The season running from September to October will celebrate one of the French New Wave’s most neglected filmmakers.
This autumn, BFI Southbank will celebrate Claude Chabrol’s cool, precise, entertaining and deliciously wicked thrillers.
Running from the 1st September until the 6th October, the season will include the BFI Distribution rerelease of La Femme infidèle (1969) returning to cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 11 September. The first of Chabrol’s great run of bourgeois psychological thrillers, La Femme infidèle is one of three of the director’s films that BFI Distribution has acquired. Le Boucher (1970) and Les Biches (1968) will also be available for cinemas to book to complement the season and La Femme infidèle’s release.
In addition, a speciually curated Chabrol BFI Player online collection will also be available for audiences UK-wide, spanning a selection of 10 films from across his prolific career.
Over a career of 50 years and 80-odd films season curator Catherine Wheatley argues that ‘few directors have mapped the darkness beneath respectable surfaces with quite the wit, precision and relentless productivity of Claude Chabrol’, successfully creating one wicked thriller after another. The season highlights 20 titles, from his daring 1958 debut, Le Beau Sergeto 2007’s The Girl Cut in Two, shining a light on some of Chabrol’s darkest and most compelling films.
A number of films being screened as part of the season will be screened on 35mm. Often cited as the first French New Wave film Chabrol’s first feature, Le Beau Serge (1958), announced Chabrol’s preoccupation with the darker side of human nature. Shot on location in his mother’s hometown, the film uncovers violence and despair in the ordinary everydayness of provincial life. The Hatter’s Ghost (1982), Chabrol’s underrated and often overlooked adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel stars French screen legends Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour as two men playing a murderous game of cat and mouse. The Cry of the Owl (1987) is a thrilling adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, where the boundaries between victim and perpetrator blur when the object of a man’s voyeuristic gaze looks back. Chabrol is arguably at his most Hitchcockian here in this homage to Rear Window. The Bridesmaid (2004), is a heady tale of amour fatale, adapted from Ruth Rendell and starring Benoît Magimel and Laura Smet as a shy, somewhat passive young man who meets a woman at his sister’s wedding, falling hopelessly into an all-consuming affair.
Other films forming part of the season will include: À double tour (1959), Chabrol’s second feature, a lurid and transgressive adaptation of Stanley Ellin’s novel, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo which prefigures the look and feel of later Hitchcockian thrillers. The Third Lover (1962) is a precise study in voyeurism and manipulation that anticipates the claustrophobic domestic dramas that would define Chabrol’s greatest period to come. Les Biches (1968), a gender-swapping riff on The Talented Mr Ripley is a polarising work, loved and loathed by queer audiences, with a story that mines the seduction of privilege and marks the beginning of Chabrol’s creative and personal partnership with Stéphane Audran.
Catherine Wheatley delivers the season introduction on the 1st September with an illustrated exploration of Chabrol’s cinema, peeking beneath his elegant surfaces to reveal the rot lurking beneath. Considering his most acclaimed titles alongside lesser-known gems.
Other events include Philosophical Screens: Le Boucher on 9th September, with film philosophers Lucy Bolton, Ben Tyrer and season curator Catherine Wheatley taking a close-up look at Chabrol’s masterpiece that cuts to the heart of the themes which shaped the filmmaker’s entire body of work on the nature of violence.
Mean Girls: Claude Chabrol’s dangerous women panel on 23rd September brings together experts, including filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond (Censor), film scholar Virginie Sélavy and season curator Catherine Wheatley, to examine the extraordinary actresses such as Stéphane Audran, Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire at the heart of Chabrol’s work who have embodied these characters.
Tickets for Claude Chabrol – Elements of Crime go on sale to Patrons 3rd August, Members 4th August and General Sale 6th August.