The A posteriori le cinema series is an opportunity to celebrate the 7e art by revisiting key titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
A small French town without history… Lucienne, lonely wife of Paul, local deputy and mayor, begins an adventure with her husband’s deputy, Pierre, who is married to the depressed Clotilde. Absorbed by their affair, the lovers build a murderous plan almost in spite of themselves. Released 50 years ago, in April 1973, The red wedding was dryly received, but is nonetheless a pivotal film in the work of the prolific – and immense – Claude Chabrol.
When the filmmaker died in 2010, Stéphane Delorme noted in his editorial Cinema notebooksof which Chabrol was one of the emblematic critics before launching the New Wave with The handsome Sergius in 1958: “Then, at the end of the 1960s, the meeting with producer André Génovès paved the way for great dark films, The butcher, let the beast die, The unfaithful wife, Just before dark, The red wedding. Chabrol continues the films, with his companion Stéphane Audran…”
However, to raise Delorme: “His status as a great filmmaker is not as secure with moviegoers as that of Godard, Rohmer, Rivette or Truffaut. The reasons are multiple: too many films made, too many important invisible films, too many popular films that we think we know, wrongly. Praises from all sides have even a little quickly transformed Chabrol into a good friendly uncle more or less always simmering the same recipe. What recipe? The portrait of the bourgeoisie, served as a jelly, fricassee or pâté. However, to review his films, it is obvious that Chabrol is much more complex. »
At the exit of red wedding, this is exactly what Chabrol was criticized for: applying a recipe. After many films attacking the provincial bourgeoisie, the director was reduced, it was judged, to repeating himself, even to caricaturing himself.
The reception was sometimes indifferent, sometimes hostile. In his popular annual collection, the American critic and historian Leonard Maltin writes: “An average Chabrol”. In The dutyAndré Leroux has a hard tooth: “In The red wedding, we have the strong impression that Chabrol is going around in circles, that he persists in dissecting a social framework from which he can no longer draw anything. »
In Take One, Peter Biskind is lapidary. Referring to this supposed “recipe”, he asserts that Chabrol is himself a “bourgeois craftsman devoid of imagination or grace”.
The golden period
For the account, The red wedding falls towards the end of a cycle dubbed the filmmaker’s “golden period”, which extends from 1968 to 1978, i.e. films deer To Violette Noziere, much admired for good reason. Between the two: a whole lot of acclaimed titles against the backdrop of this French bourgeoisie obsessed with appearances, and whose turpitudes Chabrol delights in exposing.
However, it is as if with The red weddingsomething had gone wrong, something perhaps having nothing to do with the author’s favorite themes…
First, this film is more overtly political than its predecessors (the politician husband played by Claude Piéplu is a monster whose assassination the filmmaker seems to challenge us to condemn). Then, the film recalls the affair of the “diabolical lovers of Bourganeuf”, which had just occurred: the trial having to be held in full during the planned release of the film, this was postponed for 15 days by order of the court.
Ex-critic at Unbreakable and director of Arte France Cinéma, Olivier Père summarized on his blog in 2019, about the link with the double murder of Bourganeuf: “Claude Chabrol modifies the profession of the protagonists to enrich this criminal study with a ferocious charge against corruption and the mediocrity of politicians. He paints an unflattering portrait of a deputy-mayor, a rude character and impotent husband involved in a real estate scheme. »
In short, would these two elements, the political charge and the source of inspiration, have contributed to diminishing the value of the film in the eyes of critics at the time? In other words, would we, if only unconsciously, have held it against the most “popular” filmmakers of the New Wave for daring to give political films the privilege of serious contemporaries like Costa-Gavras? This, while finding it in bad taste that Chabrol had based himself on a sordid news item (itself appearing to be inspired by the novel by James M. Cain The postman always rings twice)?
Praises from all sides have even a little quickly transformed Chabrol into a good friendly uncle more or less always simmering the same recipe. What recipe? The portrait of the bourgeoisie, served as a jelly, fricassee or pâté. However, to review his films, it is obvious that Chabrol is much more complex.
Olivier Père, on the contrary, seems to see advantages in it: “Once again, Chabrol goes beyond the police argument and the chronicle of provincial life to take an interest in fatality. The reactions of its protagonists tip the drama into tragedy. The cursed lovers are prisoners of their conditions, unable to extract themselves from a suffocating universe, without horizon. Their sensual outbursts, long suppressed by marital boredom, inevitably lead them to a disastrous destiny. »
On the death of Michel Piccoli, in 2020, Nathalie Dray, in Release, selects the film for its list of the actor’s five best performances: “Figures of fatality and of the tragic destiny of which they are the playthings, so much they are prisoners of conventions and of their social class, Michel Piccoli and Stéphane Audran, in diabolical lovers seized by irrepressible lustful outbursts, symbolize the turbulence of a passion, which only finds expression in excess and the strategy of the worst (murder). When, imprisoned, they are asked why they did not simply leave together, they answer: “Leaving? No, we didn’t think about it…”
A carnal movie
Moreover, another aspect that perhaps annoyed in 1973 was precisely the sex, or, to use Nathalie Dray’s formula, the “lustful impulses”.
Admittedly, the sensual component was not new in the world of Chabrol, but The red wedding is undoubtedly the filmmaker’s most “carnal” film. In fact, the characters of Piccoli and Audran literally seem to want to devour each other.
Audran, well, who saw himself here imparted with a banter, even a vulgarity in the intimacy, leagues away from the elegant image that hitherto stuck to his skin: another irritant?
In conclusion of his tribute editorial, Stéphane Delorme writes about the golden period of the one who would then impress with, in particular, A women’s affair And Ceremony : “We wanted to isolate Chabrol in the position of a good commercial director, but he invents a dizzying cycle that has nothing to envy to the great “modern” French films. The floating game of Stéphane Audran, violent figures […], the formal inventions (the sequence shots), the scandalous crudity age terribly well with time. We are far from the good-natured filmmaker. »
Nihilist, and darker than carmine despite his title, The red wedding brilliantly attests to this verdict.