SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
Around the midpoint of Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher a schoolteacher, Mlle Hélène (Stéphane Audran), is conducting a party of her pupils through the caves of the Dordogne. Though Cro-Magnon Man who inhabited them was, by comparison, a primitive beast, she reminds them, it is to his ability to survive that they owe their existence. The irony of the film is that Mlle Hélène fails to note the implications of her own wise counsel: that we must embrace the beast in us or die.
Chabrol, as always, is concerned with the ways in which the primitive erupts through the conventional; in this case, in crimes of passion which tear apart the social fabric. He distinguishes two contrary forces in that passion. The primordial instinct to love or possess, which preserves the race, and which connects Cro-Magnon Man and the schoolchildren, is, when frustrated, the same instinct which will destroy it. It is not accidental that there stands in the village square of Trémolat, outside the quiet school building where Mlle Hélène lives and teaches, a huge war memorial guarded by chains and marked off at each corner by a gunshell. In the same way the village butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne), rebuffed politely in love by Mlle Hélène, keeps vigil outside her window at night, a menacing sentinel.
What do we mean ‘embrace the beast’? Chabrol warns of the power of the instinct for survival and of the curious forms it takes. There is little retreat from it possible even in the most sophisticated societies. It is the force which provokes the urbane husband of La Femme infidèle to strike down his wife’s lover; the same force drives her to hide his guilt in order to preserve her family. It is the possessive force which twists the restless triangle of Les Biches until one of the three is expelled by murder. It is the force which persuades Charles Duchaussoy in Que la bête meure to give up love for the satisfaction of avenging his slaughtered son, and once he has realised that the beast is in all of us, to give up life too.
Mlle Hélène of course, in her own cool way, is as desperately concerned to survive as anyone. She takes no lovers, despite her affection for the butcher, since she has had an unhappy affair ten years ago. Now she has retired to the country, and her school and her pupils are her family. In this partial way she serves tradition and continuity, and provides her own weak link in the chain from Cro-Magnon Man. On her own, she practises yoga. It is, as far as Chabrol is concerned, a retreat as destructive as the crimes of passion it provokes. At a quiet woodland picnic, Mlle Hélène sweetly but firmly turns down Popaul’s tentative offer to kiss her. ‘I would say nothing but I ask you not to do it.’ At a later picnic on the steep banks overlooking the Dordogne, blood drips arrestingly on to a pupil’s sandwich. The victim’s hand projects over the cliff edge above their heads. Someone has begun to murder the village girls, cutting them up outrageously with a knife. The next victim is the young bride whose wedding we attended at the beginning of the film, a function at which Hélène and Popaul first got to know one another.
Functions, both social and physical, play a large part in the Chabrol bestiary. Village life is carefully and affectionately described: the wedding with its familiar figures, the drunk, the exhibitionist, the simpleton; the banal but unpatronisingly observed speeches; the gossip in the butcher’s shop where an elderly man distinguishes between war and murder; the funeral procession and the graveside ritual.
The sense of history is strong too. Starting in the present the film works backwards to reveal links with the past. Mlle Hélène has been three years at the school; it is ten years since her unhappy affair; Popaul had been 15 years in the army – Algeria, Indo-China. Hélène rehearses Popaul and the children in a formal 18th-century dance for which she manages to get Popaul to dress up – though she characteristically remains in modern clothes. Finally she leads us back to the origins: a tour through the subterranean haunts of our primitive ancestors. It is at this point that the killings begin.
And then of course Chabrol’s favourite ritual, eating. It’s part of his witty humanism that he loves revelations at the table. Not a film is without some central eating scene. Here we open with the wedding banquet. The butcher is asked to carve the exquisite but ‘bleu’ hunk of beef. Hélène laughs at his professional pride. Does she like beef, he suddenly asks her, as they walk back later to the schoolhouse. He is obsessed by blood, and his obsession, we are to learn, only leaves him in her presence. But Popaul is not all beast himself. His affection for Hélène is genuine. He is respectable – boorish maybe, but eager to please. He brings Hélène a gift of bottled cherries and thumps the jar down on her books. But it’s a gift tenderly meant. Hélène by now suspects him. While he eats the cherries out of mere appetite and willingness to consolidate their togetherness, she eats compulsively in an effort to keep horror at bay by this trivial and commonplace action. Popaul’s banalities are less a measure of his character than an effort to hide his passion for her.
Hélène knows of his guilt but cannot divine that the reason for it is herself. It is night. As she would not once give in to his loving assault, so now she barricades in vain the doors and windows of the schoolhouse against his lethal attack. When he has told her everything, she again rejects him by closing her eyes. He turns the knife on himself, persuaded that the beast must finally die. When she steps forward to help him her foot and leg glide between his splayed limbs in a tragic parody of the love she might have offered him. ‘Embrassez-moi’ are his last words to her; and now at last she does kiss him, acknowledging too late a lesson which, for a teacher, she was slow to learn. In obedience to Chabrol’s conviction that appearances constantly belie the truth, the teacher it is who has turned butcher. This is a dazzling addition to the work of a filmmaker who must now rank among the world’s best.
Gavin Millar, Sight and Sound, Winter 1970/1
SIGHT AND SOUND
Never miss an issue with Sight and Sound, the BFI’s internationally renowned film magazine. Subscribe from just £25*
*Price based on a 6-month print subscription (UK only). More info: sightandsoundsubs.bfi.org.uk
BFI SOUTHBANK
Welcome to the home of great film and TV, with three cinemas and a studio, a world-class library, regular exhibitions and a pioneering Mediatheque with 1000s of free titles for you to explore. Browse special-edition merchandise in the BFI Shop.We're also pleased to offer you a unique new space, the BFI Riverfront – with unrivalled riverside views of Waterloo Bridge and beyond, a delicious seasonal menu, plus a stylish balcony bar for cocktails or special events. Come and enjoy a pre-cinema dinner or a drink on the balcony as the sun goes down.
BFI PLAYER
We are always open online on BFI Player where you can watch the best new, cult & classic cinema on demand. Showcasing hand-picked landmark British and independent titles, films are available to watch in three distinct ways: Subscription, Rentals & Free to view.
See something different today on player.bfi.org.uk
Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup
Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email