An artist lives in his art; that is, his art is characterised by the impulses, sympathies and recoils which determine his nature as a human being. Yet equally, for the artist who loses faith, art can become a perverse refuge: an enclosed, private world within which he spins fantasies of his own defeat…. Unlike 'ivory tower' artists, who exclude pain, 'private world' artists … indulge in it masochistically; but, to almost an equal extent, have ceased to explore, to seek out new positive values by which to live.

Chabrol's work has shown a constant tension between these opposing ways of living in his art. Since the rather laboured, and subsequently disowned, Catholic affirmation of Le Beau Serge, his great problem as an artist has been the difficulty of affirming belief in anything. Rejecting the bourgeois world for its materialism, pretensions and repressiveness, but finding the various alternatives to this world either self-destructive (the 'student' milieu of Les Cousins) or completely arid (the Paris of Les Bonnes Femmes), Chabrol could have reached the impasse of the 'private world' artists. The degree to which he has transcended this possibility, and the balance of conflicting impulses in his work—hatred and tenderness, disgust and generosity, cynicism and belief—are central to the concern of this book….

Chabrol's relation to Hitchcock provides a useful starting-point for an examination of his work. It is a very complex relation, manifesting itself in many forms and on many levels. At times it is quite superficial, an obviously deliberate borrowing or hommage, as in the on-stage murder of Stéphane Audran in Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche, which recalls the Albert Hall sequence of The Man Who Knew Too Much. (p. 6)

Chabrol does not, however, encourage audience identification as unambiguously as the Hitchcock of, say, Vertigo and Psycho. Hitchcock involves us with his protagonists to the extent that we live the film with them emotionally, and then abruptly, through some sudden shock, shatters this identification so that we are forced to construct a new, more complex relationship to the action. Chabrol at times constructs and shoots his films so that they appear to be setting up precisely an identification of this kind, but counterbalances this effect by arousing greater sympathy for the watched than for the watcher. (p. 7)

[For Chabrol] to be influenced by Hitchcock is the most natural thing in the world, because their art shows such great affinities of outlook. The themes that Rohmer and Chabrol find in Hitchcock's films [in their book Hitchcock]—grouped around the central concept of 'exchange' or interchangeability—are explored and developed more rigorously (because, surely, more consciously) in Chabrol's. (p. 8)

When Le Beau Serge first appeared, it looked like an attempt at developing a French neorealist school, with Chabrol shooting entirely on location, using the real inhabitants of a real village, showing a consistent concern to represent the surface details of the environment and the people's lives with the greatest possible fidelity…. Yet, beneath the film's deceptively 'documentary' surface, Chabrol's formal and thematic preoccupations are as strong in Le Beau Serge as in any subsequent works. The film is as germinal to Chabrol's oeuvre as A bout de souffle to Godard's: if it looks back to the Hitchcock book, it as surely looks ahead to the 'exchange' films of Chabrol's present phase, Les Biches, La Femme Infidèle, Que la bête meure. The 'formal' and 'thematic' preoccupations are not to be thought of as separable. As with Hitchcock's two Charlies, the François/Serge parallels offer far more than formal symmetry: not only the film's structure, but its meaning, derive from them. Chabrol and Rohmer see as a recurring motif in Hitchcock the 'exchange of guilt'…. [This is] significant in relation to Chabrol's work, where the sense of inherent evil is so strong.

In Le Beau Serge, however, we are concerned less with an exchange of guilt than with an exchange of salvation. The parallels between the two men suggest that they are to some degree interchangeable: François could have been Serge and vice versa. At first François appears the morally superior character, Serge the lost…. But as the film progresses, we realise that François's efforts to save Serge are really efforts to save himself: he once wanted to be a priest; he has ceased even to 'practise'; beyond that, he has lost all sense of aim in life, and his disease is (as its 'reflection' in Serge's alcoholism suggests) to be seen as more than an unhappy chance. He needs above all to give validity to his role of 'example', as a means to self-justification. (pp. 11-13)

Chabrol … presents us with an interesting moral problem [in Le Beau Serge]: if, engaged upon an action one knows quite rationally and objectively to be good, one is suddenly led to suspect one's own motives for performing it, does one then go on or retract? (p. 13)

Characters who crave excitement in his films, or aspire to anything beyond their known and habitual environment, always get cruelly punished for it…. The psychological implication is that the ultimate terror is of the Id. Characters who embody the drives of the Id are frequent in Hitchcock's films, and almost invariably corrupt, perverted, frighteningly evil (though often insidiously charming at the same time). (p. 14)

It is easy to pass from this to Chabrol; his is also, and in the same sense, a cinema of fear. Consider the series of Id-figures in Chabrol's early work: Glomaud in Le Beau Serge, Clovis in Les Cousins, André the motor-cyclist in Les Bonnes Femmes. They lack the corrupt charm of their equivalents in Hitchcock, but the relationship is clear enough….

Retrospectively, however, it is André who seems more of a Chabrol Id-figure, as, in a less dangerous sense, is Laszlo Kovacs in A Double Tour. This is confirmed by the appearance of Que la bête meure and Le Boucher. Paul in the former is a much more powerful development of Laszlo, and Popaul in the latter a much more human development of André. It is significant that overt Hitchcockian touches are, in these films, undetectable: even the affinities between the two directors cease to mean very much. The later films are purely Chabrol, and the development of his personal vision is crystallised in Le Boucher….

Chabrol's awareness of powerful determinant forces, uncontrollable because below the level of the conscious mind, makes him perhaps the most Freudian of all important directors. His films revert repeatedly to the idea of the impossibility of 'reading' appearances: of reading the thoughts, emotions, motives behind the masks. More than this, there is the sense (which reaches a peak in Les Biches) that the characters themselves know little of what is going on behind their own masks. (p. 15)

Though certainly not the opposite of robust, Chabrol's films are denied the particular kind of robustness that characterises Hitchcock's. If he shares Hitchcock's distrust of the Id and its energies, it is impossible for him to share Hitchcock's acceptance of the bourgeois world….

This raises the question of what Chabrol does believe in—not in terms of ideas, creed or philosophy, but in the practical terms of exploring the possibilities of life in the world the films depict….

If one puts together Chabrol's first five films, one has a composite portrait of contemporary France (by extension, contemporary western society) as he sees it…. The most striking characteristic of the world of Chabrol's films is that it is essentially perverted, poisoned at its sources of energy, with corruption spreading through all its strata. The deranged and murderous motorcyclist of Les Bonnes Femmes is the central figure, not only of that film, but of all Chabrol's early work. (p. 16)

[Chabrol's overall] development can be traced through a single motif: the family. Only four of Chabrol's features are strictly centred on the family group: A Double Tour, Ophélia, La Femme Infidèle and Que la bête meure; but there is also, in the middle of his 'commercial' period, La Muette [a section of Paris Vu Par] … so these 'family' films virtually span his whole career to date. Besides them, there are films where the family motif appears peripherally (for instance, the ludicrous and pretentious bourgeois families of Henri—same name, same actor—in Les Bonnes Femmes and Les Godelureaux) or in disguise: the shopgirls of Les Bonnes Femmes resemble each other sufficiently in general characteristics to be considered sisters, with the proprietor and cashier as grotesque parent-figures. There are also films in which envy, and the resulting desire to destroy what can't be possessed (one of the most frequently recurring emotions in Chabrol's work) is directed specifically against a relationship from which the envier feels excluded, a reaction explainable less as sexual jealousy than as a frustrated desire to be accepted into a family group. One sees this in Charles in the later part of Les Cousins; it is more striking in Albin in L'Oeil du malin; it can be felt partly to motivate the enigmatic Why in the later scenes of Les Biches.

The motif, then, is constant; what has changed is Chabrol's attitude. In most of the early films, the family is conceived in entirely negative terms, relationships within it being almost exclusively destructive. (p. 17)

The pivotal film is La Muette, which takes on an importance out of proportion to its length. In 'meaning' it belongs very clearly with the earlier films: again the family is presented as entirely destructive. But there are two particular points of interest. The first is that Chabrol himself not only wrote and directed the film, but plays the role of the father, with his own wife Stéphane Audran as the mother. It would be absurd, as well as libellous in the extreme, to suggest that in these coarse, brutal, materialistic, mutually destructive grotesques we are being treated to a glimpse into the home-life of the Chabrols. Yet, if Chabrol has consistently savaged the bourgeois world, it is equally evident that he belongs to it and can't convincingly imagine any alternatives. (p. 18)

The second point about La Muette is that it is the first Chabrol film (since the somewhat dubious and rhetorical ending of Le Beau Serge) in which a child takes on a central importance…. The emotional force of the film, generated partly by the abrupt movement from grotesque comedy to equally grotesque horror (the mother's fatal accident on the staircase), derives primarily from our sense of an environment that destroys its own potentialities for growth.

The family group of La Muette—father, mother, son—is repeated and transmuted in La Femme Infidèle…. The tone [of La Femme Infidèle and Que la bête meure] is mellow, tender, almost serene, qualified by a sense of desolation. Both films affirm unity as a supreme value, though, ironically, through its loss: the husband and wife in La Femme Infidèle, the father in Que la bête meure, become dignified and ennobled by their strengthened sense of family. (pp. 18-19)

This new positive emphasis on marriage and family has led Chabrol to a much more tolerant attitude to the bourgeois world that such institutions support and are supported by. It is still a highly critical attitude: no one could suppose that he is upholding the world of La Femme Infidèle as the best of all possible ones. But he no longer feels the need to caricature it; or, more precisely, the elements of caricature have been displaced from the centre to the peripheries of his films….

In common with Chabrol's new feeling for the potentialities in the traditional social institutions of marriage and family, they are a testament to his deepening sense of humanity. Inevitably, too, Chabrol has become more melancholy. The final tone of [La Femme Infidèle, Que la bête meure, and Le Boucher] is a poignant fusion of serenity and desolation. The savage derider of the bourgeoisie has become its elegiac poet. (p. 19)