Tonight I watched a movie called "The Color Of Lies" (original French title "Au Coeur du Mensonge") released in 1998 and directed once again by the great Claude Chabrol. Man, can this guy make movies or what? I think it's safe to say that we are On A Roll With Chabrol!
"The Color Of Lies" stars Sandrine Bonnaire, a fairly well known actress who was in the excellent cult film "Monsieur Hire", and a first rate actor I had not seen before named Jacques Gamblin. They play a husband and wife who live by the seaside in a small French town, the type of place where everyone knows everyone else, and each other's business as well. This seems to be a theme in several French movies I've seen, a good example of which is "Le Corbeau" from 1943. Bonnaire and Gamblin are having financial difficulties. He is a painter who hasn't had a showing in over a decade, and now earns some money by giving art lessons to local children. She is a physical therapist and the main breadwinner of the two.
At the start of the film, the husband is giving a drawing lesson to a ten year old girl. The lesson wraps up and she leaves, on her own, to walk back to her house. The town is small, the walk not far, but there are woods in the middle. That always poses a problem in movies, and things are no different here.
It is terrible to say, but the little girl is killed, the victim of a pedophile. Thank goodness we are watching a Chabrol film, where nothing is graphic, and the subject of violence is back-burnered to the main study of psychological motivations.
A female police detective enters the scene. She looks a lot like Agent Scully from "The X-Files", and is just as level headed. It seems to the art teacher that this police inspector considers him to be the #1 suspect, since he was the last known person to see the girl alive.
He denies it, and Chabrol presents this in a very realistic way, without histrionics. The guy knows he didn't do it, but he also knows that the police lady suspects him, so he confronts her with this, but in a low key way. He is a nervous wreck, waiting for the investigation to play out, because he knows how things can move forward in a case where there is not much evidence. Sometimes, a "likely suspect" can be railroaded.
But he's also got another problem, and this one is distracting him from the investigation. Just down the beach lives a suave and handsome journalist, a man of some wealth who not only writes two newspaper columns, and has bestselling books, but also has a TV show, via which he makes philosophical pronouncements on all aspects of life. The man is a caricature of a phoney-baloney sophisticate and charmer, but he is also a snake and seducer who goes after the women of the town. The attractive Sandrine Bonnaire - the artist's wife - had once treated this journalist for a sports injury, as he keeps himself physically fit. Now he is fixated on her, and he is taking advantage of the fact that her husband is under scrutiny as a suspect in the child murder case.
The script is as tight as a coiled spring, and Chabrol never eases the tension as he moves through the plot, step by step. I mentioned in my review a few days ago of "Just Before Nightfall" that Chabrol has been called the French Alfred Hitchcock. I said that I didn't consider it accurate, but in "The Color Of Lies", the soundtrack music - composed by his son Mattheu Chabrol - sounds similar to the spooky but ironic incidental music that Hitchcock used at times in his films, and even more in his TV shows like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". If by some chance you ever see this film, you will see what I mean.
A theme with Chabrol - who always digs beneath the surface layer of his character's facades - is that morality will take care of itself. He has, in his movies, "good guys" getting away with murder because the person they killed was evil. He has characters being forgiven of their crimes by friends and relatives because the victim was beneath contempt. But the characters who commit these murders are usually honest and fragile people; people who would, under stressless circumstances, never hurt a fly. They have people around them - wives, relatives, townspeople - who have their own closely held secrets, but these people always seem to rally around the troubled suspect, the husband and friend, even if they think he "did it".
The Chabrol plots are a tangled web, but his stories unfold so smoothly that it feels like you are rolling along on coasters. In a Chabrol film, all you have to do is watch. You don't have to indulge anything, any artistic conceits or wasted scenes. He makes movies where you are never tempted to look at your watch, because he just tells you a story from start to finish. It's like you are reading about it and looking at it at the same time.
As I said, before this week I had not seen any Claude Chabrol films for many years. Now I've seen two in the last few days, and I've probably seen 6 or 7 in all. All I can say is that if you like mystery movies with a psychological edge, these films are as good as it gets.
See you in the morn.
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