, which is too naff to bear repeating.
