Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Relying more than ever on his instincts, Hitchocock takes what he wants from Topaz's script and undercuts the rest. What he wants seems to be situations; the rest, sentiments expressed in the dialogue. Topaz has more existential variety and less emotional intensity than any of his previous films. New people and places follow each other, evoking scant reaction from the hero and his closest associates. The film has at least four beginnings and endings, but its characters do not change in the slightest. Hitchcock does not even motivate their actions...
Such stylistic precison and detailing of motivation are more typical of the fifties than of today's film-making. On many scores-his dramatic premises, his recurrent themes and characters, his stylistic means-Chabrol seems to be working with traditional material. But to take stylistic means as far as they will go is to break new artistic ground. La Femme Infidele, which uses an ultimately experimental style with extraordinary emotional power, deserves not to be dismissed as "perfect...
...YORK critic who called La Femme Infidele a "perfect bourgeois drama" had reason to be proud of himself. Claude Chabrol's new film takes for its subject the most hackneyed situation in melodrama, the triangular love relationship. Its subtlely of expression bespeaks the most exquisite taste. The critic's label nevertheless implies that the film's scope is restricted, and while most audiences may find that true. La Femme Infidele is far from the good little movie the label implies. It is perfect not because Chabrol has restricted his aims, but because he has taken his dramatic situations, themes...
Similarly, the themes and characters of this earlier films are here so integrated as to make their significance more immediate. The hero is Chabrol's destructive romantic, but his dialogue hardly reveals profound love or the insane determination to preserve close personal relationships. It is his facial expressions that detail his momentary emotional states and reactions to other characters' words that betray his character. He is the most completely motivated character I have even seen in a film, for Chabrol has chosen to use dialogue obliquely, turning rather to acting and camerawork to describe his characters...
...minutest details of each situation play an essential part. That the film's second section takes place at home has the deepest possible bearing on the emotional climate of the relationships then developing. The world of the film contracts and its relationships become less existential, more archetypal, as they turn to the family: man, wife, and son. Here again scenes are played less outrageously than in earlier Chabrol, so that the child who sees through the superficial amicability of his parents' relationship reacts to his intuitive insights only indirectly. His inability to finish a picture puzzle, a metaphor...