Claude Chabrol, one of the central figures in the French New Wave movement passed away yesterday at the age of 80. Thus, like my Altman, Bergman, Antonioni and Rohmer memorial posts, I thought I would discuss my favorite Chabrol movie. Though, first, I must admit that I have actually never been a huge Chabrol fan. Misanthropic pessimism is fine (I’m a huge Clouzot fan after all) but Chabrol’s films too often just feel mean spirited–and I suspect were a significant influence on the “New French Extremity” movement that I find equally distasteful. However, I have always felt that his film “Le Boucher” is as fine a film as any director could hope to make and single-handedly raises my opinion of his work enough to make me want to write this post in the first place. Also, I should point out that having only seen 4 Chabrol movies, I realize it’s a bit presumptuous of me to call “Le Boucher” the “masterpiece” in the oeuvre of a director as prolific as Chabrol. Still, no matter how many masterpieces he might have made, “Le Boucher” must be counted among them, and I’d like to take a look at what makes it work so well for me.
Note – there will be a few spoilers here…so if you like restrained European suspense films and have never seen a Chabrol movie check out “Le Boucher” before reading further. You won’t be disappointed!
For myself, “Le Boucher” is probably the only film about a serial killer that I would want to watch more than once. Sure, there have been plenty of great serial killer movies like Peeping Tom, but it’s just a theme that I find very unpleasant and, along with most prison movies and all holocaust movies, is something I just try to stay away from in my movie watching. Of course, Le Boucher is no ordinary serial killer movie.
Yes, the titular butcher is a serial killer, and yes, a series of women are murdered over the course of the film (though, importantly, the murders are never shown and often only mentioned by the townsfolk after the fact), but the butcher is played as a pretty normal dude. Granted, a normal dude who has been left with the suffocating need to murder after experiencing over a decade of war, but otherwise a normal dude.
Unlike most serial killer movies, “Le Boucher” doesn’t treat him as an insect whose motivations for killing are to be dissected under the viewer’s magnifying glass, but rather like a man whose motivations in life and love are no different from our own. It is his love for the town’s school teacher, and his all too normal frustrations as he deals with his feelings that dominate the movie. “Le Boucher” is a love story where the lovers are kept apart not by differences in social status or a wacky misunderstanding, but rather by the murderous proclivities of the title character. The butcher loves the school teacher, but as a sane and rational individual he knows that his compulsion will eventually ruin what could be. Yet, he allows himself to hope, and perhaps, even look for redemption in his love of the school teacher.
The butcher is not the sole focus of the film; the school teacher is an equally compelling character. Early on she suspects the butcher is the murderer, and yet she hides evidence and does not turn him in. She justifies it to herself that it is because she can’t be sure, but deep down she knows it must be him. Eventually she comes to realize it must be him, but even then she discovers that she can not turn her back on him. Just as the butcher agonizes over what he knows is a doomed relationship, the teacher is tormented by the horror she feels for someone that she can not help but love anyway.
The film works because the relationship is believable. Chabrol fills his film with wonderful scenes of their relationship interactions (like the mushroom hunting scene) that would have made Rohmer proud. The teacher is urbane and sophisticated, and while the butcher does a fine job of matching in kind, you can see the rough unsophisticated man beneath the surface. Not a mean-spirited man, just a man who is ill at ease with a woman he feels might be a bit out of his league. And, of course, the teacher loves him for his rough edges. You believe in their love because Chabrol takes the time to make their relationship the focus of his film.
“Le Boucher” is a tragic story of a love that could not be. By using the butcher’s murderous compulsion as a romantic MacGuffin, Chabrol creates a very unusual and complex relationship drama. Those fascinated with the mind of a serial killer may be disappointed, but those fascinated with the intricacies of human interaction are sure to find quite a lot to think about in this masterfully constructed story of a doomed love affair.
5 Comments
This sounds like the kind of movie I will love. I’m interested to see, though, whether Chabrol can effectively convince me that a serial killer’s motivations in life and love are no different from our own. From what you say, I can see that’s not really Le Boucher’s raison d’être, but I can see it being a sticking point.
Yeah, I bet you would like this movie…I played up the love story angle here, but it is an interesting portrait of a serial killer, especially so because he really seems rather normal.
I concur with a some of what you have to say but I feel that the film is really about the crisis of masculinity when faced with apparent impending redundancy. In a world where, for a time, a hardline faction of feminism posited that women not only didn’t need men but were actually improved by overcoming their supposedly indoctrinated desires and abstaining from relationships with them, two people struggle to make the transition towards a new relationship paradigm. With disastrous results.
Let me attempt to clumsily explain:
The film is called The Butcher but could just have easily been called The School Teacher and the Butcher; or The Brains and the Brawn. He’s pretty simple; she, not so much.
Helene is attempting to become a modern, progressive, independent woman, but she isn’t quite the full package yet. This is illustrated by how she holidays in Paris at exactly the same time that Parisians are vacationing in rural villages like hers. She is intelligent and astute but remains in transition.
After a previous poor relationship, in which she got hurt, she’s now acutely aware of how she is attracted to dominant, masculine types and how they bring out a submissive side of her personality. So, like a recovering alcoholic avoids drink completely, she intends to abstain from relationships with men as she feels they are unhealthy and ultimately destructive for her. Her schoolchildren will act as surrogate offspring; fulfilling her mothering instinct without the need for procreation, therefore negating the need for a man. Logical perhaps, but most human beings don’t really run that well on logic alone…as Popaul and others keep reminding us throughout the film.
Popaul from the outset is constantly trying to impress her with offerings of bouquets of meat and solemn tales of his horrifically violent, but dutiful, army exploits. He’s playing the archetypal hunter/warrior; behaving just like the ancient inhabitants of the caves Helene takes the children to later would have. However, he wasn’t a born alpha male. He’s had to work at it to become what he thinks society requires of a man. He is at once embarrassed at how the bloodletting sickens him whilst at the same time proud of his proficiency and ability to overcome his anxiety in order to supposedly provide for and protect his woman/society. Modern society is changing though. War and, to a lesser degree, eating meat are beginning to become frowned upon in supposed enlightened circles (note how he checks with Helene first to see if she evens likes meat). He too, in his own less intellectual, blunter way than Helene, is trying to become more progressive. The irony of course is that he didn’t even like blood in the first place; he’s forced himself to do these things because he thinks it’s what real men do and what society expects of them.
Helene adopts a provocatively dominant position in almost every instance when they are together; inviting him to her house for dinner; he sits on a lower seat than her; preparing the meat whilst he makes the salad; driving them to the cinema &c. He accepts this with good grace, but it bothers him. Also, he only ever smokes after she does. I think she might buy him the lighter so that he can light his, and maybe sometimes even her, cigarettes. A symbolic gesture that could in some ways be read as patronising perhaps?
Upon her discovery of the 2nd sacrificial murder, her decision to conceal the evidence in order to protect Popaul is borne part from her illicit attraction to him but also from an intuition that it could be partly her fault. Is she sub-consciously aware that her actions are driving this? Does she also find this somewhat empowering? Her tears of relief when she discover’s he still has her lighter arise from the guilty realisation that her reasoning was incorrect; he’s not a violent man and more importantly she’s not attracted to them and their actions. Sadly it turns out she was wrong, on both accounts. Kind of.
Apart they would have perhaps led lonely lives, but no one would’ve got hurt. However, once together their inability to reconcile their respective roles in an uncertain and changing interior and exterior social landscape led to a violent outbreak of cognitive dissonance.
At the climax (ostensibly the film’s sex scene) she submits to his physical dominance in her schoolroom of intellect. Almost willing him to symbolically penetrate her as those strangely alluring feelings of submission well up in her once more. Does she want to be murdered by him? No. But does she want to be nearly murdered by him? Maybe. But he doesn’t want to kill her. He wants to kill himself. Disgusted by all the butchering he’s done. Both the butchering that society asked of him and that of his own confused volition. Ashamed before her he makes his final sacrifice; himself.
Her facial expressions as they wheel Popaul away on the gurney are probably the most ambiguos elements of the whole film. Love. Pity. Vainglorious pride. Happiness. Sadness. She feels all these and more. She’s still as confused and conflicted as before.
At the film’s end Helene watches the new dawn break over the water and contemplates her future. Popaul, on the other hand, is dead.
It would appear that whilst Chabrol admits that gender relations needed to progress, his take on the hardline feminist revolution that was in ascendence around 1970 is that it may not have been beneficial for either party. Or at least that it was perhaps not the ideal way for everyone to live. I think he also felt that if it were to have continued along this path, and men were to feel increasingly redundant and emasculated that it may have eventually resulted in increasing levels of violent misogyny.
In some ways he was right; hence, amongst other developments, the more moderate form of post-feminism that exists today and the realisation that men and women do have certain roles to play in relationships but they are in no way fixed. We are not defined by gender but a failure to confront our deepest desires leads down the road to repression and that’s where the real demons dwell.
Evolving above our base instincts is a tricky ol’ business.
You’ve succeeded remarkably in your attempt to explain clumsily. Congrats!
I’ll buy a lot of this. I’ve actually heard this theory as a general sociological explanation for the rise of serial killers in the latter half of the 20th century, so it seems plausible. Still, it seems a little specific to be the “correct” interpretation any more than mine is.