Claude Chabrol (1958)
Le beau Serge has often been cited as the French New Wave’s very first film – though not by its writer-director. Introducing this BFI screening, Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze, a professor of French literature and film at Durham University, explained that Claude Chabrol, within a year or two of the film‘s premiere at the 1958 Cannes Festival, was disparaging the French media for promoting him and his former Cahiers du Cinéma colleagues ‘like a new soap brand’. Although Chabrol was willing to call the group a ‘co-operative’, you can understand why he resisted the midwife-of-the-nouvelle–vague label – or, at least, the implication that, in making his first feature, he consciously set out to start a cinema movement. Still, it’s a chronological fact that Le beau Serge reached the screen before any full-length offering by Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer or Jacques Rivette. I liked Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze’s description of Chabrol’s debut film as the New Wave’s ‘unofficial birth certificate’.
Dousteyssier-Khoze’s introduction was exemplary for its clarity and in outlining so well the film’s context. She mentioned that Chabrol took a dim view of Le beau Serge as well as of the French press, reckoning the end product too heavy on religious symbolism; but also that the film he eventually released, which runs ninety-seven minutes, is barely half the length of the one that he made. This goes some way to explaining why the narrative feels bitty and includes some rather jarring cuts. For example, the story’s two principals have a disagreement that’s seemingly at its height when Chabrol cuts, one of the pair then immediately says, ‘I see what you mean’, and the dispute is over. Those two principals are the title character (Gérard Blain) and his erstwhile friend François (Jean-Claude Brialy). At the start of Le beau Serge, François, who’s been living in Paris and is recovering from tuberculosis, returns to Sardent, his hometown.
Chabrol was born in Paris, in 1930, but Sardent, a small town in the Creuse department, is where he spent much of the World War II years, living with his grandparents while his parents remained in Paris, working for the Resistance. Sardent is also where he shot Le beau Serge on location, casting townspeople without acting experience alongside Blain, Brialy, Bernadette Lafont and other professionals. Chabrol rued the loss of a large part of what he considered to be the film’s quasi-documentary aspect. The writer and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol was famous for his portraits – on page, stage and screen – of rural life in southern France (he’s perhaps best known nowadays as the author of the novels on which Claude Berri’s 1986 films Jean de Florette and Manon des sources are based). In retrospect, Chabrol referred wistfully to the ‘Pagnol side’ of Le beau Serge – ‘You saw the baker making his bread, the gossips in the stores, the schoolchildren running along the streams …’ Most of this evidently ended up on the cutting-room floor.
The epithet in the title is partly ironic. That is, Serge is not in good shape even if he is good-looking. When I saw him in Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959), Gérard Blain sometimes reminded me of Dean Stockwell; here, playing a roiling mess of bitterness and fear, Blain also brings James Dean to mind. Back in Sardent for the first time in years, François, on first catching sight of Serge, hardly recognises his old mate, who is now a far from functioning alcoholic. Serge planned to leave Sardent, as François did, until he got a local girl, Yvonne (Michèle Méritz), pregnant. He married her and stayed put. Their baby was born with a disability and died in infancy. Yvonne is now pregnant again, but Serge gloomily fears that history will repeat itself. His verbal and physical abuse of his wife is getting worse. Serge seems also to have a history with Yvonne’s promiscuous younger sister, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who lives with her father, Glomaud (Edmond Beauchamp) – though he’s rumoured not to be her biological father. What’s certain is that Glomaud, like Serge, is nearly always drunk, and even more aggressively so. When he gets wind that François is sleeping with Marie, Glomaud threatens him with violence; when François tells him that she’s not his daughter, Glomaud acts on the lustful feelings he’s always had for Marie and rapes her.
There are moments when Serge and François talk as old friends, remembering the good times. More often, their conversations turn into heated arguments. At a dance, François takes Serge to task for mistreating Yvonne, so Serge beats him up, encouraged by other locals who want to see him ‘teach the Parisian a lesson’. Earlier on in the film, François has talked with the parish priest (Claude Cerval), whose regular congregation has dwindled to a handful of elderly women. After the fracas outside the dance hall, the priest advises François to leave Sardent, fearing that his presence is doing more harm than good. François stubbornly determines to do and prove otherwise – to stay and to make a positive difference.
Chabrol’s regret about the rural texture he was virtually forced to sacrifice, is understandable. Other than the opening sequences and the set piece of the dance, Le beau Serge doesn’t convey much sense of a routine community life continuing beneath the film’s surface melodrama. There were other elements of the set-up that I struggled to understand. Why Glomaud, seemingly oblivious to years of local gossip about Marie, is so quickly convinced that François knows that Glomaud didn’t father her. Especially why François, given his recent illness, decides to convalesce in a seemingly isolated place with few mod cons during a harsh winter (this seems to take fresh-air-is-good-for-you thinking too far). What’s more, the legacy of his TB is one of those screen conditions that afflict a character only when they’re serving a crucial plot purpose. In the aftermath of Glomaud’s rape of Marie, François chases him across countryside, tracks him down to a cemetery, and knocks him to the ground. It’s only then that François, barely out of breath, remembers to give a little cough.
In relatively sober moments, Serge wants François to be a hero – and that’s what he eventually is. The character of François doesn’t quite hang together, though. He arrives in Sardent wearing a suit and tie, and his wardrobe throughout marks him out as different from the people he grew up among. He appears to represent a professional success story, but it’s never clear what he’s been doing away from Sardent, other than dabbling in theology, and the priest asks him, in their first meeting, what he’s planning to do with his life. But his fragile lungs certainly matter in the film’s climax, which is also where the story’s religious metaphors emphatically take centre stage – atonement, self-sacrifice, the redeeming birth of a baby. When Yvonne goes into labour, the local doctor is as hard to get hold of as Serge. In blizzard conditions, François, on foot, resolves to find them both. The doctor (André Dino) is attending and wants to stay with the ailing Glomaud. It’s the latter who insists that, since Marie can care for him, the doctor should deliver Yvonne’s baby instead. Although it’s dead of night, François then somehow finds Serge, who’s asleep, dead drunk, in a chicken pen. Though desperately weak himself, François drags his friend home and brings him to his senses just in time to see the birth of a healthy baby boy. François loses consciousness as Serge cries tears of joy.
Henri Decaë’s black-and-white cinematography, which often uses natural light, is very eloquent. (Decaë’s camera operator was Jean Rabier, who would become Chabrol’s regular DP in the years to follow.) The acting is good, except for Bernadette Lafont’s flirtatious turn as Marie, which amounts to a performer determined to grab attention rather than a characterisation. In the smaller roles, Claude Cerval and Jeanne Pérez (as François’s nosily solicitious landlady) both do well, but Michel Creuse, as the local baker, deserves special praise. Creuse really was a baker in Sardent at the time – he’s the only actual local to make an impression amid the acting pros. Like Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy would again play a very different type in Chabrol’s next film, Les cousins, but it’s Blain’s versatility that you appreciate watching Le beau Serge. The film is better than Les cousins (and way better than Wedding in Blood (1973), my first course in this month’s Chabrol season) and interesting in plenty of ways. I was glad to see it but I must say even more glad to hear Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze’s introduction – one of the best that I’ve listened to in more than twenty years of BFI filmgoing.
20 September 2026
