Chabrol and His Actors
The Enigmatic and the Inexplicable
Claude Chabrol’s oeuvre is an idiotically large body of work that only a fool or a fan would entertain looking at whole. Even Guy Austin in his useful introduction to the director’s oeuvre, Claude Chabrol, skips some of the titles. Yet one way of narrowing it down is to look at a small handful of films Chabrol made with Stephane Audran and Isabelle Huppert. If we focus on some of Audran’s films for the director, and some of Huppert’s, it is not least because Audran was for some years Chabrol’s wife, and Huppert has worked with no director more than Chabrol.
They bring to Chabrol quite different qualities and this isn’t only about age, even if Audran played Huppert’s mother in 1978’s Violette Noziere. While it is true that Chabrol often expected from Huppert aspects of character that suggested youth (petulance, disobedience, insouciance and daring), while from Audran during the key years of their collaboration (Les Biches, La femme infidele, Le Boucher, Wedding in Blood) he sought the languid, the cool and the aloof, it is more the distinct personalities of each actress rather than the age they happened to be when Chabrol cast them that is most important.
Audran was a properly Chabrolian actress, making few films for other directors as distinct as her work for Chabrol. She was in Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, and playing too, memorably, the sexually active wife in Bunuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. But the main film she carried beyond Chabrol’s work was Babette’s Feast. Audran might seem a limited actress who found her place in film working for a director who knew her well enough to bring out important qualities we will go on to explore. But Huppert has worked for so many important directors it would be as daft to list them as it would be to explore Chabrol’s full canon. Chabrol and Huppert were both prolific figures and yet this isn’t to suggest in Huppert’s case that it often led to second-rate work. How could it when she worked with Godard, Pialat, Tavernier, Handke, Honore, Hansen-Love, Hong Sang-Soo, Rithy Pan, Hal Hartley and many others? In another actor, such a body of work might indicate sloppiness (Klaus Kinski for example — who is left with the films he made for Herzog and a small number for others.) But with Huppert it was as if the approach she always took to acting allowed her to convey a fundamental aspect of character without ever feeling obliged to spend time immersing herself in the role or busying herself with research over the character. “I don’t believe in the idea of playing a character. I just believe in the idea of playing states—joy, sadness, laughter, listening, talking. That’s all I think about. In order to have the fiction come through you, you have to get rid of the idea of a character.” (New Yorker)
Huppert has perhaps a sixth sense over what she can do rather than an earnest need to immerse herself in other personae. This approach might be truer of acting than the claims often made in the name of craft on the one hand and living with the character on the other. The actor is a physical fact — a certain height, age and build, with a grain in the voice that often makes us recognise an actor acoustically even if they are doing an accent. Better to see the actor as someone who performs within a bandwidth that the facts allow rather than a range that insists the best performances are complete transformations. Even Dustin Hoffman playing a man well into his hundreds (Little Big Man) is still recognisably the actor. To make the actor properly unrecognisable, we might wonder if there is any point casting that actor at all — as if the work could be done entirely by prosthetic teams and post-synch sound. Central to the pleasure of watching an actor is that they are both themselves and an attenuation of that self into a character. Huppert always seemed to understand this and over many films, covering fifty years, has searched out certain qualities of affect that cannot be reduced to doing a job well.
But we are running ahead of ourselves and should say far more about Audran before going on to Huppert. It was as if what Chabrol needed from Audran was to bring out a problem he shared with Luis Bunuel — how to present the bourgeoisie without falling into unequivocal condemnation or an unconscious celebration. How to retain the balance showing an enviable life within an unenviable dysfunction? Chabrol says that bourgeois life is “entirely conceived of egotism” (Film Quarterly) but this takes a very different form from Bunuel’s. The Spanish director in Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire and others seeks dissolution, while Chabrol offers the homicidal. When Audran worked with Chabrol again after making The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, she would keep saying on Wedding in Blood that Bunuel would have done things differently from her husband. “Bunuel would have done it like this" Chabrol noted. "Bunuel would have done it like that.” (Claude Chabrol) However, Bunuel is a oneiricdirector who can allow for mutually compatible realities that might, but needn’t, arrive at the murderous, while Chabrol insists that the nature of mimetic desire is a zero-sum game that cannot countenance the continuation of rivalry.
Mimetic desire is a term from Rene Girard that he discusses by proposing: this “…is when our choice is not determined by the object itself, as we normally believe, but by another person. We imitate the other person, and this is what ‘mimetic means.” (Stanford University) Girard says elsewhere that “the triangle is no Gestalt. The real structures are inter-subjective. They cannot be localised anywhere, the triangle has no reality whatever.” (Deceit, Desire and the Novel) This aspect of the potential emptiness behind desire was evident in Chabrol’s work with Audran but became more pronounced when he made Huppert more central to his films. It was as though Audran could never quite be an observant presence in Chabrol’s work but instead an observed one to be fought over and desired. This might have a little to do with Audran’s more elegant presence in the director’s work: she possesses a languid, long-legged beauty that distinguishes itself from Huppert’s more compact frame and pretty but not striking features. Even though Chabrol has said that “I try to avoid – except when it’s the purpose of the film – making the camera subjective in relation to the characters in the film. That is, directly subjective – to make the audience identify with one of the characters by the effect of the camera,” (Film Quarterly) this choice cannot necessarily be separated from the person playing the role. We can think here of a shot in Le Boucher. It is a long take showing Helene (Audran) and Paul (Jean Yanne) walking back from a wedding. They are newly acquainted yet show signs of intimacy. When they part, the camera follows Helene as she walks towards the schoolhouse where she lives, but though we are with her, we might wonder if Paul is standing looking on. The moment, like many moments in the film, possesses a looked-at quality, as if Paul is observing her. Occasionally this is explicit, when for example he looks at the back of her head for a few seconds before she turns round and smiles. But it becomes clearer when near the end of the film as the murderous Paul is dying and Helene drives him to hospital how much he adored her and how much he has been watching her. "I would have liked to be…with you always…to love you…to protect you.” There is no rivalry in the strict mimetic sense in Le boucher but there is an ex who hurt her ten years earlier and Helene has remained it seems celibate ever since. When she offers up this back story it isn’t just as reminiscence; it is also offered as justification why she rejects Paul’s overtures. She may not be remaining faithful to an ex, but she is insistently proposing that this great love caused her so much pain that she is unwilling to get into another relationship when she has found equilibrium in herself. When Paul says never making love can make you insane, she says doing it can make you go crazy too.
Our broader point is that often in Audran’s films for Chabrol she is the central figure in mimetic desire and thus subject to what is commonly called the object of the gaze; Huppert we will see is more inclined to be the subject of it. That camera movement in Le Boucher showing the camera following the male character while Huppert is out of the frame but possibly gazing on would be easy to imagine. With Audran it makes sense that she will be the person the camera follows — her persona is predicated not just on beauty but on looked-at-ness, a quality that dissolves the gazes male or female and indicates a low-key exhibitionistic aspect within the narcissistic. Not all actors are narcissistic nor exhibitionistic but those that have this quality of looked-at-ness must possess both, a quality that proposes whether someone is looking in a mirror or expecting the gaze of others to fall upon them the effect is similar. Beauty is neither a necessary or sufficient condition though it is a useful one. Delon is a beautiful man without much charm in Plein Soleil, while Jeanne Moreau is attractive but predominantly charming in Eva. Both possess this looked-at-ness, as does Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Brigitte Bardot in much of her work (just as Delon has it in much of his.) Perhaps one reason why the exhibitionistic and the narcissistic can work in conjunction rests on the nature of cinema itself. An actor can be both subject to the gaze on screen and potentially watch that gaze as an audience member. The theatre actor is in this sense potentially and often enormously exhibitionistic but not strictly speaking narcissistic. There isn’t within the art form the incorporation of the actor’s own look on the material, unless recorded which turns into a filmed document and no longer a theatrical work - which is predicated on liveness.
In Les biches, La femme infidèle, Le boucher and Wedding in Blood, Audran draws out the look of others as though sharing the gaze she has upon herself. In Les biches, the person looking is Why, who before the end of the film will murder the wealthy Frederique after she steals Why’s boyfriend. But the idea that Why kills out of jealousy would be to simplify the problem. She kills more it seems because she wants to steal Frederique’s identity, evident when after the killing she places on her face the same mole Frederique (and Audran has). Conventionally, she wants her boyfriend back and Frederique’s money, but that is only half the story and would tell us little about Chabrol’s singularity. She wants these things but within the self that belongs to another person. After all, Why may not win Paul back and is unlikely to walk off with the inheritance, but she however briefly vampirises Frederique just as she will have felt possessed by this woman’s wealth and power. Jealousy, even envy, would be a weak word to describe the feeling that shows a woman whose identity is made fragile by the presence of Frederique; so weakened that the only way she thinks she can strengthen it is by murdering the person who has created this fragility. If we propose that Audran is, if you like, a ‘narcibitionist’, then this rests on the strength of a gaze that is both capable of looking at itself and assuming the look of others.
Yet this won’t always manifest itself in the same way and we can think of fellow narcibitionist Alain Delon in Plein Soleil, co-written like Les biches by Paul Gegauff, with the former film an official adaptation of Patricia Highsmith while the latter is an uncredited take on the story — the “ film is actually a distaff version of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Sassard in the class-envious Ripley role.” (Bright Lights Film Journal) In Plein soleil, Delon kills the wealthy Greenleaf halfway through the film, takes on his identity and clearly wants the good life the poorer Ripley can now enjoy. Yet Highsmith’s interest is in the psychological profile of Ripley even if there is much jealousy and envy in the deed, and Plein Soleil plays as a suspense thriller with the second half showing the police slowly catching up with Ripley. In Les biches, the killing takes place at the end of the film and thus there is no suspense, as if Chabrol wanted to push further the crisis of self to the point of eradicating typical thriller tension. If Plein Soleil’s director Rene Clement uses Delon as an actor who possesses similar qualities to Audran, but shows him as the murderer, while Chabrol shows Audran finally as the victim, it may rest on Chabrol’s greater interest in this precarity of self than Clement.
If Girard is right that mimetic desire is a triangle, quadrangle, pentangle etc, with no reality whatsoever, and that desire desires desire in a tautological vicious circle that no amount of material possessions can alleviate, then the further a film goes in the direction of this problem, the greater its chance of exploring psychological states without arriving too hastily at material conclusions. Chabrol’s films may resemble noirs and thrillers but they take from them the mimetic of desire but resist manifesting it too strongly in materialist intent. We will return to Audran's importance here but for the moment we can think of Le femme infidele and Wedding in Blood as films that play on but refuse to play up the materialistic. In La femme infidele, we could imagine that the writer Helene is having an affair with would wish to kill the husband and have Helene to himself. Put aside that he would also be adopting a child and doesn’t seem so poor that he would need the husband’s money, Chabrol doesn’t even hint at such a possibility because he isn’t interested in so obvious motives and material gains. That wouldn’t do much for exploring desire within the context of identity.
Instead, when the husband, Charles, finds out about the affair he goes to Victor’s home, treats the lover with conviviality, and then sees a lighter sitting on the bedside that he’d given to his wife, and shortly after kills the lover. In a typical thriller (and none more so than a Hitchcock film), the husband wouldn’t have known of the affair until he sees the lighter — it would be like many a moment in Hitchcock where the audience and the character realise simultaneously the magnitude of a detail, one that carries significance because it reveals an important aspect of the plot. But the lighter doesn’t reveal the intimacy of the lovers' encounter but the vicissitudes of Charles’s mind. In this object, he sees surely an aspect of his wife’s indifference towards him — that his gift can be used to light cigarettes after making love to another man. In turn, the wife realises that her husband has killed her lover and doesn’t especially grieve Victor, but finds herself once again falling in love with her husband. Charles has shown himself worthy of her love just as he had seemed earlier so unworthy of it that she could treat his gift as a practical thing instead of as an object of value, and of value because of the value her husband represented to her. He once again becomes important in her life and the film ends with his arrest and her devotion. They have become once again a loving family but one estranged by his incipient imprisonment.
In Wedding in Blood, Lucienne starts an affair with her husband’s deputy, Pierre, and in another film the murder of first Pierre’s wife, and later Lucienne’s husband, would be based on the material gains to be had from such killings. But Pierre kills his spouse as if out of conjugal failure, that this listless woman who doesn’t want to make love has little to live for (they have no children and she has no job), and so his slow poisoning of her might seem more an act of euthanasia than murder. Yet even the murder of Lucienne’s husband isn’t done for material gain, even though the Mayor is rich enough to live in an enormous house and for years has looked after Lucienne and her now teenage daughter. Yet if Lucienne married for security, she and Pierre don’t at all kill for it. They do so as if to keep their passion alive, with the Mayor saying he has no problem with their affair but he will insist Pierre go ahead and help with a massive and corrupt business deal. That could have been reason enough in another film for Pierre and Lucienne to kill him, but that seems as weak a reason as killing him for his cash. It is more that they desire each other and their complicity has been diluted by the Mayor’s awareness of the affair and the demands he now makes upon them. By killing him they can return to the complicit as they now have another secret: not one that excludes him from knowing what they are doing, but that excludes him from their lives altogether. They may get caught, just as Charles does in La femme infidele, but this heightens the emotion. It doesn’t weaken it. There they sit at the end of the film in handcuffs seated next to each other in a police car. Their love never more pronounced.
If some of Chabrol’s endings can seem perverse we could say they are perverting the cause of justice while for example Hitchcock’s confirm justice’s cause. How often in Hitchcock films do we have people erroneously accused of a crime they didn’t commit and the film concludes on their innocence substantiated? Chabrol (who of course co-wrote an important early study of Hitchcock (Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films) looks for revelation too but not of innocence, nor even of guilt. He wishes to reveal aspects of his characters and why he would say he was always more interested in murderers than murder. “If you conceal a character’s guilt, you imply that his guilt is the most important thing about him. I want the audience to know who the murderer is, so that we can consider his personality.” His interest “isn’t in solving puzzles, but in studying human behavior.” (Bright Lights Film Journal) If he were more interested in innocence he would have made films reliant on two Hitchcock mainstays, ones his writing on the director helped discover. The wrong man scenario that we find in Hitchcock’s film of that name and in several others (including The 39 Steps, I Confess, and North by Northwest), and in the guilt by association theme he was often drawn to and includes Shadow of a Doubt, Rope and Strangers on a Train. These are about the innocence of wronged characters, the relative guilt of those too strongly associated with the murderer and who are implicated despite lacking culpability. This might be the professor whose ideas led to ex-students to murder in Rope, or the niece Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt too enamoured initially by her homicidal uncle. What would interest Chabrol about these possibilities wouldn’t be the narrative conclusions that can come out of an innocent proving themselves so or a complicit figure realising they must create a distance from that complicity. It would be much more how innocence is too relative a term and complicity often a perversity — a pleasurable frisson over a tortured realisation.
Chabrol does often show in his late sixties/early seventies work characters implicated in the guilt of others, but it plays out quite differently. When Helene knows that her husband in La femme infidele has killed her lover, she increasingly likes the idea of it. If she has shown herself so indifferent to her husband’s feelings that she leaves her lighter in her lover’s bedroom, Charles proves so devoted that he has dispatched the lover from their lives. She doesn’t tell the police and there is no doubt that she would have harboured this secret without much guilt. In Le Boucher, Helene is perhaps closer to the Hitchcockian heroine of complicit guilt, and once again a lighter proves important. After seeing the body of a victim, Helene discovers near it the lighter she has given Paul and is now left in a quandary over what she should do. She doesn’t go to the police as we may wonder if she finds fascinating that a man in his desire for her must kill others to dispel that need. The film proposes the killings come out of this, even if Paul may have a history of violence, one sublimated into war zones in which he fought and the butcher profession he now practices. But it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to assume that Paul has been killing for Helene just as Charles has done likewise, and it might not be entirely fanciful to suggest that Helene here finds it perversely agreeable he has done so even if she may also be horrified at the murders he has committed. After all, at the end of La femme infidele Helene would seem to love Charles more than ever as he is taken away by the police, while Helene in Le Boucher might wonder if she does indeed love Paul as he confesses to his crimes while he confesses also to his immense love for her. Finally, in Wedding in Blood, the film concludes on a similar emotional perversity: the handcuffs they both wear in the back of the police car proof of their love for each other as they have shown the lengths they will go to in remaining a couple. Their respective spouses have been dispatched, and the film manages to convey to us that most vows couples make can seem weak next to the sort made by Pierre and Lucienne. Instead of a wedding vow that proposes they will remain together until death, it is more that the death of others has brought them together. A wedding in blood indeed.
We can return now to Audran’s narcissism and exhibitionism and see that her characters potentially seek the maximum amount of sacrifice from others, and differ from femmes fatale in expecting this retrospectively rather than in advance. We have noticed this when discussing La femme infidele: Helene doesn’t push her lover to kill her husband but is quietly satisfied that her husband has killed her lover. In Le boucher, she finds again after the event that Paul has killed for her, and in Wedding in Blood, she doesn’t ask Pierre to murder his wife but becomes aware that he has done so. Killing the husband in Wedding in Blood comes only after the blackmail and isn’t part of an a priori plan. This suggests that Chabrol saw in Audran’s persona one less given to preconceived manipulation; more to retrospective narcibitionism, seeing in her roles someone who understands that what matters isn’t material gain (as we find with many a femme fatale) but psychological prowess. Even in Just Before Nightfall this may be so. Audran plays what might seem like the self-sacrificing wife, Helene, a woman who accepts it when Charles tells her he has had an affair in the past with a friend’s wife who has now been murdered. She even, when he then goes on to tell her he was also her murderer, assumes it must have been an accident. No, he says, he thinks he did want her dead. Helene never becomes enraged but does she nevertheless kill him at the end out of anger or sorrow? He can’t get over the guilt and when he asks for something to help him sleep she gives him an overdose that leaves him dead. Helene puts him out of his undeniable misery but we may wonder if she does so because he can no longer look her in the eye, which means in turn looking at her more generally — which means looking at the style she flamboyantly offers in her clothing and that becomes more and more subdued as the films goes on. It is as though her attire loses colour as her husband loses his, with people telling him how pale and ill he looks. When we first see her outside she is wearing a boldly multi-coloured scarf, a red jacket and red boots. In the house, we see her in a tank top with horizontal stripes like an energy rating chart. Later she wears a blue top with a black skirt, and later still beige slacks and a top that is a swirl of yellow, orange and blue. This is a woman with a large wardrobe but nothing quite matches the exuberance of that first appearance. We might wonder if she kills him because he is increasingly and quite literally cramping her style, and that she might wish for a husband who can pay her a bit more attention. While psychologically a viewer might suppose the reason both the wife and his best friend are so determined to keep Charles from confessing to the murder is because they have been having an affair themselves — though the friend denies this would be possible unless Helene was like his own wife, someone given to adultery just as the friend has been as well. Instead, we might just propose that Chabrol is seeking the unfathomable in the shallow. If Camus could claim that Meursault goes to his death because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, does Charles go to his because his wife didn’t want a man moping around who wasn’t giving her the attention she deserved? We might be exaggerating our case all the better to fit into our thesis of Audran’s characters, but the film is in a strict sense unreadable, which, in turn, allows us to interpret it perhaps a little too readily for our own ends.
Proposing that Audran’s characters have an egotistical aspect helps explain Chabrol’s comments about “the battle between good and evil is more complicated. The principle is: when there's a character who is nice and another who is evil — for example, in Le Boucher, which is a limited case and a very simple one…you can say that the butcher sometimes has more virtue than the teacher, that he tries to love her but she refuses. He gives her presents. She only gives him a lighter…” (Film Quarterly) Chabrol may be half-joking but vanity, while hardly up there with murder, is rarely seen as a virtue. Yet from a Girardian perspective, Chabrol manages to examine murder from an angle that is close to irrelevant, all the better to explore what underlies the murderous. What matters isn’t that crimes have been committed and solved — what interests Chabrol is mimetic desire that is inevitably and constantly manifesting itself. A crime isn’t a question of good or evil; it is the consequence of an exaggerated problem in constant triangulation. We needn’t agree with Girard completely to see that this is nevertheless a very useful way of looking at Chabrol’s work. As Girard says, “when any gesture of appropriation is imitated it simply means that two hands will reach for the same object simultaneously: conflict cannot fail to result.” (Diacritics) This is often the noir problem as a woman plays two men off each other or expects one to murder the other. But this is also a very conscious scenario, with a lover and the wife plotting to kill the husband (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity) or a husband discovering the affair and aiming to kill the wife or lover (Dial M. For Murder). Often there are clear motives: in The Postman Always Rings Twice they kill the husband chiefly out of lust; in Double Indemnity, the femme fatale does it for money; and in Dial M for Murder, the husband uses the affair as an opportunity to have her killed so that he can inherit her fortune.
Here, the material motivations are clear while in Chabrol’s films they are murkier, and thus perhaps he better represent Girard’s belief that “it is commonly observed that the intensification of rivalry produces a shift of the mimetic attention from the disputed objects to the rivals themselves. This shift accounts for the efficacy of the so-called "scapegoat effect" still insufficiently studied but readily observable" he says. "The same mimesis which is conflictual and divisive as long as it focuses on objects of appropriation must become re-unitive as the very intensity of the escalation substitutes one single scapegoat for many disputed objects.” (Diacritics) The gist of Girard’s general claim is that mimetic desire has its roots in objects but that doesn’t mean this is where the tension remains. “The emergence of more and more complex symbolical societies must somehow correspond to the catastrophical breakdown of the earlier forms. The mechanism of symbolicity must be triggered by the murderous exasperation of mimetic rivalry.” (Diacritics) Film noir is not at all a primitive approach to the problem but it does propose that the issue is materially motivated rather than psychically perverse. The difference between Audran’s figures in several Chabrol films, as opposed to the typical femme fatale, rests on this question, and partly why we have made much of Audran’s narcissistic exhibitionism. It is as if she is looking at herself being looked at by others but without Chabrol showing necessarily the gaze upon herself or the others' gaze upon her.
There is a moment, for example, when Charles is in bed in La femme infidele and he is reading his book. The camera then pans left and the films shows Helene in her dressing room, a mirror in front of her. Chabrol neither suggests this is Charles’ point of view nor that Helene is looking at herself, but he does register in this shot (which also includes a slow zoom) a desire that seems caught between the two. After all, we discover the husband suspects his wife is having an affair and hires a detective, and that she looks like in the early stages of the film someone who isn’t quite getting the attention she is entitled to expect. When the camera pans and zooms in on her in the bathroom we see her attending to her long, slender legs and the camera registers a look that indicates desire but that remains caught between an exhibitionism that nobody at that moment is observing, and a narcissism that isn’t quite activated as she sits in from of the mirror but doesn’t look into it. In Le boucher halfway through we get one of the few point-of-view shots in the film. It is when, as we have noted, Paul looks at the back of Helene’s head while she instructs the schoolchildren when they dance. She slowly turns to face him and insists he and she dance too. His look upon her comes as no surprise to Helene, as if well aware of her power over him even as it increasingly manifests itself as power over others that he will murder. The shot showing the back of Helene’s head might call to mind the famous shot of the back of Madeline’s in the museum in Vertigo, but while Hitchcock was often interested in someone holding for too long information that could endanger the lives of others, it is more troublesome still when Helene does so here, as she is increasingly aware surely that her chastity is another’s woman’s demise. It would be too assertive to claim she does this out of perversity but the result is perverse nevertheless.
While in Audran such perversity seems a consequence of choices her characters make, in Isabelle Huppert the perversity is, if not any more conscious, much more motivated. This might sound like a contradiction, but this is only to say that Audran is caught in triangulated desire while Huppert often generates perversity without quite knowing why she insists upon it. As she says in Merci pour le chocolat,: “I have real power in my mind. I calculate everything.” But she has no idea why she creates the scenarios she does. In Violete Noziere she is arrested and sentenced to death for murdering her father and almost killing her mother — who survives the poisoning. She says, when asked for the motivation, that her father abused her, which may or might not be true, and even if true may not be known by Violette. It is as if she offers it as a reason because it is plausible without being necessarily the case, while other things may be necessarily the case but less plausible. Later, she insists she won’t be executed and also seeks her mother’s forgiveness. She escapes the death penalty and looks like she has repented, but we cannot know for sure not only or even especially because Violette is lying, but because she doesn’t know what her feelings are. It isn’t as though she is incapable of self-sacrifice: she will do anything for the man she falls in love with no matter if he will lie to her and squander the money on gambling. But Violette is a woman both profound and shallow, looking for a reason to exist beyond the immediate working-class milieu in which she lives and the petit bourgeois morality her parents practice, and finds that purpose prostituting herself at a hotel and by falling in love with this man who means everything to her. “Do as you like with me . I love you like an animal.” The film then oddly cuts to her back in her parents’ cramped home, in her narrow single bed that is off the living room and, in a high angle shot, she says to herself, while no doubt thinking of this lover, “I love you.” The film then cuts back to them in the hotel room as we might wonder if this interjected shot indicates a transition or a flashback, a dream or a projection. Its status remains indeterminate but then so does Violette. When Gilles Deleuze offers his only specific reference to a Chabrol film, he invokes this one, saying, “Chabrol will rediscover this power and use of the flashback in Violette Nozière, when he wants to indicate the heroine's continual forks, the variety of her faces, the irreducible diversity of the hypotheses (did she or did she not want to spare her mother, etc?” (Cinema 2: The Time Image)
In Audran’s work for Chabrol, we view a woman whose motives are complicated but not inexplicable. In Les Biches she likes to manipulate people using her wealth; in La femme infidele, she would appear to take a lover to counter her husband’s indifference, and is quietly pleased when he proves he can be a man of passion by killing her lover. In Le boucher, why would Helene want to take up with Paul when she has been badly hurt in the past, and increasingly realises that the man whose company she enjoys is a murderer? In Wedding in Blood, she probably again likes a man who adores her, and can tolerate that he kills his wife partly for her. Perversity of feeling isn’t the same as an absence of meaning, and this is chiefly the shift we find in Huppert’s work for Chabrol: she brings to the director’s oeuvre an unreliability that Deleuze acknowledges when he speaks of the powers of the false. Though he sees it far more evident in Robbe-Grillet’s work than in Chabrol’s, we might suppose that Huppert pursues this question more than almost any actor. When Deleuze says “a new status of narration follows from this: narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying”, it finds its most assured thespian practitioner in Huppert. Violette Noziere is about a woman who sees the truth as a temporal-spatial void, and her mind as a protective space for the many lies it offers. Thus if an event is in the past or cannot be seen in the present, and her mind an inaccessible realm, it is fertile ground for mythomania. Her parents no nothing of her assignations in the hotel room just as the law will have no idea whether or not she is lying about her father’s sexual abuse. When she proposes that her syphilis might be hereditary, we are surprised that this possible truth is at least rooted in a student doctor’s claim. When Violette offers anything with a modicum of reality it stills the vortex without quite attending to the truthful.
In the similarly period-set Story of Women, Huppert is incapable of facing the truth for a different set of reasons. Here she is a woman during the Nazi occupation who acts as if it is no more than an inconvenience. She takes up with a young lover who collaborates with the Nazis, and cares little for a husband who has returned from the war a damaged man. She carries out inevitably illegal abortions and runs what amounts to a brothel: the family move into a bigger house and rents rooms to sex workers. This would be all very well were she a woman of pragmatic means, someone who wants to get through the war and protect her family. But with Huppert in the role the film shows that Marie is more fantasist than realist — a fortune teller insists her future is rosy and Marie reckons one day she can become a great singer, though her voice is appallng. The film may lack the complexity of Violette Noziere and can seem a little like a standard WWII period drama, yet Huppert brings to the role a quality of ‘unsympathy’ that leaves us musing less over what people had to do to get by, than what some people would do to make the most of their situation. One way of looking at this is to think of the necessary and sufficient conditions people sometimes address when looking at ‘monsters’ in history. Hitler would unlikely have appeared if it weren’t for the Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of the Deutschmark in the 20s and so on. But Hitler is also a singular figure and without him perhaps the atrocities would never have come to pass. Equally, if rather more modestly, if Marie hadn't been indifferent to her husband, hadn't started an affair with a collaborator and hadn't had her children sharing a house with prostitutes sleeping with the enemy, she might not have been executed. Her situation is presented as difficult but then so were those of many others during the Occupation. The difference rests on what people do within the context of these difficulties. Marie makes the most of them and the state makes an example of her. Huppert would never be inclined simply to play characters for whom circumstances are against her — that would be to provoke sympathy when Huppert has consistently invoked the opposite — as if to say that given a set of difficult circumstances, her characters would be amongst the first to exploit them and not simply accept them.
Marie is a woman who will lie and dissemble without quite the breathtaking audacious dishonesty of Violette, but it is there, and it rests on the problem of truth as both a moral and epistemological notion. Huppert’s characters are rarely true people, consistent in their behaviour, resolute in their morals and honest in their interactions. It is a quality Huppert brings to at least two other Chabrol films, La Ceremonie and Merci, pour le chocolat. In the first she plays a secondary role, a local postwoman Jeanne who has moved to the village to avoid a scandal elsewhere — she was cleared of killing her young daughter but in a moot case. She befriends the new maid of the wealthy Lelievres, and they start the sort of dangerous female friendships common in mid-90s cinema: Heavenly Creatures, Butterfly Kiss and Fun. Eventually, Jeanne and Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) kill all four members of the Lelievre family: the father, the son, the wife and the daughter. It is a deed that may have been avoided if it weren’t for Huppert’s cajoling presence as Jeanne, even if it is Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) who has more a motive for the murders. Sophie can’t read or write and spends most of the film trying to hide this fact from the family. When the daughter finds out she wants to help Sophie, but that isn’t how Sophie takes it. She is horrified this wealthy, confident and beautiful young woman now has this information that defines Sophie's sense of self and its potential collapse and threatens to tell the girl’s father that his daughter is pregnant after listening in on a phone conversation between the girl and her boyfriend. The girl is horrified and tells the other family members, and the father insists Sophie must leave. We needn’t concern ourselves with the intricacies of class that is also involved in Sophie’s anger; it is Jeanne who interests us. It is her character who is less amenable to meaning, as though she acts with all the impetuousness that Sophie cannot allow herself as someone who controls every aspect of her life, making sure she survives without people knowing she cannot read.
In an excellent piece, Jean-Claude Polack says “Chabrol does indeed speak of his heroines as born murderesses. The sequence of their reciprocal narrations of unpunished crimes (infanticide for Jeanne, patricide for Sophie — the symmetry is perfect) place the two amoral women-exterminating angels or witches — at the limits of the human.” (October)” To counter a fine critic and the director might seem wayward, but though Polack is correct in noticing a certain symmetry in the women’s past crimes, we might wonder if Sophie’s was patricide or an accident. In a newspaper article Jeanne reads out, Sophie was found not guilty, and Jeanne says provocatively, complicitly: “didn’t you kill your father?” The film cuts back to Sophie at the sink before another shot of Jeanne still lying on the bed, from Sophie’s point of view. Sophie smiles as she comes towards Jeanne and confidently proclaims “they couldn’t prove it!” Whether she killed him or not what matters more is how easily under Jeanne’s influence she is, and while it is one thing to laugh off your unfortunate dead father dying in what may have been an accident; it is another to see complicity by suggesting another has killed her father. There may be symmetry in the past crimes but the magnitude of each is quite different, and it is Jeanne who speculates that Sophie killed her father as though to acknowledge the murder of her own daughter. It is perhaps reflective of their respective personalities: that Sophie is cold but Jeanne callous. When Mr Lelievre comes and complains about his parcels being opened and accusing Jeanne, she tells him his second wife is a whore and it was no wonder his first wife killed herself. He slaps her and Jeanne seems less indignant than triumphant - that she has worked this entitled, wealthy man up into fury.
While with Sophie we can understand her character chiefly through her illiteracy, with Jeanne we cannot find the key to hers and this is vital not just to the characters Huppert often plays, but how she goes about playing them. Speaking of her role in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, she says: “Here is what I liked. She is raped and confronted by this violence and she has to be the mother to a fragile son and the daughter of a crazy mother. And an ex-wife, lover, boss. That this woman is defined in so many ways, it makes her a very complete human being.” (Guardian) We may disagree with Huppert as we have already with Polack and Chabrol, but only to add that an important aspect of Huppert’s characters is that they are incomplete human beings. How else to describe Erika in The Piano Teacher, Malina in Werner Schroeter’s film of that name, her teasingly dissatisfied character in Loulou, or her sometimes cruel figure in La Separation? None of these are Chabrol films, but they capture a feature to be found in her best work for him; that an aspect of character cannot define her, as we can say the illiteracy defines Sophie.
If Huppert isn’t given to researching very much into her characters it rests partly on her interest in states over psychologies. “Well, it’s not my way of doing it. To begin with, I don’t believe in the idea of playing a character. I just believe in the idea of playing states—joy, sadness, laughter, listening, talking. That’s all I think about. In order to have the fiction come through you, you have to get rid of the idea of a character. The character is like a prison. And you could go further in that way of thinking—since it’s not a character, I don’t need to know anything about her.” (New Yorker) By playing moods rather than characters, she caregister an incompleteness that is more complex than characterisational deficiency. Sophie in this sense is deficient (her personality predicated on her illiteracy) but Jeanne’s isn’t so predicated and suggests instead dissatisfaction. To understand many of Huppert’s characters in Chabrol’s films and those of others isn’t to comprehend the specifics of character but the complexity of states. Whether lying in Violette Noziere or offering blunt truths in La Ceremonie, her figures don’t so much say what they think but offer what they feel, which is why, whether telling the truth, or offering a lie, they can seem like the same thing.
While in Chabrol’s work with Audran as the lead, Girard's mimetic desire seems applicable, it would appear less so in understanding Huppert’s films for the director. Girard might say that any great work is there to reveal the structure of consciousness that will do almost anything to hide such a mechanism, but Huppert’s fascination as an actress often rests on an intricacy of feeling that cannot be understood structurally because she has internalised what in others would be a societal demand meeting an unconscious desire. Girard says Shakespeare “…sees everything in terms of relations. Helena’s ‘inferiority complex,’ for example, is only the the ‘Wong’ or the ‘beast’ end of her relationship with Hermit and Demetrius. Ultimately, everyone ends up with the dame ‘inferiority complex,’ since everyone feels deprived of an absolute superiority that always appears to belong to someone else.” (All Desire is a Desire For Being) What Girard often shows in characters as different as Camus’s Meursault or these lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that for all their apparent resistance in the former, and the difficulties placed on true love in the latter, their wants and needs are quite straightforward. "…desire in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perpetually runs to desire just as money runs to money in the capitalistic system. We may say, of course, that the four characters are in love with love. That would not be inaccurate; but there is no such thing as love or desire in general, and such a formulation obscures the most crucial point, the necessarily jealous and conflictual nature of mimetic convergence on a single object.” (All Desire is a Desire for Being) In Huppert’s film it is more that she is so frustrated by life rather than with life that she creates problems which contain secrets within a mystery. The secret can be the process but the mystery remains indiscernible. The secret is what the characters keep to themselves, well analysed when Huppert says, “…what I’m thinking: how does my character find their way out of the trap they’re caught in? They have to plot an escape from a situation in their own little way, but this little way is the best way to come to a victory in the end. That’s what the film is always about in general – a character is in a problem and they find their own way out, to a birth, or a rebirth and to do it, they have to fight or struggle to escape. That’s the drama of every film, so my job is just to figure my character’s way out.” (Rabbit Foot) This in itself is intricate given how many even finefilms make that struggle readily apparent to the viewer — from the central character in A Man Escaped to…Sophie in La Ceremonie. We know what they want to escape from — Nazi incarceration in the former; Sophie’s illiteracy being discovered in the latter. But what happens if you hide the fact of your crisis; if it barely touches the surface of the film’s narrative?
First of all, it creates the narratively inexplicable, as the viewer can’t know what the character is trying to escape from. But this contains another problem if we believe that in many of Huppert’s films the characters don’t quite know what they are escaping from either. The answer might be impossibly profound and ontologically impossible — that they are trying to escape from themselves. From this perspective, Huppert has done more than most to explore self-hatred, but this needn’t be your run-of-the-mill, bog-standard, garden-variety self-hatred that Girard often explores so well as a problem of mimicry and envy: of escaping oneself into the admiration of another, and destroying the other in the wish to replace the figure of admiration, with yourself then in a new position of potential self-hatred as the envied one who nevertheless must in turn envy another. Hence Girard's earlier claim “…that everyone feels deprived of an absolute superiority that always appears to be someone else.” (All Desire is a Desire for Being) But there is potentially another problem that sits behind Girard’s — a self-loathing that plays out like a variation of Berkeley’s philosophy. This is a world “…mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being perceived. For ideas, and so for the physical world, esse est percipi.” (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy) Deleuze looking at Samuel Beckett’s short film with Buster Keaton invokes Berkeley and says, “how can we rid ourselves of ourselves and demolish ourselves….We are in the domain of the affection of perception, the most terrifying, that which still survives when all the others have been destroyed. It is the perception of self by self…” (The Movement Image) For Girard, the problem of self is an irony rather than a paradox — that if we could only see how much we want to be like others, we wouldn’t need to flatter ourselves with perceptions of our individuality, and would acknowledge how much our desires aren’t ‘ours’ but part of a mimetic mechanism. In this sense, people disagree and get in fights and conflicts not because of their individuality but their conformity.
Yet it seems to us that Huppert’s persona is often predicated on the paradoxical over the ironic, as if the trap her characters wish to escape is more Berkeleyesque than Girardian. In Berkeley’s philosophy, nothing exists but our mind’s perception of things (there are no things in Berkeley’s anti-materialist, idealist philosophy), but what unites all these ideas is God’s omniscience. Berkeley says when speaking of material objects that we accept that they don’t exist but that we recall their existence perceptually. “The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.” (Of the Principles of Human Knowledge) The only perceptual power that holds all these ideas of things together is God’s. As Lisa Downing says, if “God [is] an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context.” (Stanford Encyclopedia to Philosophy) God holds everything together and protects one from madness and solipsism but what if there is no God to do so and the self is left to its own devices, testing its power as it detests itself? In Violette Noziere, Huppert says “God is empty. Someone must be above him.” But who might that be, and how has God become without value? Imagine living as a reality Berkeley’s thinking within God’s absence and it helps us understand an aspect of Huppert’s work for Chabrol, especially in Violette Noziere. If she only acts states rather than characters, this is a little like living as though there is no unifying purpose to our actions, and no reality beyond our immediate perceptions. If she then tries to escape this trap it becomes a metaphysical impossibility rather than a physical difficulty — the difference between escaping from prison and tentatively finding God in Bresson’s film, and failing to find a power greater than oneself in Huppert’s work. If in Violette Noziere, Violette lies constantly, it is as though she believes that any act has no greater validity than the present moment demands. When the maid asks her what she is studying, she says medicine. The maid says the last time Violette said it was history, and Violette sighs. It isn’t that she has been found out lying but that other people believe in consistency.
Yet Huppert’s can appear the most calculating of personae, which seems contrary to the pragmatic dishonesty of the characters she often plays, and that Violette Noziere perhaps more than any other early role allowed her to find. However, when she speaks of calculation in Merci pour le chocolat, this shows someone who sees very much the consequences of actions. Is this to arrive at a contradiction or can we spring ourselves from our own trap by invoking once again the paradoxical nature of Huppert’s characters? Imagine one feels there is no reality beyond the immediacy of experience, that people disappear when they leave a room, that an object you hold partly vanishes when you turn it upside down. All we can ever see are partial views, and disappearing presences. With the object, even looking at it in a mirror won’t help — we can see the top and the bottom, yet part of the object will remain concealed from us. Let’s not get overly philosophical here (and can we not see the whole of a transparent plastic object?), our purpose is to explore the feeling of scepticism meeting solipsism, and where the latter cannot allow for a faith that would take us beyond the sceptical.
We can consequently propose Huppert’s calculation is in unmotivated motivation, while for example a femme fatale is interested in motivated motivation. The female in a film noir usually wants money and status, sex and power. She might already have the former pair but only because of a rich husband, and to get rid of him she can have all four. Her motivation is clear even if the story showing her calculations might be complicated indeed. She wouldn’t doubt the world exists and instead wants more of it for her own gain. Huppert may often play murderous and abusive but she seems almost surprised by the deeds she commits, and wouldn’t readily distinguish them from the suicidal and self-harming characters she plays. Sometimes the apparent contraries are contained within the same character, like Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher: a woman both given to hurting others and also herself.
What matters to Huppert's characters is that that they must get themselves out of the immediate situation they find themsleves in and that consequences are less important than causes. Causes may have consequences but what matters is that the moment is attended to in all its necessity, over the future that remains unsure. When Huppert was asked what would her guiltiest pleasure be, she proposed “imagining myself as a sadistic and manipulative murderer, like something out of a book by Agatha Christie.” (Guardian) This would be someone well aware of her intentions, and Huppert’s character are, instead, merely well aware of their moods. In La Ceremonie, when she pours hot chocolate all over the Lelievres’ bed, when she rips up Mrs Lelievre’s clothes, she seems to have no thought at all for the consequences: that this is immediately pleasurable. It is Sophie who realises that this is the beginning of a murderous spree as she shortly afterwards blows away Mr Lelievre when he finds them in the kitchen. Equally, when earlier in the film Jeanne opens his mail, she doesn’t care to hide the fact but tells him he can’t prove it; and that she has far more on him than he has on her. She gives him a piece of her mind as he tries to give her a piece of his, but while he expects the threat of an investigation to scare her off, she doesn’t play by the rules of fair argument and the law. Why should she, the film possibly proposes, when her purpose is to play up class conflict well aware that she and Sophie are of little significance to the wealthy Lelievre? But that seems more an excuse than a reason: that she is too impetuously provocative to claim a given reason for her actions.
Jeanne at first seems far removed from Marie-Claire in Merci pour le chocolat, a woman of great, inherited wealth — a woman at least as rich as the Lelievres. However, while Chabrol may have joked that La Ceremonie was ‘the last Marxist film’, this doesn’t at all indicate that Jeanne is a Marxist. That would suggest a political agenda which in turn would show a strong motivation. Our claim is that whether playing poor or rich, it doesn’t really matter; the trap will be the same. It is why for all the apparent good deeds Marie-Claire practises in Merci pour le chocolat, they are of little consequence to the film because nothing suggests they are of much consequence to Marie-Claire. During one meeting, the managing director explains to the board what is costing the company and what is making the company money. Marie-Claire is in charge but hardly engaged, and if she insists that she will continue with her loss-making foundations then that is what she will do. She says this with no passion for the causes she supports and seems throughout the meeting distracted and irritated — as though there is something on her mind that she cannot quite locate.
This may describe many a Huppert character, figures who seem to have things on their mind but that this shouldn’t quite be confused with motivation. Peter Harcourt notes: “In a recent [seventies] interview, Isabelle Huppert suggested that nowadays, Violette would probably be a terrorist. This gives us food for thought. She was a protester against the established norms of our not-too-satisfactory society.” (Cinema Canada) Yet another way of reading such a statement is that just as she could have been a patricide or a terrorist this can be irrelevant from a particular perspective — which is that her characters offer a state of dissatisfaction with the world that they must act radically within not for any great purpose but for a greater purposelessness. At the end of Merci pour le chocolat, after Marie-Claire says “ I have real power in my mind. I calculate everything”, she adds, “It’s in God’s hands. I think I need to feel tired occasionally. You understand?” She’s been putting sleeping pills into various family members’ drinks for years, and may have been responsible for killing her husband’s first wife. In another film this would be an act of jealousy, and perhaps it is — but if so, this isn’t the same thing as saying this is why Marie-Claire does it. Her remarks read like a series of non-sequiturs, as they reveal what is on her mind but not what motivates her decisions. It is more that she reveals the emptiness of her thoughts rather than their motivational content. Rather than seeing Huppert as a profound actress in Chabrol’s work and those of others, better to see her as a bewildering one, as someone who doesn’t know what she wants because the want doesn’t stretch into a purposeful future but is caught in an immediate need to escape from the disturbing chaos of the present. This is the trap and her means of escape may lead to harming others or herself; might lead to the murder of her father but could just as easily lead to a terrorist action. The deed will always somehow be arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be complex.
While speaking of Audran, we made much of Chabrol’s work too. Talking of Huppert, it is almost as if we are suggesting Chabrol facilitated Huppert’s; while Audran merely represented Chabrol. This latter point is partly inevitable: Audran was almost exclusively associated with the director, and even The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie can seem like an extension of Audran’s general Chabrolian persona into a Bunuel film. This could never be so with Huppert, with dozens of different directors working with Huppert, seeking in her an aspect of their own work. While Audran was Chabrol’s actrice fetiche, Huppert may as we have noted made more films with Chabrol than with anyone else but, speaking of her work generally, she says, “…I was never really asked to be the woman sitting behind the man, the woman giving value to the man. You have to be a certain type of woman [to be that]. That was never my case, so in a way, the only place I could take was the main place. Which was fine.” (Guardian) A number of obituaries defined Audran as the woman who starred in Babette’s Feast, including The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Guardian, whose headline also at least offered a nod to Chabrol: “Star of Babette’s Feast who shone in the films of her husband Claude Chabrol.” Audran, with a hundred or so films made, was almost as prolific an actress as Huppert, yet she will be perceived in the main as faithfully affiliated with Chabrol’s work and the odd exception, while Huppert is associated with various preoccupations that she could share with numerous filmmakers. One always sensed in Chabrol’s Helene films the camera was watching her; in the director’s work with Huppert that she was watching through the camera. Yet this is a perception as much as a fact. As Chabrol says “…Hitchcock tries to convey a story subjectively — everything is based on the subjectivity of the character, while Lang seeks the opposite, to objectify all the time. I try to objectify too.” (Film Quarterly) Yet there are important points of view in Violette Noziere, for example, when Violette sees the man she falls for in the film, and when Merci pour le chocolat she observes her musician husband, and a young pianist who may well be his daughter. But this wouldn’t be where our feeling that Huppert inverts the look available in the Audran films lies. It rests chiefly on Huppert as an actress of radical interiority and Audran one of glacial exteriority. These two looks contained by these two actresses led to some of Chabrol’s best films: Le biches, La femme infidele, Le Boucher, Just Before Nightfall, Wedding in Blood, Violette Noziere, La Ceremonie and Merci pour le chocolat. Chabrol worked with other well-known actresses, including Jean Seberg, Romy Schneider, Emmanuelle Beart and Marie Trintignant. But if he only made a dozen films, and only with Huppert and Audran, his reputation wouldn’t be much altered.
© Tony McKibbin