Beginning with Les Biches in 1968, Claude Chabrol’s career entered its second major phase. While he directed his debut feature, Le Beau Serge (1958), before his Nouvelle Vague colleagues Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut directed their own, he got bogged down in commercial assignments throughout the mid ‘60s. This Man Must Die, adapted from Nicholas Blake’s novel The Beast Must Die, sees Chabrol expand his directorial voice and use aspects of film noir to comment on French middle-class life.
This Man Must Die starts with the scene of a young boy on a beach. As he walks home, the film cuts between him and a car racing in his direction. The result is a hit-and-run accident. His father, Charles (Michel Duchaussoy), an author of children’s books, is devastated, resolves to find a suspect, and works up an elaborate theory regarding his son’s death, suspecting that the killer owns a garage and works with cars. Then he meets Hélène (Caroline Cellier), an actress who was riding in the car during the accident. He starts dating her and his real target emerges 51 minutes into the film: Paul (Jean Yanne), Hélène’s gruff and abusive brother-in-law.
Chabrol’s frequent pans give the story a touch of elegance. Reflecting the struggle in which Charles is engaged in, one shot starts with the image of a chessboard, its pieces knocked over, and closes with Hélène lying in bed. The film also returns to the sea several times, treating it as a backdrop for death rather than a beautiful holiday spot. A few other small reflexive touches course through the film. A conversation about contemporary French literature sees the film’s screenwriter, Paul Gégauff, name-checked. And, at the end of a news bulletin, the presenter speaks directly to Hélène and Charles, as though she could tell they were watching. These meta touches grow deeper when Charles’s diary, concealed as a novel-in-progress, becomes a detective story that he acts out in real-life. The fact that his thoughts about the death of his son, first spoken to the police, turn out to be true give the film an oddly unreal touch. In the end, his confident transformation into a storybook hero leads him to a series of moral conundrums and the viewer is left to question who the “beast” in the title is referring to.
This Man Must Die screens this evening, January 27, at L’Alliance New York as part of the series “Chabrol! Suspense! Restored!”
