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The Films of Claude Chabrol

Le beau Serge

The Cousins

À double tour

The Good Time Girls

Wise Guys

The Third Lover

Landru

Ophelia

The Tiger Likes Fresh Meat

Blue Panther

Our Agent Tiger

Line of Demarcation

The Champagne Murders

Who's Got the Black Box?

Les biches

The Unfaithful Wife

The Beast Must Die

The Butcher

The Break Up

Just Before Nightfall

Ten Days Wonder

High Heels

Wedding in Blood

The Nada Gang

A Piece of Pleasure

Dirty Hands

Les magiciens

The Twist

Alice or the Last Escapade

Blood Relatives

Violette

The Horse of Pride

The Hatter's Ghost

The Blood of Others

Chicken with Vinegar

Inspecteur Lavardin

Masks

The Cry of the Owl (November 28/10)

Based on the book by Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl follows Christophe Malavoy's Robert as he spends his free time peeping into the home of a fetching young woman (Mathilda May's Juliette) - with Juliette's inevitable discovery of Robert's presence kicking into motion a decidedly unusual friendship. It's hard to pin the blame of The Cry of the Owl's abject failure entirely on filmmaker Claude Chabrol, as the director, working from a script co-written with Odile Barski, replicates many of the beats and plot developments contained within Highsmith's hopelessly ineffective novel. The problem here, then, is the presence of an inherently faulty premise that's simply not workable, with the initial encounter between Robert and Juliette straining credibility right to its breaking point and establishing an atmosphere of eye-rolling implausibility that persists right through to the film's anticlimactic finale. Chabrol's decision to infuse the proceedings with a lamentably deliberate pace exacerbates its various problems, and it's also worth noting that even the performances manage to leave the viewer cold - as the various actors tackle their respective characters with an almost astonishing lack of subtlety. The end result is a terrible, consistently unwatchable piece of work that's about as wrongheaded as they come, which effectively forces the viewer to wonder just what Chabrol saw in the laughably irrelevant source material.

out of

Story of Women

Jours tranquilles à Clichy

Dr. M

Madame Bovary

Betty

The Eyes of Vichy

Hell

La Cérémonie

The Swindle

The Color of Lies

Nightcap

The Flower of Evil

The Bridesmaid

The Comedy of Power

A Girl Cut in Two

Bellamy

© David Nusair