Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970): Cine Lumiere, 6.15pm
This film is part of the Claude Chabrol season at Cine Lumiere and also screens on April 26th followed by a discussion with Prof. Antoine de Baecque (author of the biography Chabrol, Stock, 2021)
Time Out review:
Classically simple but relentlessly probing thriller, set in a French
village shadowed by the presence of a compulsive killer. Some lovely
Hitchcockian games, like the strange ketchup that drips onto a picnic
hamburger from a clifftop where the latest victim has been claimed. But
also more secretive pointers to social circumstance and the 'exchange of
guilt' as Audran's starchy schoolmistress finds herself irresistibly
drawn to the ex-army butcher she suspects of being the killer: the fact,
for instance, that alongside the killer as he keeps vigil outside the
schoolhouse, a war memorial stands sentinel with its reminder of
society's dead and maimed. With this film Claude Chabrol came full circle back
to his first, echoing not only the minutely detailed provincial
landscape of Le Beau Serge but its theme of redemption. The
impasse here, a strangely moving tragedy, is that there is no way for
the terrified teacher, bred to civilised restraints, to understand that
her primeval butcher may have been reclaimed by his love for her.
Tom Milne
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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