Claude Chabrol:IT REMAINS a durable irony of French cinema that, despite its practitioners' disdain for the bourgeoisie, the discontents of the middle classes prove such an endless source of fascination.
Few directors illustrated this paradox more effectively than Claude Chabrol, who has died aged 80. The prolific film-maker, director of classics such as Les Biches(1968) and Le Boucher(1970), always claimed to be a Marxist. Yet, unlike left-wing British contemporaries such as Ken Loach, he never tired of examining the comfortably-off and their hangers-on. A founder member of the unofficial club that became known as la nouvelle vague(new wave) – indeed, he directed the first film to carry the label – Chabrol was a walking exemplar of post-war French cinema and all its contradictions.
It hardly needs to be said that Chabrol was born into a middle-class family. The son of a pharmacist father who fought with the Resistance, the budding director was raised at Sardent, 150 miles south of Paris. Under pressure from his parents, he spent some time studying pharmacy at the Sorbonne, but, having run a film club when still a boy, the young Claude could never shake off his passion for cinema. Like Jean-Luc Godard (bizarrely) he worked for a while as head of publicity for the French offices of Twentieth Century Fox. His proper domain, however, remained smoke-filled cinemas such as the Cinémathèque Française and the Ciné-Club des Quartiers Latins.
In the gap between movies, he met up with future titans of the nouvelle vague: Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut.
Disgusted at what they saw as a complacent French cinematic establishment, the mob – writing in the hugely influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma– argued for the virtues of American directors, hitherto not deemed worthy of serious consideration, such as Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller and Budd Boetticher. The "auteur theory" developed: a film should be considered as the work of a director in the same a way a novel is viewed as the work of a writer. Chabrol was particularly enamoured of Alfred Hitchcock and, in 1957, he and Rohmer wrote a short book on the English master.
A year later, using money from an inheritance left to his first wife, Chabrol delivered his first feature. Winner of the best director prize at the Locarno Film Festival, Le Beau Serge, a tale of mild depravity in the provinces, prepared the ground for the burgeoning nouvelle vague. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coupsarrived in 1959. Godard's À bout de Soufflefollowed a year after that.
Chabrol received credits on his colleagues' films – "technical adviser" for À bout de Souffle – but it was apparent from an early stage that he was heading in a less experimental direction. Indeed, by the early 1960s, after lacklustre efforts such as Les Godelureaux(1961) and The Tiger Likes Fresh Blood(1964), the nouvelle vague's successors at Cahiers felt inclined to write Chabrol off as second-rate. The critical tide turned again with Les Biches, a taut tale of lesbianism, and Le Boucher, a dark melodrama. Over the following four decades, often working with his second wife, actor Stéphane Audran, the director delivered an impressively solid series of Hitchcockian thrillers, dramas of infidelity and satirical comedies. As Godard drifted into abstraction and Rohmer's dialogue became ever more gnomic, Chabrol found a way of skirting the cinematic mainstream without abandoning his characteristically measured tone. One could (just about) imagine films such as the fitful Madame Bovary(1991) and the excellent La Cérémonie(1995) existing in an alternative universe where la nouvelle vaguehad never happened.
A droll man with a gift for storytelling, Chabrol never stopped working and, as recently as 2009, directed Gerard Depardieu in an indifferently received thriller entitled Bellamy. He is survived by Aurore Paquiss, his third wife, and by three sons and one daughter.
Claude Chabrol, born June 24th 1930; died September 12th 2010