Henri-Georges Clouzot (1955)
Based on the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who also did the screenplay), Les diaboliques is the story of how the wife and mistress of the headmaster of a private school in Paris join forces to murder him and dispose of his body. He disappears more than expected – he fails to turn up as a corpse where and when he should – and the women, especially the valetudinarian widow, become more and more edgy and guilty. The denouement reminds us why their partnership seemed such an inherently improbable one at the start of the picture, before Clouzot took us in. This is a famously suspenseful and frightening film but its macabre highlights didn’t do much for me. Both as a headmaster and a husband, Michel Delasalle is a mean-spirited tyrant. It’s hard to feel that the women, in bumping him off, have done anything wrong. But neither of them is likeable either, so we’re hardly anxious for them not to be found out. Delasalle’s unpleasantness doesn’t seem to be modified when he makes his surprise comeback in the film’s closing stages.
Simone Signoret gives a fine performance as the mistress, impatient, poker-faced Nicole. When she seems shut off from Christina, the wife, we accept this as part of Nicole’s skilled dissimulation to throw the others in the school off the scent. It makes perfect sense when we eventually discover that the mistress’s cool deadpan has a dual purpose. When Christina has pegged out (she has a weak heart and has been gruellingly scared to death), the restored-to-life Delasalle and Nicole embrace. You might think this unlovable pair were made for each other but Paul Meurisse’s Delasalle is too charmless for their big moment to register as strongly as it should. Signoret suggests a passionate nature in reserve; Meurisse is such a cold fish that you struggle to believe that Delasalle would engage Nicole’s feelings. As Christina, Vera Clouzot, the director’s wife, is striking but her acting is relatively conventional – there’s no hint of ambiguity, or potential for Christina to be different from what she seems.
The introduction of the police detective in Les diaboliques is not unlike the first appearance of the private eye in Psycho, which I’d seen the previous evening. Martin Balsam’s Arbogast appears to be just hanging around Sam Loomis’s hardware store in Mayvale, Arizona; Charles Vanel’s Fichet is sitting about at the morgue where Christina Delasalle comes hoping to identify the body of her husband. Vanel gives the policeman an unassertively shrewd charm – Fichet’s rumpled quality and casually determined affability make it impossible not to experience him as an ancestor of Columbo. In the smaller roles, the casting and acting is a good example of what I think of as typical in quality French cinema of the 1940s and (most of) the 1950s: both as physical specimens and as performers, the actors – Jean Brochard as the school caretaker, Pierre Larquey as an elderly teacher, Michel Serrault (in a very early role) as a younger one – are believable but their playing is heightened in a way that seems to make them physically archetypal as well as theatrical presences.
Clouzot’s other films include Le corbeau (1943): he evidently had a gift for describing malign, sequestered communities. The arrogance of the schoolboys in Les diaboliques is muted by the fusty atmosphere of the place; the rituals of the dormitory and the washroom and dining room are well observed. The details of the revolting food on offer are hard to get out of your mind: the scene in which Delasalle forces the fragile Christina to swallow a piece of putrescent fish – he tells her with freezing scorn, as she nearly chokes on her food, that the whole school is watching her – is especially nasty. The algae on the swimming pool in which the women have dropped Delasalle’s body are also a powerfully viscous, almost sickening image of the spiritual rottenness at the heart of the film. Without guessing what would happen, I was sure there must be a twist in the tale in order for Les diaboliques not to be far too clinical for its own melodramatic good. That twist is clever and the whole piece is very accomplished but I didn’t like it. In spite of claims to the contrary in the BFI programme note, I thought the tone was flippant – or at least that there was a gloating edge to the director’s misanthropy (which brought to mind the Coen brothers). Because of the way he works the audience in Les diaboliques, it’s understandable for Clouzot to be compared with Hitchcock but you can feel the latter’s pleasure in being in charge. His amused authority is a lot more engaging than Clouzot’s pessimistic sense of superiority.
14 April 2010
