This is part five of my French New Wave Series, where I start going year by year through the major period of New Wave, starting with 1957.

Part 1: French Cinema and the Aesthetic Problem of the 1950s before New Wave: What Was Realism? Here.

Part 2: Post-War Realism Part 1: Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau here.

Part 3: Post-War Realism Part 2: Robert Bresson and the Birth of Verite. here

Part 4: Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais invented New Wave in 1955, three years before Truffaut. Here

Some Major New Wave Films from 1956-57

Cahiers du Cinema Writers:

• “Les Mistons” (short) dir. by Francois Truffaut

• “Le Coupe De Berger” (short) dir. by Jacques Rivette

• Le Beau Serge dir. by Claude Chabrol

Rive Gauche:

• “Sundays in Peking” (short) dir. by Chris Marker

• “Lettre de Siberie” (short) dir. by Chris Marker

• “Toute la Mémoire Du Monde” (short) dir. by Alain Resnais

• “Night and Fog” (short) dir. by Alain Resnais

• “Le Mystere de L’Atelier Quinze” (short) dir. by Alain Resnais

• “Le Chant du Styrene” (short) dir. by Alain Resnais

1958 is usually understood as the year New Wave broke. It was the year of Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and the debut of The 400 Blows and Hiroshima, Mon Amour at the Cannes Film Festival. But, as the list above testifies, many who would later be associated with the movement were releasing important short films through 1956 and 1957. In addition, the first member of the Cahiers du Cinema critics cohort to release a feature film was not the de facto leader of the New Wave, Francois Truffaut, but its dark prankster, Claude Chabrol. This post will focus on 1957, Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and its companion film, Les Cousins (1958), as the beginning of the New Wave, following Richard Neuport. Importantly, they both starred Jean-Claude Brialy, who would become the first major star of New Wave and have prominent roles in quite a few Chabrol films, Godard’s A Woman Is A Woman, and Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee. While not as recognizable a name to international audiences as Jeanne Marais, Jean Seaberg, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Leaud, or Chabrol’s eventual wife, Stephane Audran, he was an important figure both in front of and behind the camera and helped prove that the movement was not just a dry academic exercise; it could produce memorable performances and captivate audiences.

Also of note is Brialy’s co-star in both films, Gerard Blain. Blain was also in Truffaut’s short from this year, “Les Mistons.” In these early Chabrol films, he is captivating, playing two wildly different characters with great charisma. In both films, he is an object of suppressed queer desire for the Brialy character, and it’s easy to see why. He is a strikingly beautiful man, almost a French James Dean or Rock Hudson. Unfortunately, he more or less drops out of major New Wave films after these early late-50s performances; he has extensive credits, including some more Chabrol films, and Wim Wenders’ wonderful Tom Ripley movie, The American Friend, but we will not see him again in this series.

Chabrol made an incredible number of films over a very long career, including eight (!) features in his first phase from 1957-1964, but access to them in the United States is very spotty. Criterion Collection has the first diptych of Beau Serge and Les Cousins, and then not another film until the 1980s when he started working with Isabelle Hubert regularly and had a bit of an international resurgence. Even then, they only have three of those films. A handful of other Chabrol films are available on different streaming services, but many were never released on physical media in the U.S., never mind current streaming availability. As such, I have to point out that my exposure to Chabrol is very incomplete compared to the other major Cahiers directors, all of whom have almost their entire oeuvre readily available on streaming, except for some of Godard’s more experimental periods.

While Truffaut’s enthusiasm for Hitchcock is well known, in my opinion, Truffaut was much better when he worked in a Bazin/Renoir playful realist mode than in films like Mississippi Mermaid or The Bride Wore Black, where he was most directly imitating Hitchcock (the exception is the playful Stolen Kisses, which appropriate Hitchockian style for comedic ends). By comparison, Chabrol was an absolute master of Hitchcockian techniques, themes, and most importantly, dark humor. By my estimation from what I’ve seen, he was probably the greatest heir to Hitch before De Palma (and possibly De Palma’s equal, depending on your stance on a few things).

But Chabrol had a rocky career. After the success of his first two films, the next six were failures (although three of those I’ve seen are all worth watching). He then made cheap, campy spy films in the mid-60s, riding the wave of James Bond. He had a comeback of sorts into the mainstream in 1968 with Les Biches, a wonderfully despicable lesbian suspense exploitation film that is secretly a gender-swapped Tom Ripley movie (and I think deserves to be considered alongside the great Ripley adaptions like Rene Clair’s Plein Soliel, the aforementioned The American Friend and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley). He was, from then on, a maker of mainstream thrillers and detective films, of, by all accounts, a wide variety of quality and success.

The most striking thing about the first two films is how they use Hitchcock’s techniques not to build suspense, but to highlight queer desire and obsession. These are not suspense films, although they have individual scenes that may provoke suspense. They are, rather, on paper, very French realist melodramas about the conflicts between Parisian and Provincial life. Les Cousins is the first New Wave film of many to contain an explicit reference and implicit paratext with a novel by Honoré de Balzac, the great French realist novelist of the 19th century. Here, it’s a reference to Lost Illusions, a book that Gerard Blain’s law student is given by a friendly bookseller, and he is seen reading throughout. Truffaut’s 400 Blows also invokes Balzac as the young Antoine Doinel’s favorite writer and object of youthful aesthetic worship. Since Dionel is a stand-in for Truffaut himself, I’ve always assumed Truffaut is expressing his youthful love for Balzac here.

When I first realized how often Balzac comes up in New Wave films, I was quite surprised. After all, New Wave is known as a radical aesthetic movement that reinvented film form and was close aesthetic fellow travelers with the “New Novel” movement, structuralism, leftist politics, etc… Balzac seemed a staid and conservative choice as literary reference—the very realist that the structuralist critic Roland Barthes’ would expose as failing at mimesis due to his being trapped in linguistic codes in his monumental S/Z (1975). But the more I realized how much New Wave is interrogating and adapting French traditions of realism, the more the Balzac nods made sense. Particularly after I finished reading Lost Illusions, and had more insights into the complexity of Balzac’s realist techniques and his voice as a writer. New Wavers were certainly interested in the new discourses that were questioning the possibility of realism in art tout court, but for the most part, they stuck with some form of realism, merely interrogating it rather than abandoning it (with Godard as the major exception).

That said, New Wavers never directly adapted Balzac (that I know of) until Rivette made The Duchess of Langeais (2007) late in his career. Direct adaptations of French literary classics were one of the targets of Cahiers’ criticisms of the French “Tradition of Quality” in film. They rather frequently incorporated literary paratexts and references, most obliquely in Rivette’s character’s obsessive references to Balzac’s History of the Thirteen in Out 1. Thus, beyond announcing New Wave’s well-known Hitchcock worship, Chabrol’s also begins naming a perhaps less known and less expected literary inheritance for the movement.

The films are, indeed, quite literary in their construction and the way they mirror each other, as if they are two novellas collected in a single work. In Le Beau Serge, Brialy plays a young man returning to his provincial hometown of Sardent from Paris to recover from an illness. He is pretentious and idealistic, out of place among the farmers and working people where he came from. His old friend, Serge (Blain), has been married to a woman, Yvonne, for a while, is perhaps sexually involved with her 17-year-old sister, Marie, and has become a useless drunk. Brialy’s character also becomes involved with Marie and then commits himself to saving Serge and his family from their degradation and dissipation. But he is condescending and cruel, causes more harm than good, is resented by Serge and his family, and utterly fails to save anyone.

Les Cousins tells an inverse story of a country boy getting lost in the vice and corruption of Paris. Blain is a young man from the provinces coming to Paris to study law at the Sorbonne. He is staying with his cousin, Brialy—a Wagner-loving hipster fascist (yes, they existed even in 1958!) who lives a life of dissipation, throwing parties, constantly pursuing new lovers, sustained by a wealthy and absent uncle. He is a student as well, although you wouldn’t know it except when he passes his final exams with ease after Blain’s character has failed his. They wind up in a love triangle when Blain falls for a young woman in his cousin’s circle, played by future star Bernadette Lafont. He expresses his sincere love for her and his desire for a committed relationship. At first, she wants this, agrees that she wants to be “good,” but then is convinced by Brialy and a friend that she could never be happy with a good, sincere boy like Blain, and instead winds up sexually involved with Brialy. She then moves into the apartment the cousins share, and Brialy and Lafont rub their sexuality in Blain’s face. This all ends, predictably, tragically. But with a giant knowing wink from Chabrol in the absurdity of the final scene.

These two films are mirrors. Stereotypes of the country and city are explored and reversed. In Le Cousins, we get the typical depiction of the naive country boy succumbing to the vice of the city, but lest you accuse Chabrol of taking up an ideological position, in Le Beau Serge, it is the city boy who naively tries to bring some goodness to the suffocating immoral toxicity of country folk. And in both, the bearer of good is significantly flawed, discovering and succumbing to their hangups and obsessions as much as any vice beyond themselves. In Le Beau Serge, the city boy is condescending, obsessed with truth at the expense of pragmatism, and cold and cruel to the people who are trying to save him. Whilst in Le Cousins, the naive country boy is obsessed with his mother and only wants that relationship, unwilling or unable to see the real humans in front of him.

Hitchcockian style erupts into these films in a unique way. In both, the Brialy and Blain characters are obsessed with each other erotically. The quintessential Hitchcock shot is that of the audience being positioned as looking at something alongside a man (Jimmy Stewart) engaged in voyeurism, usually at a woman with whom he is indulging erotic fantasy and obsession. Chabrol counts on his audience recognizing this type of shot, how it functions, and then uses them to build patterns of obsessive looking and watching between his two male protagonists. They are never looking at the women they are with; they are always looking at each other, obsessing over each other’s behavior, trying to figure out what they will do, and reacting emotionally.

In both films, the Blain figure is positioned as subordinate. He sees Brialy as distant, cold, powerful, representing something he can’t understand but longs for. In Beau Serge, there is a strong subtext that the two men were lovers as teenagers before Brialy left for Paris. Blain’s depression, drunkenness, unhappiness in his marriage, and sexual compulsions are all readable as products of his loss of Brialy and that relationship, and his cruelty and judging coldness upon his return. Blain is always, more or less, saying, “How can you judge me for being a drunk, you made me one!”

In Les Cousins, Blain is perhaps less explicitly sexually interested in Brialy: his fantasies are for a good heterosexual domesticity. But he is obsessed and repulsed by his social power. In one of the funniest scenes, Brialy interrupts a dissolute party in his apartment (almost the entire film is in the apartment, and Chabrol finds every possible interesting shot in this space) to force everyone to listen to his Wagner records. Blain’s character looks on, obsessed with his capacity to command attention for something so absurd. And then, in a giant wink to the audience that foreshadows the ending, Brialy puts on the Liebestod (love-death) theme from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He’s that guy, unbearable at a party, but fascinatingly charismatic and commanding, nonetheless. And if you recognize the music, you know it is about the final consummation of forbidden eroticism in death.

Brialy, in both, is the dom. In Beau Serge, his very denial of the sexual relationship, his attempts to heteronormatively straighten out Serge’s family life, is a demonstration (and enjoyment) of his power over Serge. In Le Cousins he more openly enjoys his power, arranging Blain’s romantic interest and failures, fucking in the shower visibly through frosted glass in front of him. He has guns (rare in mid-century Paris) in his apartment and loves playfully pointing them at people, but he keeps the ammunition elsewhere. Later, in despair over his failed exam and Brialy’s conquest of his love interest, Blain takes down a gun, loads it, and points it at his head. But decides not to pull the trigger. The next day, Brialy is playing around in his dominant way, picks up the gun, and points it at Blain. Not knowing it’s loaded, he pulls the trigger, and Blain is killed. Thus, Blain’s character has armed the object of his erotic obsession with the tool to give him a “liebestod”—a consummation of their secret forbidden erotic desire in a love death, the final act of dominance. But this is absurd, not Wagnerian, it is all darkly humorous.

These are fascinating films, at once realist and full of stylized Hitchcockian eroticism and dark humor. It may be surprising how much queer subtext (practically text, given Chabrol’s winks to the audience) these films have. But that was always there in Hitchcock, even though queerness was often villainous or pathological for him (as in the gay actor Anthony Perkins’ effeminacy and passive demeanor marking him as unsettling in Psycho). I think Chabrol is less “problematic” than Hitchcock, and sees queer desire less as an exceptional pathology, and more as a normal part of our lives. But he is also not using the material in a manner you could ever call responsible. This is playful, salacious, exploitation filmmaking—perhaps even more despicable because it’s so stylistically artful and literarily constructed. But that’s what I like about these films, their rampant immorality of perspective, their unwillingness to extract us from the games of power and desire they are creating. It makes them rich both as viewing experiences, charged with erotic energy, and thinking through psychoanalytic queer theory. There are volumes and volumes of queer theory analysis on Hitchcock’s films—my favorite are still Lee Edelman’s readings of North by Northwest and The Birds in his still controversial classic No Future (2004). Chabrol is just a little more in the know as a filmmaker that queerness is always at play in these interpersonal power dynamics. But he’s not “good” politically, he’s irresponsibly subversive. If he moralized, the films would be weaker, but I can understand how another viewer might feel trapped at a party thrown by an uncomfortably commanding hipster fascist laughing through the Wagner record he forced you to listen to when facing his claustrophobic immoral universe of sex and death and his refusal to take it all particularly seriously.

This will probably be my only significant writing about Chabrol in this series. There are worthwhile films in the rest of his New Wave period, particularly his exploration of right-wing resentment in The Third Lover (1962) and the proto-Lynchian surreal artificialities of his Bluebeard film, Landru (1963). But he did not have another major film until the end of the 60s, long after the period of focus I have set for myself here.

Next up will be the watershed year of 1958 and the stunning feature debuts of Truffaut and Resnais.