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'Merci pour la chocolat' combines the two most characteristic tones of late Chabrol - the grim, relentless Langian formalism carried over from his great mid-period to films like 'La Ceremonie'; and the more relaxed, comic works like 'Cop Au Vin' or 'Rien ne va plus'. the seriousness can be found within a plot about individual and family tragedy; the treatment is never flippant, and the ending is numbing. The 'fun', if you want to call it that, arises from Chabrol's winking contract with his audience, offering a magnificently contrived story about parents and children, possible switches of babies, boyfriends who conveniently happen to be trainee forensic scientists, and so can check chocalate stains for poison: adding up to a mystery story whose solution is actually revealed in the first half hour.
The fun lies not in who done it - there are no other suspects, there may not even be a crime - but what is going on in the heroine's head, with Chabrol littering clues and red herrings. He is gloriously helped by Isabelle Huppert's obfuscating performance, her character's fundamental blankness - she is an observer judging others' reactions - is varied by vacuousness; hysteria; somnolence; good humour; tenderness; calculation. Which of these, if any, are the 'real' Mika? In a film characteristically loaded with allusions to Greek mythology, Mika is Arachne, a spider caught in her own web (appropriately the design on her sofa as her defeat sinks in, suggesting it was never her web in the first place, but that of the bourgeoisie to which she, as an orphaned outsider, never truly belonged), every cunning plan never bringng her closer to the object of her desire, the wearyingly narcissistic Polonski.
Of course, Chabrol achieves his effects more subtly than mere plot leg-pulling - as the allusion to Fritz Lang suggests, it is the smoothly unstable playing with point of view that unsettles our attempts at definitive explanations. It might be going too far to suggest that Chabrol's method in the film is Cubist, but he has an unsettling habit of breaking up sequences, cutting between camera positions as if he is starting a new scene, although it's just another angle on the same one. This can happen when he shifts the focus from one group of characters in a scene to another; more distractingly, it can happen within one group itself, breaking up a conversation with camera angles, or colour tones that don't match.
Despite the title and the central McGuffin about poisoned chocolate, the film's governing metaphor is the music that frequently punctuates the narrative (Liszt's 'Funerailles'!). The central structural unit, the preserve of that other Chabrol idol, Hitchcock, is the double or reproduction - the film begins with a once-married couple remarrying, the officiary and 'bride' sharing the same red hair. The main action towards which the narrative leads doubles an action that shadows the entire film (the death of the first wife), right down to the son suffering the same ankle injury.
The plot is full of parents and their children, many of dubious certainty about their relationships. In the piano sequences, the original pieces are doubled by the pianists' interpretations (further reproduced in a recording Polonski and Jeanne listen to), on two pianos reflecting their bourgeois surroundings; they become a weird kind of incestuous sublimation.
All this doubling and reproduction serves to further isolate Mika, a ganging up on her in terms of form and content, increasing a sympathy enlisted enlisted by Huppert's acting, and achieving a kind of empty tragedy.
score 7/10
the red duchess 20 June 2001
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0700414/ |
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4-4-2021 12:05:07