Le Boucher
“If you only knew human nature…” sighs the detective, but in fact human nature is laid out quite precisely in this brilliant psychological thriller – both its “Cro-Magnon” side, in the killer’s blind rage and the butcher’s memories of wartime savagery (and perhaps also in the constant background presence of children, as unthinking in their innocence as the killer is in his brutality), and its more exalted side, our attempts at something more transcendent (“Aspirations”!), whether the primitive cave-paintings in the grotto or the tentative tenderness between a man and a woman. The greatest aspiration of all may be Community, the village life that sanctifies and civilises triumph and tragedy through its rituals, its weddings and funerals – the opening caption is more than a dedication; the villagers of Trémolat are the true heroes here – though of course redemption comes in many forms; Chabrol plays Hitchcockian games then deliberately goes beyond them, the damsel-in-distress climax duly offered then transcended by a sublime final 10 minutes, the damaged – but redemptive – love of two damaged people (note the sly side-note of the heroine’s disenchantment, which implicitly is what allows her to respond as she does; she’d be deeply shocked, if she still believed in love). Starts with landscape shots, ends with the same shots only wreathed in fog, the noble haze of moral ambiguity. Sounds about right.
- Theo Panayides.
