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Credits
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Summary
Henri Marcoux, a respectable middle-class
man living
in Province with his wife and two children, is having an affair with a
younger woman, Léda. His wife, the redoubtable
Thérèse
Marcoux, is determined to avoid a scandal at any price, even to the
extent
of breaking off her daughter’s engagement when she learns that her
future
son-in-law Laszlo has been sympathising with her husband. Then
the
unthinkable happens – Léda is found dead. But who is the
killer?Review
Claude Chabrol’s third film shows a marked
departure from
his two earlier films, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins.
For one thing, it is his first film to be made in colour, but, more
significantly,
it is his first attempt at a psychological thriller. Whilst not
as
polished as Chabrol’s later works in this genre, À double
tour
contains many of the hallmarks with which fans of his thrillers would
become
familiar in future years.
On closer examination, À double tour is not so much a thriller as a cruel, even cynical, portrait of bourgeois life. The Bourgeoisie come in for some pretty rough treatment in Chabrol’s cinema, but in this film Chabrol is perhaps at his most vitriolic and condemnatory. The narrative could only have taken place in a bourgeois milieu, with its double standards, obsession with respectability and dangerously repressed tensions. Chabrol’s evident lack of restraint earned him some very negative criticism and, like many of his early films, the success of À double tour was compromised by bad press. The film features an actor who would, before the end of the following decade, became one of the most popular and sought-after actors in France. Jean-Paul Belmondo was given the part of the Hungarian fiancé Laszlo Kovacs when Jean-Claude Brialy fell ill and had to pull out at the last minute. Belmondo gives an impressive – and typically unrestrained – performance, in what was to be his first major screen role (although it was not until his next film, Godard’s À bout de souffle, that he became widely recognised by the public and film-makers). © James Travers 2002 |
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