Chabrol owes a debt to Hitchcock, but there are significant differences between their universes. Chabrol himself in recent interviews has not missed an opportunity to suggest that Fritz Lang's films might be more important referents than Hitchcock's, and with good reason, I think. Central to the classic Hitchcock film is a sense of the tension in the relationship between pursuer and pursued—an element which is not all that important in Chabrol's films, and which he often avoids completely, as in Juste avant la nuit (Just Before Nightfall). Hitchcock's films develop a political sense because the detective so often represents the state and because the pursued is often innocent. But everyone is always guilty in Chabrol's films. This is a darker, more Langian guilt than we ever see in Hitchcock where in fact most characters are innocent. Chabrol's people, like Lang's suffer psychological guilt even when the law overlooks their transgressions, while Hitchcock's people don't—even when they are rightly accused. (pp. 256-57)

However, to concentrate on the moral dimensions of Chabrol's world—whether religious, Hitchcockian, or Langian—is a bit misleading; for Chabrol is more concerned with the structure of his films than with the metaphysics of his characters…. This—not metaphysics—is Chabrol's most important debt to Hitchcock: a sense of the curious relationship between filmmaker and audience and an understanding of the psychological power of the medium. We may criticize Chabrol's films for their insipid politics, for their cavalier attitude towards their characters, but when he is at his best Chabrol has no peers as a manipulator of the medium. (p. 257)

The elements of Chabrol's "decameron" [the ten films produced between 1968–1973] are easily identified: the materials are thoroughly bourgeois, as is the ambiance. One of the central questions in Chabrol criticism is whether or not (as Robin Wood has put it [see Wood and Michael Walker excerpt above]) "the savage derider of the bourgeoisie has become its elegiac poet." This is not such an easy question to answer as might at first seem. Chabrol reveals a considerable ambivalence towards the bourgeois universe, as we shall see, but it should be emphasized that the subtlety of his films demands a corresponding sense of irony in his audiences. Even when Chabrol is most rhapsodically bourgeois there is still a distancing which gives the films a critical dimension. The problem arises when we place more emphasis on character than Chabrol does and therefore identify with (or infer that Chabrol identifies with) the good businessmen and carefully coiffed and perfumed matrons who people his landscape.

More important, I think, than the bourgeois subject matter of the films is what Chabrol does with it. These are all strongly materialist films in which the qualities of light and texture, the "meanings" of landscape and color, and the way the camera captures, conveys, and modifies these materials take precedence over the données of plot and character. Chabrol is acutely aware of the function of location within a film, and much of his energy during shooting is devoted to capturing the particular qualities of the locale. (p. 258)

In the context of these finely observed backgrounds, Chabrol's characters find themselves absorbed, not in the melodramatic events which usually constitute the fabric of a thriller, but in the mundane rituals of everyday life. It has become almost a joke, for example, that meals are an obsession with Chabrol…. The family, as a political concept, is extended in several of the films to embrace the village—a larger matrix out of which arises, as in Le Boucher, occasional aberrant violence. Chabrol's films seldom come to a distinct period; the reason is that the plane of focus is this larger unit (the family or the village), which continues even after the particular story ends. There is an ironic tension between the environment and the passion which is basic to a Chabrol film.

Chabrol organizes all of these structural elements in three dimensions. First, there is the basic excuse of the genre: the policier provides the framework within which these elements can be set; the murders are the catalysts which help in our analysis of the structures. Second, Chabrol sets up an elaborate network of conventions—some of which come from the genre, many of which are his alone—which formalize and de-dramatize the proceedings. There is, for example, a recurrent pattern of exchanges of responsibility between characters throughout the films, which some critics have interpreted as signifying Catholic theories of guilt transference. The dialectic between city and country first established in Le Beau Serge (and mirrored in Les Cousins) is probably the most striking example of this…. Last, and most important, is the subtle emphasis on point of view which marks Chabrol's films. As we have indicated earlier, mise-en-scène almost always takes precedence over psychology—and the strength of the mise-en-scène forces our consciousness that these events and characters are seen from a precise point of view. This dimension is more abstract than the previous two and not so easily apprehended, but it just may be the key to understanding Claude Chabrol's movies. On the one hand, it is a sign of the formalism of the films; on the other, if we don't have a sense of this filmmaker's irony, not a few of his films degenerate into maudlin exercises in melodrama: this irony is the ultimate rationale for his devotion to "little themes." If we can't sense it, then most of his films have only formal interest for us. (pp. 259-60)

The ten films Chabrol made between 1968 and 1973 are an unusual achievement. They are simpler in design than the films he made a decade earlier, and that simplicity gives them a sharper focus. With the exception of Nada (The Nada Gang), the last one, each of them concentrates on the finely tuned sensibilities of the bourgeois characters Chabrol knows best. Whereas the earlier films had been populated for the most part by young people, this group deals almost exclusively with middle-aged characters. Nada is a blow for independence from that middle-aged, middle-class milieu; but this time Chabrol is a stranger in the city of youth.

There is less psychologizing now, but paradoxically a greater depth of character. There is a much more controlled formalism, but—again paradoxically—less distance felt between us and the characters. Our sense of these changes is communicated through the increasingly masterful miseen-scène, now more restrained, almost rigid at times. What strikes us first about these films is their stunning craftsmanship. There isn't one that doesn't offer at least three or four sequences that are breathtaking tours de force. It's a curious fact that the parts of Chabrol's films are often more impressive than the wholes—and conversely, each of his films has more meaning when seen in context with its neighbors than it does when it stands alone.

This loosely linked series began in 1968 with Les Biches (The Does, The Girlfriends), a film which … has a structure that is congruent with both Les Cousins and Les Godelureaux: the classic triangle of sexual jealousy. Les Biches, however, has a symmetry which was lacking in the earlier films. It is still a story of initiation, of an innocent corrupted, but Chabrol now gives equal weight to each side of the figure…. The genius of the film lies in this highly subtle symmetry, a system of balances which gives it an illusive shimmer. (pp. 269-70)

As in all Chabrol's best films the closely worked details of the relationships are the key. It is through them that he achieves the aura of violent, fatal complicity which links all his characters and which makes the films, finally, not case histories of aberrant others, but memories of ourselves. The murder plots, more and more obviously, are cinematic conventions which serve mainly to heighten strong, wide currents of passion—emotions which envelop and represent repressed bourgeois society. The trip towards the politics of Nada is a long one, but Nada is always the destination on the horizon. (p. 271)

[Nada] is Chabrol's first venture outside the safe confines of the charmed bourgeois lifestyle. It elicits a complex response, for the salient characteristic of the film is its ambivalent tone. The irony with which Chabrol treats the bourgeois power structure is lethal, as we might expect, but the attitude the film takes towards the varied crew of militants who comprise the Nada group is at times self-conscious and tendentious. Chabrol is not nearly so familiar with these people as he is with their natural enemies. And he seems to find it necessary to excuse the serious nature of his subject by injecting the exaggerated flavor of a cheap thriller, mainly through the soundtrack (loud, insistent "chase" music and military themes) but also in the mise-en-scène. Nada reveals very little of the visual sophistication we have come to expect from Chabrol. It is filmed in a straightforward style which betrays his uneasiness with the subject matter. (p. 282)

Existentially, the actions of the Nada group justify themselves. The point is that the question of terrorism is a serious dilemma for the left; it has not yet been resolved, it never was resolved in earlier eras, it probably won't be resolved in our own. By rephrasing it Chabrol answers the question, but avoids the dilemma. The solution is semantic, not practical…. We could, nevertheless, read into Nada an understanding of the excruciating nature of that dilemma were it not for the ambivalent mise-en-scène of the scenes with the Nada group. With the bourgeoisie Chabrol is more at home, as in the scenes devoted to the actions of the Minister of the Interior (who sleeps under a glowing portrait of Pompidou and enters the fray in his own personal helicopter as his wife waves goodbye from the steps of their floodlit chateau), and to the chief of police and the various operatives of intelligence and counterintelligence who are at war with each other while they are battling Nada…. There is considerable humor in these scenes, which contrast sharply with the scenes of the group alone.

It is doubtful that Chabrol will ever be able to get any closer to the people of Nada; but with all its problems the film is a refreshing attempt to move out of the constricting circles of bourgeois guilt into psychological as well as political liberation. (pp. 283-84)

[His current] furious schedule of production is a sign of Chabrol's most important contribution to the New Wave. Truffaut may have investigated genres with greater intelligence. Godard condemned them in order to begin again. Resnais and Rivette have worked slowly, exploring the crucial dimension of time. Rohmer has made the connection between cinema and literature. But only Claude Chabrol has thrown himself completely into the role of entertainer-filmmaker which, when it was played by the great American directors of the thirties and forties, first inspired the group as a whole. (pp. 284-85)