À Double tour

Chabrol's first color film finds the director experimenting with not only imagery-the film's opening scene runs along the cluttered floor of a bourgeois home, before settling on a spinning color wheel for the opening credits-but form, as he begins to flesh out Hollywood crime-fiction pulp with Continental existential ennui and his own jabs at French family life. (“I'm not against marriage or the family,” he wrote, “only the bourgeois family.”) Jean-Paul Belmondo (in his first role after Breathless) plays a Hungarian drifter swaggering through a repressed family in a gaudy Aix-en-Provence villa, his all-id (and all-ego) presence in direct contrast to the dullard father, the tightly wound mother, and especially the anxious adult son, who spends his time spying through keyholes. Chabrol gleefully drags the familial rot out of the cluttered interiors and into a riot of sunny Provençal fields, creating a noir as color-drenched as Leave Her to Heaven, yet as bleak as Sartre.

This page may by only partially complete.