Aparências

In the French psychological thriller ,Claude Chabrol makes more and more his influence felt .Add some Henri -Georges Clouzot's "le corbeau "( 1943)snatches (the letters replaced by email) ; with such directors ,who lent credibility to the French film noir, how could a director fail?

And how could he fail when one of the best contemporary French actresses (and in my book,the best ) ,whose hairdo recalls Stephane Audran's heyday, is at hand ?Karine Viard is stunning , she savors her vengeance with an almost sadistic pleasure : the scene in the classroom where the PTA is gathered ,climaxes the film :she plays cat and mouse with her husband in front of his self-conscious lover ,the schoolteacher who finds a shrewd loophole though .Viard displays false compassion ,false understanding and false smile with gusto ; the male actors almost pale into insignificance ,compared to her.

Like in the best Chabrol works of the late sixties/early seventies ,the detective side and the murder take a back seat to the depiction of a selfish despising bourgeoisie : the heroine 's mom ,a crude woman who is certainly from the working-class is considered an outcast by the husband ,not because she's an intrusive mother-in-law ,but because she 's not educated ,she does not fit in the elite the couple entertains (the dinners are revealing); :one may deplore the way those people go unpunished ,but like in "juste avant la nuit"(1971) , agonies of remorse come back to haunt them...

In Clouzot's times , there were writers of poison-pen letters ;in the computer age,not only you can find secrets on a mobile ,but you can also send intimate messages to as many people as you wish ,and find on internet informations about your enemy .....

Like Chabrol and Clouzot , the screenwriters can create secondary characters you will remember: the exasperating woman , a French literature buff ,who intervenes at the most awkward moment .

I'd tone a bit my praises for the young German one-night lover , who's not on a par with his co-star .

It's a relatively minor point ,and considered at a longer view ,an almost irrelevant one; few directors are able to make theirs their predecessors' qualities with absolute consistency.