Claude Chabrol
Beneath the elegantly composed surfaces of Claude Chabrol’s bourgeois thrillers lies something altogether more poisonous: a cinema of corrosive irony, wicked wit and simmering violence.
Few directors have mapped the darkness beneath respectable surfaces with quite the wit, precision and relentless productivity of Claude Chabrol. Over a career spanning some 50 years and 80-odd films, he spun wicked thriller after wicked thriller, skewering the French bourgeoisie and exposing the seam of malice behind the most elegant of veneers. Dubbed the ‘French Hitchcock’ Chabrol’s films share affinities with thriller writers such as Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell, each of whose work he adapted. But he is also a kindred spirit to the most recent generation of Korean filmmakers – Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook both cite Chabrol as a key influence. Cool, precise, and wryly entertaining, his films are a peculiar cocktail of the mundane and murderous, the ordinary and the obscene.
