Word: realism
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...saint and an artist, they say, is that an artist knows he's a liar. Making sense out of existence is a dangerous game: the temptations of Conviction, on the one hand, and utter, shapeless Alienation, on the other, are usually seductive enough to deprive piety of content and realism of form. "Spit in a whore's face and she'll tell you it's raining," goes an old Yiddish proverb. What to do about reality seems to have become a problem of choice, and a film-maker who suspects that both documentary and story are lies isn't likely...
...appears, he disdains even deception. When his early movies dealt with film, even tangentially, they did so with provocative wit and a serene, pungent charm. Vent de L'est, however, says at its audience, Your bourgeois concern for my movie is as contemptible as my regard for medium. "Realism," Godard once said, "is never exactly the truth, and the realism of cinema is obligatorily faked." In Vent de L'est, even the lies are faked, and the incessant, didactic narrators are finally to be trusted no more than capitalists, mad dogs or artists...
Because Le Boucher is primarily a narrative, because it moves from scene to scene discretely, with visible growths and amplifications, its realism conveys an almost anthropological charm. The story makes an explicit link between the drives and aspirations of the Cro-Magnon man and the diverted energies of us, his descendants. Sublimation, murder, and love are three traditionally heavy themes, and the fact that Chabrol sets them in a narrative (rather than historical, or surrealistic, or impressionistic) context allows them to assume the same weight that, say, Freudian psychopathology plays in Alice in Wonder-land...
Every one of the lovers and strangers is good, and there are a handful who are truly exceptional. Gig Young, who looks as if aged in alcohol, plays the suburban husband with just the right touch of craven satyriasis. Anne Jackson portrays his paramour with fine shades of comic realism, and Bob Dishy lunges about hilariously in pursuit of the superbly addled Marian Hailey. Harry Guardino plays his character with broad sympathy and a fine eye for detail, right down to his onyx pinkie ring...
...finally gets his existential shit together when he meets Leonard II (Seymour Cassel), a fiery wild-eyed money burning Jerry Rubin style terrorist and gets into a back-up bomber action at a conspiracy trial. Williams aims at more than "realism" by portraying this final sequence as unsenstional, without crowds or reporters. The cerie setting he comes an apotheosis of the existential situation: the problem of the individual's depth-perception, the limits of the revolutionary's knowledge into his support and his justification. The People are no where to be seen, and an oppressive silence dominates...