Cinema: High-Wire Melodrama

LA RUPTURE

Directed and Written by CLAUDE CHABROL

In a movie by Claude Chabrol, evil is never discreet or dispassionate. Once his characters opt for bad behavior, it instantly becomes an obsessive preoccupation. They become positively fussy as they pat into place and hover anxiously over the development of plots against virtue and propriety that are self-satirical as well as self-defeating in their loony complexity. As a result, Chabrol’s tragedies and near-tragedies almost always teeter on the edge of farce. In his best work, there is something of the fascination of a high-wire act.

Chabrol is close to his best in La Rupture, a story so maniacally convoluted as to defy description, but totally absorbing. Basically it is about a strong, simple, good young housewife (Stephane Audran) whose husband has for no good reason turned to drugs and violence. After one of his rages puts their son in the hospital, she is determined to divorce him. But his very rich, authoritatively lunatic father is equally determined that she will not obtain custody of the child. The old man hires a shifty young man (Jean-Pierre Cassel) either to discover or to invent evidence of moral turpitude that would cause a court to refuse the mother custody of her son.

Moral Struggles. This scheme is as wild as any ever manufactured by a Victorian theatrical melodramatist and if Chabrol’s plot reminds us of antique theatrical forms, so do his characters. They seem to exist mainly to demonstrate how — caught up in our own pre occupations and bemused by the ambiguities and polite deceptions of modern behavior — we miss the moral struggles going on around us.

It is Chabrol’s self-appointed mission to heighten our awareness” of these struggles by presenting them in an admittedly exaggerated, stylized manner, a manner that deliberately jars against his utterly realistic mise-en-scéne. There are moments in his movies in which be lief in what one is seeing threatens to dissolve into laughter, but there are many more in which we are shocked into a new awareness that beneath the surface of ordinary-looking lives, high dramas of genuine moral dimensions are being played out.

Richard Schickel