Chabrol in his previous two films with Audran ("Les biches" and "La femme infidèle") shows a perfect touch in presenting actions whose motivations are unexplained or underexplained yet emotionally plausible. Here, in "Le boucher," he miscalculates and does the opposite: Hélène's motivation is obvious and implausible.
Hélène is intelligent, happy, and successful in a career she loves, and she has sworn off romance after a bad experience. Yet we're supposed to believe she's drawn to a man whose every remark shows him to be embittered, morose, and uneducated. And the attraction is such that after only a few casual meetings with him, she hides evidence that he's a deranged killer.
Her action is a touchstone of the thriller genre: a protagonist covering up a lover's crime. When this moment is handled properly, the audience's shock at the perversion of justice is balanced by sympathy for the protagonist's devotion. But since there is no basis for Hélène's devotion, we respond only with disgust, which destroys our sympathy for her -- a fatal flaw for any film. Our disgust increases after the third murder, which she's partly responsible for. The film grows ever more repellent as it fails to acknowledge how compromised its heroine is.
Finally comes the ride to the hospital, where Paul makes a speech. Here is Chabrol's chance to salvage the situation by revealing some poetic truth behind it. Instead, Paul only declares that he worships Hélène. He adds a creepy, stalker-like confession of how he stood in the street many nights staring at her window. These are platitudes that beautiful women hear all too often. Yet for Chabrol they justify Hélène's radiant expression at the hospital, her first kiss of Paul, and her vigil by the water after his death. Becoming the object of a homicidal sadist's obsession -- something that real women dread -- supposedly transforms and redeems Hélène.
Chabrol apparently had in mind a schematic notion about embracing the bestial foundation of society as it breaks through the bourgeois surface, but he failed to develop the schema into a credible story.
Hélène is intelligent, happy, and successful in a career she loves, and she has sworn off romance after a bad experience. Yet we're supposed to believe she's drawn to a man whose every remark shows him to be embittered, morose, and uneducated. And the attraction is such that after only a few casual meetings with him, she hides evidence that he's a deranged killer.
Her action is a touchstone of the thriller genre: a protagonist covering up a lover's crime. When this moment is handled properly, the audience's shock at the perversion of justice is balanced by sympathy for the protagonist's devotion. But since there is no basis for Hélène's devotion, we respond only with disgust, which destroys our sympathy for her -- a fatal flaw for any film. Our disgust increases after the third murder, which she's partly responsible for. The film grows ever more repellent as it fails to acknowledge how compromised its heroine is.
Finally comes the ride to the hospital, where Paul makes a speech. Here is Chabrol's chance to salvage the situation by revealing some poetic truth behind it. Instead, Paul only declares that he worships Hélène. He adds a creepy, stalker-like confession of how he stood in the street many nights staring at her window. These are platitudes that beautiful women hear all too often. Yet for Chabrol they justify Hélène's radiant expression at the hospital, her first kiss of Paul, and her vigil by the water after his death. Becoming the object of a homicidal sadist's obsession -- something that real women dread -- supposedly transforms and redeems Hélène.
Chabrol apparently had in mind a schematic notion about embracing the bestial foundation of society as it breaks through the bourgeois surface, but he failed to develop the schema into a credible story.