Charlot47
Joined Nov 2009
Welcome to the new profile
We're still working on updating some profile features. To see the badges, ratings breakdowns, and polls for this profile, please go to the previous version.
Reviews83
Charlot47's rating
The title, suggesting both the darkened bedroom where consummation takes place and the artist's device for capturing reality, has been used before. Nabokov's black novel of 1932, filmed by Tony Richardson in 1969 as « Laughter in the Dark », played out a deadly triangle in which a seduced girl and her former lover trap and ruin a respectable man.
This film gives us a more feminist twist in which two girls, one about to be seduced and the other wanting to be, swap places to trap a respectable man. The story is however far older, being known in ancient India and appearing in both Boccaccio's « Decameron » and Shakespeare's « All's Well That Ends Well ».
As in Shakespeare, there is a sub-plot of a second male character who acts as confidant and contrast to the male lead. While Shakespeare's Parolles is a bombastic coward, illustrating the bad company into which the hero has fallen, Questerbet's Thomas is a saintly artist showing the qualities the hero lacks.
Story alone cannot sustain the 107 minutes this film lasts. It has consciously simple sets and props, evoking theatre rather than cinema but also perhaps more true to its medieval period, and music that fits well enough. What's left is words and actions : do they bring the tale to life in the twenty-first century ? Do they carry you away into the world of the film maker's imagination ? Are your thoughts and feelings gripped by the characters' dilemmas ?
In my case, the answers are not very positive. A pity, when the two lead actresses - Caroline Ducey and Sylvie Testud - have done much better work in other pictures.
This film gives us a more feminist twist in which two girls, one about to be seduced and the other wanting to be, swap places to trap a respectable man. The story is however far older, being known in ancient India and appearing in both Boccaccio's « Decameron » and Shakespeare's « All's Well That Ends Well ».
As in Shakespeare, there is a sub-plot of a second male character who acts as confidant and contrast to the male lead. While Shakespeare's Parolles is a bombastic coward, illustrating the bad company into which the hero has fallen, Questerbet's Thomas is a saintly artist showing the qualities the hero lacks.
Story alone cannot sustain the 107 minutes this film lasts. It has consciously simple sets and props, evoking theatre rather than cinema but also perhaps more true to its medieval period, and music that fits well enough. What's left is words and actions : do they bring the tale to life in the twenty-first century ? Do they carry you away into the world of the film maker's imagination ? Are your thoughts and feelings gripped by the characters' dilemmas ?
In my case, the answers are not very positive. A pity, when the two lead actresses - Caroline Ducey and Sylvie Testud - have done much better work in other pictures.
So far, very few reviewers seem to have grasped what is going on in this film and the rest are floundering. For it is highly local and highly topical, as Chabrol contrasts two poisons then prevalent in French society.
One, more recent, was the evil residue of the unrest in 1968. In France, as in West Germany and Italy, minuscule groups of ex-students mouthing empty slogans took to robbery, extortion and murder in the apparent hope of triggering the collapse of capitalism.
The other, longer lasting, was the even more toxic legacy of successive military defeats. After the defeat by Germany in 1940, the upper levels of the French civil service and police were permeated with men who collaborated in the horrors of the Vichy dictatorship and the Nazi occupation. After the defeat in Algeria in 1962, the army was also infected by the bloody repression of its opponents, real or supposed. Too many men had learned that you got results by ignoring the rules and by resorting to torture and murder.
Chabrol's terrorists are suitably dangerous but bumbling, with only their leader aspiring to some sort of Lucifer status. His cops are terrifying, replicas of the Gestapo that had terrorised France only 30 years earlier, with the diabolical commissaire sporting a hairstyle of the early 1940s while his two goons could easily have been pulling out toenails at that time.
Though placing the story in a highly contemporary setting, as always Chabrol is not making a political statement or giving us a history lesson. His subject is humanity and its flaws.
PS One reviewer warns us not to let our children see this film. Not because of the endemic violence and profanity but because of two brief moments when a woman is shown with no clothes and a man is shown on top of a woman under the bedclothes. Both are intrinsic to the story, as the first glimpse is of a prostitute at her place of work and the second is of a terrorist, who (highly symbolic!) has to admit to the girl that he is impotent. Though it is always admirable to broaden young people's minds, I can't think of a single Chabrol film which could really be appreciated before the age of 18.
One, more recent, was the evil residue of the unrest in 1968. In France, as in West Germany and Italy, minuscule groups of ex-students mouthing empty slogans took to robbery, extortion and murder in the apparent hope of triggering the collapse of capitalism.
The other, longer lasting, was the even more toxic legacy of successive military defeats. After the defeat by Germany in 1940, the upper levels of the French civil service and police were permeated with men who collaborated in the horrors of the Vichy dictatorship and the Nazi occupation. After the defeat in Algeria in 1962, the army was also infected by the bloody repression of its opponents, real or supposed. Too many men had learned that you got results by ignoring the rules and by resorting to torture and murder.
Chabrol's terrorists are suitably dangerous but bumbling, with only their leader aspiring to some sort of Lucifer status. His cops are terrifying, replicas of the Gestapo that had terrorised France only 30 years earlier, with the diabolical commissaire sporting a hairstyle of the early 1940s while his two goons could easily have been pulling out toenails at that time.
Though placing the story in a highly contemporary setting, as always Chabrol is not making a political statement or giving us a history lesson. His subject is humanity and its flaws.
PS One reviewer warns us not to let our children see this film. Not because of the endemic violence and profanity but because of two brief moments when a woman is shown with no clothes and a man is shown on top of a woman under the bedclothes. Both are intrinsic to the story, as the first glimpse is of a prostitute at her place of work and the second is of a terrorist, who (highly symbolic!) has to admit to the girl that he is impotent. Though it is always admirable to broaden young people's minds, I can't think of a single Chabrol film which could really be appreciated before the age of 18.
Not a film to take too seriously, since the murders in the snowbound hotel and the ensuing investigation are more on the comic than the tragic side.
Unfortunately, as in «The Mousetrap» which is one of the progenitors of this tale, one cannot discuss the identity of the murderer or their motive without a massive spoiler that would spoil future viewers' fun. Suffice to say that what has seemed trite becomes psychological, so the deliberate early banality ends with a nice twist of complexity.
And the German title gives us a tiny clue, as it is pretty sure to be the detective's last case (though, as with the Reichenbach Falls, one must never rule out resurrection!)
Unfortunately, as in «The Mousetrap» which is one of the progenitors of this tale, one cannot discuss the identity of the murderer or their motive without a massive spoiler that would spoil future viewers' fun. Suffice to say that what has seemed trite becomes psychological, so the deliberate early banality ends with a nice twist of complexity.
And the German title gives us a tiny clue, as it is pretty sure to be the detective's last case (though, as with the Reichenbach Falls, one must never rule out resurrection!)