by Claude Chabrol

PUBLISHED ON 16.10.2022

"You see, there is often a bias against money!" is a key line in Claude Chabrol's The Breach/The Breakup. Directed in 1970, this drama of manipulation is part of the brilliant decade of the filmmaker that also includes Le Boucher, This Man Must Die and The Unfaithful Wife.

From the outset, the tangible yet abstract music of Pierre Jansen (Chabrol's resident musician) sets the tone for this fabulously noxious story in which money is the poisonous sap. A woman fights against her wealthy father-in-law to get custody of her child. Ready to do anything, the father-in-law (played by a Michel Bouquet, whose voice has never been more piercing) brings in an unscrupulous little adventurer (Jean-Pierre Cassel with his sweet scoundrel voice), to corrupt the young woman.

The Breach/The Breakup, 1970

Chabrol carefully films the trap that is set for his heroine (played by Stéphane Audran) and takes advantage of it to paint a wide variety of human portraits. The young lawyer's marvellous face of kindness and understanding is replaced by the invariably false face of the manipulative scoundrel and, of course, the often-tortured face of the young mother. Chabrol's directing brings them all together in a kind of macabre ballet, and a moment of grace emerges: the confession of the heroine, who in a six-minute scene in a tramway, delivers all that her life has been up to that point with honesty and impressive abandon.

Virginie Apiou

The Breach/The Breakup by Claude Chabrol (La Rupture, 1970, 1h30)

Pathé Bellecour Fri. 21 7:45pm