The Films of Claude Chabrol
Le beau Serge
The Cousins
À double tour
The Good Time Girls
Wise Guys
The Third Lover
Landru
Ophelia
The Tiger Likes Fresh Meat
Blue Panther
Our Agent Tiger
Line of Demarcation
The Champagne Murders
Who's Got the Black Box?
Les biches
The Unfaithful Wife
The Beast Must Die
The Butcher
The Break Up
Just Before Nightfall
Ten Days Wonder
High Heels
Wedding in Blood
The Nada Gang
A Piece of Pleasure
Dirty Hands
Les magiciens
The Twist
Alice or the Last Escapade
Blood Relatives
Violette
The Horse of Pride
The Hatter's Ghost
The Blood of Others
Chicken with Vinegar
Inspecteur Lavardin
Masks
The Cry of the Owl (November 28/10)
Based on the book by Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl follows Christophe Malavoy's Robert as he spends his free time peeping into the home of a fetching young woman (Mathilda May's Juliette) - with Juliette's inevitable discovery of Robert's presence kicking into motion a decidedly unusual friendship. It's hard to pin the blame of The Cry of the Owl's abject failure entirely on filmmaker Claude Chabrol, as the director, working from a script co-written with Odile Barski, replicates many of the beats and plot developments contained within Highsmith's hopelessly ineffective novel. The problem here, then, is the presence of an inherently faulty premise that's simply not workable, with the initial encounter between Robert and Juliette straining credibility right to its breaking point and establishing an atmosphere of eye-rolling implausibility that persists right through to the film's anticlimactic finale. Chabrol's decision to infuse the proceedings with a lamentably deliberate pace exacerbates its various problems, and it's also worth noting that even the performances manage to leave the viewer cold - as the various actors tackle their respective characters with an almost astonishing lack of subtlety. The end result is a terrible, consistently unwatchable piece of work that's about as wrongheaded as they come, which effectively forces the viewer to wonder just what Chabrol saw in the laughably irrelevant source material.
out of
Story of Women
Jours tranquilles à Clichy
Dr. M
Madame Bovary
Betty
The Eyes of Vichy
Hell
La Cérémonie
The Swindle
The Color of Lies
Nightcap
The Flower of Evil
The Bridesmaid
The Comedy of Power
A Girl Cut in Two
Bellamy