Claude Chabrol (1970)
A butcher by profession is revealed to be a serial killer who knifes his young female victims. His psychological profile is no less obvious. Popaul has been brutalised by fifteen years in the army, during which time he returned to his home village only once – for his mother’s funeral. (He hated his father – also a butcher.) He seems drawn to Hélène, the headmistress of the village school, through a combination of sexual desire and emotional retardation. In comparison, Hélène is, for a while anyway, an enigma – like Popaul, we wonder why this poised and beautiful woman is also solitary. Yet when she explains that she had a hurtful experience in love ten years ago and doesn’t want to get involved again, she tells us all there is to know about her. The themes of Le Boucher are uninspired but it’s engrossing and sometimes powerful, thanks to a combination of the two lead performances, Claude Chabrol’s assured handling of conventional thriller elements, and a more distinctive, near-documentary realisation of the Perigòrd village in which the story takes place (some of the actual villagers play minor roles in the film).
The cave paintings over the opening credits – like Hélène‘s conversation with her pupils about Cro-Magnon man, as her class walk among the stalactites on a school trip to the caves – seems bogus and pretentious in its implicit linking of the murders with primitive instincts or behaviour. You don’t feel that Popaul’s crimes illustrate a larger human condition: they reflect the psychopathology of a particular man (even if the lack of imagination in Chabrol’s writing runs the risk of making the character a stereotype rather than an individual). The dissonant music by Pierre Jansen is largely superfluous as a means of either suggesting psychological aberration or creating emotional tension. Jean Rabier’s lighting, however, is very expressive: it often resonates with what Hélène and Popaul are thinking or feeling. There are some striking images – of sun through trees, umbrellas at a funeral, Popaul’s disappearing into the dark at the foot of a flight of stairs in the schoolhouse.
Le Boucher opens with a wedding breakfast to celebrate the marriage of Hélène’s colleague Léon Hamel. In this leisurely but absorbing sequence, Chabrol provides fine observation of local ritual and sets in motion the relationship between Hélène and Popaul, who are seated next to each other at the banquet (his shop supplied the main course, which he carves for her). The interactions between them that follow – on the walk back from the reception, when she invites him to dine on the leg of lamb he’s presented her with (which, as Pauline Kael noted, is like a bouquet) – draw us in. Chabrol describes the life of the village, and the impact of the killings on the villagers, with great skill. When a murdered girl is discovered in a neighbouring location, a woman in the village’s boulangerie is not just morbidly interested – she likes the idea that the killing might put the area on the map. When the next murder occurs and the victim is Léon Hamel’s young bride, we sense the stunned change of attitude in the community at a murder which is appallingly close to home. The shock of learning the identity of this second victim repeats and enlarges the shock of her blood dripping over the edge of a crag onto a schoolgirl’s face and food below, as Hélène’s class picnic after their visit to the caves. (This is the film’s most famous moment – although its showiness makes it a bit too salient.)
Jean Yanne keeps the sinister signals to a minimum. Although it’s clear from an early stage what Popaul will turn out to be, Yanne provides a rare example of a screen serial killer who verifies the real-life cliché ‘He seemed like a decent, ordinary bloke’ – yet he’s never innocuous. Popaul eventually talks to Helene about killing people and killing animals and says that ‘The blood all smells the same’; the moment works because Yanne turns this into a matter of fact but almost baffled observation (even if Chabrol has a broader, schematic point about human bestiality in mind). Hélène’s panic in the school, as she runs round locking doors and windows, is essentially, and largely comes over as, a generic trying-to-keep-the-killer-out sequence – but it’s strengthened by the alluring self-possession which Stéphane Audran gives to Hélène and which, in the course of the story, is revealed as an act of will and gradually dismantled.
The Wikipedia article notes that ‘Critics have argued whether or not it is not Popaul who is responsible for what he does but rather society and in a sense Helene, for denying him affection (sic)’. (Gavin Millar, whose Sight and Sound review was used for the BFI handout, is evidently among those critics.) I’m not fully convinced by this because it seems such an obvious and tired idea to impose on the story (and how does it connect with the men-are-beasts thread?) but the interplay between Audran and Yanne provides some justification of it. Hélène has the kids in her class dress in eighteenth-century costume and perform a formal dance in the gardens of the school. When she mentions to Popaul that she’s going to do this, he talks about joining in – saying that he likes ‘playing the fool’. It’s startling when he does so, in period clothes and wig, but smoking his usual cigarette. The scene, which is peculiarly upsetting, vividly conveys the distance between him and Hélène (who’s wearing her normal clothes): it shows Popaul both as a hopeless courtier and as a boy who wants to impress the teacher. (He’s told Hélène that he loathed his actual teacher in the village school – Hélène is the ideal teacher he never had, as well as the lover he needs, and the mother he misses.)
A little later, in the woods, collecting mushrooms with two of the children, Popaul asks Hélène why she lives alone, and there’s a strong and convincing tension between them. She never loses her poised, charming smile as she answers – we realise that smile is not an invitation but a way of keeping a self-controlled distance. Popaul likewise remains amiable yet we feel (and share) his desire to get closer. He’s repeatedly on the point of abandoning the attempt but he can’t get rid of the itch to know more; Jean Yanne expresses this almost physically as he asks more questions – haltingly, tentatively, with a needling, forced casualness. And when Popaul turns the butcher’s knife on himself and Hélène holds him, before driving him to hospital, we sense that he is fulfilled by the embrace – and by her kiss shortly before he dies. I may have got it wrong but, for me, the duration of that kiss not only suggests guilty atonement for her previous coolness but also confirms that Hélène has been harbouring real feelings for Popaul. (This chimes with her showing herself at an earlier point in the story desperately ready to dismiss what looked to be incriminating evidence against him.) Driving back to the village from the hospital, Hélène gets out of her car and the film’s last shot is of her sitting, deep in thought, in the Perigòrd countryside as dawn breaks. Chabrol suggests that she will never get Popaul out of her mind.
22 June 2009
