Les noces rouges
Claude Chabrol (1973)
Two of Wedding in Blood’s near contemporaries in the Claude Chabrol filmography – Les biches (1968) and La femme infidèle (1969) – take place in or on the outskirts of Paris. Wedding in Blood doesn’t move as far from the metropolis as Le boucher (1970), with its Périgord village setting, but the small town where the action is based, is a hundred miles or so from the capital. The town is unnamed presumably to make the point that this could be any French provincial town – and to stress the place’s furtive conventionality: curtains are seen twitching in house windows at the start. As respected citizen Pierre Maury (Michel Piccoli) leaves his house one evening and walks to his car, he exchanges pleasantries with several other residents. That makes the sequence slightly reminiscent of Michel Simon’s first scene in Sacha Guitry’s La poison (1951), and Pierre Maury, like Simon’s Paul Braconnier, in due course kills his wife. Any resemblance between the two films ends there, though. Although Wedding in Blood has supposedly funny moments, it’s a crime drama rather than a black comedy. More important, and more disappointingly, writer-director Chabrol, unlike Sacha Guitry, doesn’t make much of the local ethos until very late in the film.
Pierre Maury’s wife Clotilde (Clotilde Joany) is an invalid. The destination of his evening drive is a quiet road through woodland beyond the town where he’ll meet, as he regularly meets, his mistress Lucienne (Stéphane Audran), to have sex. Pierre returns home to his wife, Lucienne to her teenage daughter Hélène (Eliana De Santis) and her husband, Paul Delamare (Claude Piéplu) – a député in the national parliament and the town’s deputy mayor, who’s now running for election as mayor. Paul, unaware of his wife’s relationship with Pierre, names the latter as his prospective deputy, figuring that Pierre’s name on the mayoral ticket will attract left-of-centre votes Paul wouldn’t otherwise receive. He is Hélène’s stepfather, having married single-parent Lucienne shortly after her illegitimate daughter was born. Paul is impotent: the implication is that this marriage is one of political convenience, his stepdaughter a spurious emblem of fatherhood.
This might seem a promising basis for a critique of bourgeois thinking and imperatives, but Chabrol’s realisation of the set-up is shallow and careless. There’s no hint of small-minded town gossip about, or disapproval of, Paul’s marriage to a woman who’d had a baby out of wedlock. No rumours are heard about his motives in marrying her. Although Lucienne seems meant to be an impeccable trophy wife, she’s rarely on the screen as her husband’s political consort – she’s more often having it off with Pierre. It’s not clear if Pierre agrees to be Paul’s running mate out of hypocrisy or just because Chabrol needs him to do so, to keep the story afloat. Nor is there any suggestion that, by involving Pierre in his campaign, Paul might risk losing conservative voters: he’s duly elected mayor, and Pierre deputy mayor.
Paul remains oblivious to the affair until he sees his wife exchange a knowing, amused look with Pierre while Paul is pitching a dodgy land deal to him. You can accept Paul’s blindness to what’s been going on as a reflection of his political priorities, although it’s therefore harder to believe the scales would fall from his eyes at the particular point that they do. But presenting the adulterers’ secret glances as an uncharacteristic but crucial slip on their part – as Chabrol does – makes no sense. They’ve been brazenly careless about where they do their lovemaking. Routinely in broad daylight, at the very edge of their usual trysting place – just where the wood looks out on a lake, where people boat and from where the wood’s edge is clearly visible. On one occasion, in a local landmark – a chateau – while a guided tour is taking place there. They sprawl on an antique bed cordoned off as a prize museum exhibit; for good measure, they open a bottle of champagne that spurts (or ejaculates) over a valuable artwork on the bedroom wall. This bit is in the film simply for the follow-up to it. It’s Pierre that Paul assigns to investigate the act of cultural vandalism – a comic irony that was no doubt praised as ‘deliciously mordant’ or similar …
One is used to Chabrol treating his characters with a curious, amused detachment that sometimes detracts from the dramatic tension of his psychological crime stories. In Wedding in Blood, loss isn’t the word because there’s no tension from the word go. The deceived spouses are utterly lacking in interest, let alone appeal. Claude Piéplu’s Paul is never more than a self-important chauvinist: everything he says and does is designed to show that he deserves what he gets. Lucienne and Hélène behave towards him with barely concealed contempt most of the time. When he’s asleep, they peep into the bedroom he doesn’t share with Lucienne, and giggle as he snores. As Clotilde Maury (a much smaller part), Clotilde Joano is striking only in that she’s like a woebegone, enervated version of Stéphane Audran, which at least suggests that Pierre may go for a certain physical type. To their credit, Audran and Michel Piccoli manage to give their sex scenes a semblance of passion – no small feat when Chabrol seems keen to make the lovemaking comical or even silly, because of where and how it’s taking place. The film leaves you in no doubt that Audran and Piccoli are fine actors, but you probably already knew that – from enjoying them in better roles than they have here.
After Paul has twigged to the affair, he gives his wife and his colleague permission to continue with it – on condition that Pierre supports the crooked land deal. It’s at this point that Lucienne and Pierre seem to decide they must murder Paul, though it’s unclear why. (It might be easier to believe in the strength of Pierre’s moral objections to the land deal, for example, if he’d been allowed to show any prior hint of political integrity.) Lucienne and Pierre contrive to make Paul’s death look like an accident. The Delamares are en route to Paris, late one night, with Lucienne at the wheel. When she suddenly stops the car on a nearly deserted road, Pierre emerges from the darkness and bludgeons Paul to death. Pierre and Lucienne move the corpse into the driving seat, douse the car in petrol and set it alight. The killing is well staged, but the aftermath is a clumsy anti-climax. This isn’t a Thérèse Raquin-like case of things starting to unravel between the lovers from the moment they’ve murderously disposed of the obstacle to their happiness together. Once Lucienne’s daughter Hélène, much earlier in the story, has perceived that her mother is having an affair with Pierre, you know her feminine intuition won’t go to waste – even though things don’t turn out as Hélène plans.
After Paul’s death, Hélène gets her mother to admit the affair, though Lucienne denies any involvement in her husband’s death. Soon afterwards, the town’s police prefect (Daniel Lecourtois) receives instructions from Paris – by order of the President – to treat the death as a traffic accident. The local rumour mill has ground very slowly until now – after Clotilde’s unexpected death, the only gossip is that she may have committed suicide – but it finally gets into gear about Lucienne and Pierre’s relationship, and what this may have led to. Hélène therefore writes to the prefect, urging that the case be reopened to clear her mother’s name. The renewed police inquiries have the opposite effect. In the film’s final scene, Lucienne and Pierre have confessed their crimes and are taken into custody. They’re not only handcuffed together but holding hands – confirmation of their murderous union, which gives the film its title[1].
How come the presidential order is summarily overruled by the local police simply to agree to Hélène’s request? Why, when they question Lucienne, does she immediately admit to the murder as well as the adultery? The first of these two things, at least, can’t possibly be justified with reference to the real-life 1970 case that supposedly inspired the film: there was no political dimension, even at local level, to the murder committed by the so-called ‘amants diaboliques‘ in the town of Bourganeuf. It’s typical of Chabrol’s approach that he implies a high-level political cover-up, only then to drop it as soon as it becomes inconvenient.
Wedding in Blood opens with quotes from Aeschylus’ The Eumenides on the screen. Orestes to Minerva – ‘Goddess, tell me if I am innocent or guilty’; Minerva – ‘This cause is difficult. What mortal would dare pass judgment?’ This gets the film off to a culturally classy start and suggests a morally complex tale to come. Chabrol doesn’t even try to follow through on this. The more of his work that I watch, the less I like Claude Chabrol, which sounds like bad news with bookings for two more of his films in this month’s BFI retrospective – here’s hoping that things can only get better with Le beau Serge and Juste avant la nuit. Wedding in Blood is certainly the least rewarding of any Chabrol film I’ve yet seen.
10 September 2026
[1] I’m following BFI’s lead in giving the film its English title – or one of its English titles, to be more precise. According to IMDb, Les noces rouges was released as Wedding in Blood in the US and Red Wedding in the UK.
