Ten Days' Wonder (Chabrol, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.30pm
This is part of the Claude Chabrol season and features an introduction by season curator Catherine Wheatley. Another screenings of the film (on September 19th) during the season is detailed here.Time Out review:
Here Claude Chabrol inaugurates a new genre, the theological thriller. Charles
(Anthony Perkins at his most charismatically unstable) wakes from a dream of
Creation to find himself with blood on his hands. He turns for help to
his erstwhile professor of philosophy (Michel Piccoli), and persuades him back
to the Van Horn country estate to use his 'Logic of Science' in sorting
out the family mess. The estate is a 1925 dream engineered by Charles'
adoptive father Theo Van Horn (Orson Welles), who is worshipped by his
child-bride (Marlene Jobert), and sculpted as Jupiter by the awed Charles.
Chabrol's movies, echoing Fritz Lang's, have long been edging towards a
confrontation with the theme of Fate. This is it. Theo Van Horn chooses
to play God, creating his own world, dictating the behaviour of those he
places in it, taking care to add flaws to his creation to keep it
breathing. But God hasn't reckoned with his own capacity for
imperfection, for such shining qualities as jealousy, hatred, revenge;
so he comes to his own grief, faced with the lonely fact that his
creation is a nine-day wonder... Chabrol's movies grow less and less
like anyone else's; this is one worth seeing again and again.
Tony Rayns
Here (and above) is an extract.
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