Chabrol's mid-career "The Butcher" is slowly engrossing, even though it hardly merits comparisons with Hitchcock (or even Clouzot). A young provincial schoolmistress (Stephane Audran) becomes emotionally involved (or does she?) with the town butcher (Jean Yanne) who's cutting up the local girls as well as the local livestock. (No spoiler here; the movie doesn't even bother working up another suspect for the crimes.) As usual with Chabrol, a civilized, bourgeois surface only obscures more animal impulses, and sordid backstories reach secret fruition in the current action. The butcher's murders are, he says, the result of psychological trauma sustained in war; and the schoolmistress's emotional distance is, she says, the result of a broken heart long ago. But is either story true? We're never really sure, and there's a strange equivalence between the two characters that Chabrol doesn't press too heavily, but at the same time never fully illuminates. He even fades to black at the climax (spoiler: the butcher's knife winds up in his own gut - but who put it there?). At the finish we're left with the schoolmistress staring out to sea, keeping her own secrets (an effect at which the beautiful but sphinxlike Audran certainly excels) - and we realize we've been intrigued, but never quite gripped.
Review of The Butcher
