Small Town Minds
Odd.
Weird. Not quite
normal. We don’t understand
it! A key scene, the pivot on
which the plot revolves, contains too much ambiguity; which is a mistake
because it confuses the film’s meaning without enriching it. Too much happens too quickly. There should have been a few extra
scenes to properly fill in the explanatory background so to clarify the
character of Hélène. Chabrol cuts
a corner, and it shows: we interpret some crucial moments very differently from
what we believe is the director’s intention. The unity of the work is broken, and we become aware of a
narrative flaw: the motivation of Lucienne’s daughter is not so obvious to us
as it should be. Puzzled by an
inconsistency we try work it out for ourselves. Oh dear! Instead
of letting the movie do its osmotic work we spend our time trying to solve a
pseudo-problem that should never have existed. Enamoured with our own thoughts we lose track of the film,
engrossed in a question we struggle to answer: why did Hélène shop her mother to the police?
After the crimes have been committed the two lovers stop
seeing each other, afraid that if their affair is discovered the murders will
be too. They are living in
torment! Incarcerated inside fears
they themselves have created. This
wasn’t their original idea at all…
Lucienne and Pierre killed their partners to be free. Yet in a terrible irony they have now
lost all their freedom, and there is no prospect of them regaining it. Obsessed
by their crimes they think it is impossible to resume their liaison, afraid the
community and the police will jump to the obvious conclusion when it is made
public. Whereas before they could
see each other intermittently, now they live in solitary confinement; their
fears of future gossip and innuendo the locked doors and barred windows of
their isolation cells. They are
serving a prison term where there is no remand! Because of course everyone will believe they did their
spouses in. The risk of exposure
is too great, so the only way to keep their affair secret is not to meet! But how long must they wait? One year? Five years?
Forever? The latter is
possible. And even if it isn’t,
the psychic agony their separation creates could permanently ruin their
relationship, as well as themselves.
What a fate! To be walled
up inside their own imaginations.
Pierre’s wife Clotilde is suffering from acute depression,
brought on by hypochondria. She
has given up on life, and finds no interest in it. For years Pierre has patiently looked after her; but then he
meets Lucienne, another person deprived of emotional succour, and the madness
of sexual passion overwhelms him, and his days are absorbed in thoughts of his
new mistress. If only he could
spend his nights with Lucienne! By
killing Clotilde he thinks he will be free to do just that. He is right. Now they can spend three or four hours together in bed,
rather than a few minutes in the woods or half an hour in the town’s historic
chateau. Bliss! Although happiness causes its own
problems: by seeing each other more often they are more likely to be seen,
which increases the risk, or so they believe, of the murder being
discovered.
They have created an impossible dilemma that they cannot
resolve. The couple are ensnared
by their own minds! Under
pressure, and obsessed by details that are mostly irrelevant, their judgement
dissolves and they kill Lucienne’s husband. Yet another mistake!
Afraid of the consequences, worrying about what people think, assuming
their guilt will be transparently obvious, they lock themselves up inside a
permanent present which they are too afraid to vacate. They daren’t do anything! Any action could disturb the delicate
balance of their lives, and thus expose them to rumour and to arrest and to
eventual conviction. And so they
refuse to see each other. It is
their last and biggest error. Both
their lives have stalled completely as they wait for something to happen. And of course something does. Catastrophically Hélène acts on their
behalf.
Absolute freedom is impossible. Remove one set of constraints and you replace them with
different ones. In the past they
feared the discovery of their infidelity: nicely captured by the decision of
the town council to institute police controls of the chateau to discover the
teenagers they think are sleeping on its antique beds. The couple are also scared of their
partners. But these are small
worries compared to what has replaced them. It is the French state who is their enemy now. Yesterday it was adultery. Today it is murder. Before it was only the facts of the
affair that worried them; now these have been replaced by something much more
terrifying - their own ideas. Now
they dread exposure, which they believe will lead to their arrest. This couple’s fears have grown into something
very large and amorphous: the terror of public opinion which, they think, will
automatically assume they are murderers because they are lovers. This fear is mostly metaphysical,
allowing the creation of endless speculative permutations, which in turns
heightens the emotions, causing them to live on the edge of paranoia and
neurosis. The relationship thus
becomes deeper and more obsessive, while at the same time the feelings of
constraint increase. They love each other more, but see each other less. A nightmare! Chasing after greater freedom they find they have lost it
all.i
They are trapped by their expectations of what they think
people will believe. Lucienne and
Pierre know the truth, and they assume everyone else will realise it too, if their
love is exposed. But this is not
obvious. They haven’t properly
thought about their situation and the nature of the place they live in. Only they know all the facts – when
their affair started, the precise details of the death, Paul’s character and so
on. Other people, seeing only the
external details of their relationship, may come to a different conclusion; as
indeed they already have: the town has rejected the official explanation of
death by natural causes and assume Clotilde committed suicide, because of her
illness. If the liaison were made
public their views might change.
They may even think that Pierre’s affair caused the suicide; an
important but nevertheless slight shift in public attitudes, which would
result, it is true, in Pierre being morally but not criminally blamed for his
wife’s mortality. Their lives
could get a little frosty, but he would not be sent to jail. Murder? It is impossible in a place like this with people like
these! This is the provinces, and
Lucienne is the wife of the mayor, and Pierre is his deputy. Respectable people who live in little
French towns do not kill their husbands and wives. It is simply not done.
So there!
And this is not all.
There is a general lack of curiosity in the culture, which stops people
questioning their impressions and basic beliefs. We see this especially after Paul’s death. The head of police prefers to stop the
investigation, worried that it might uncover something disreputable – like
drink driving or perhaps worse.
The mayor’s reputation must be protected even when he is dead. Small town assumptions and
political expediency have a tendency to accept appearances for what they are
(or prefer to keep appearances intact rather than destroy them with
dirt-stained realities). Pierre
and Lucienne are safe. The town
makes them so. Its comfortable
prejudices will protect them from close scrutiny and scurrilous rumour. Yet they cannot see this; the lovers
scared of phantoms they themselves invent. Looking at their own actions all too clearly they mistakenly
assume others will see them in the same incandescent light, even though their
neighbours have only a smidgen of the available facts. Of course they’ll look at the affair
differently. It is an awful irony
that Pierre and Lucienne are too provincial to escape their own provincial
culture; unable to see their own people with the detachment and clarity that
would allow them to escape their self-made fears. Trapped by their background and their extra ordinary
situation they turn the local population into a fantasy. It is this fantasy that destroys them
in the end.
Hélène share’s Lucienne’s views about her husband Paul
Delamare. Both know that he is a
completely unemotional and insensitive man who is only interested in power and
money. She is not sad to see him
go.
Hélène is also very smart. She very quickly realises that her mother is sleeping with
Pierre; and later, when she thinks about the affair, fits all the pieces
together and completes the puzzle, telling her mother what she believes is the
truth. Lucienne is shocked. But somehow she controls herself, and
confesses only to the relationship.
What follows is Chabrol’s mistake.
After her mother’s confession Hélène writes to the chief of
police about the terrible rumours that are circulating in the town regarding
Lucienne and Pierre. She asks him
to investigate the case to establish the truth, and so exonerate them both
completely. The town will
therefore know for certain that her mother and Pierre are in no way responsible
for these two deaths. The official
is surprised by this letter as there have been no such rumours. However, accusations like these have to
be investigated, and so he revisits the mayor’s house. This time Lucienne can’t act it out,
and overwhelmed by the revelation that it is her daughter who notified the
police she confesses.
Why did Hélène do it?
The simple answer, and the one that fits into the overall pattern of the
film, is that she desires her mother’s happiness, and believes this will only
occur if the affair is made public; which requires that her suspicions, which
she projects onto everyone else, are removed. It is childish innocence, and adolescent solipsism. It is also contains a lovely little
irony: it is precisely because she is so naïve that she can recognise the
brutal truth. Without the
prejudices (or more accurately: without the sophisticated culture) of the town
she can put the facts together without any pre-conceptions, and without
sentimentality, and finding the cause in her own hatred of her stepfather she
can create a tightly plotted story that is both compelling and accurate. Only a child could have made all
these connections and been so direct in their formulation.
Hélène here embodies, it is one of the odd aspects of this
odd scene, the emotional coolness of the adults – thus even Lucienne quickly
recovers from the revelation that Pierre has murdered his wife. However, the nuances are huge. Hélène is clear-sightedly rational
rather than emotionally indifferent.
She acts out of love for her mother, whom she thinks she is
helping.
She acts out of love for her mother… It is exactly this anomaly we have to
explain.
Kids are at the same time very smart and very stupid. Hélène is so desperate to know the
truth, yet when Lucienne confesses to the affair, while at the same time
denying the murders, she believes her absolutely. Hélène is only a child, so full of love, and so intelligent
and so naïve…
Hélène is a child.
She lacks the experience to understand the consequences of her
actions. She doesn’t realise that
once a suspicion is raised attention is concentrated on the targeted object,
such concentration liable to distort or exaggerate, or even, as in this case,
uncover the unexpected truth about it.
Hélène’s actions show the limits of her understanding, which could stand
in for those of the town. In some
ways Hélène is its representative… No, this is not quite right. This is better: she symbolises what the
rich and the sophisticated think small town provincial people should be
like. Thus when she writes her
letter she is only imagining the reactions of the local population from her own
relatively privileged position: she knows a few more things than they do, while
she is prejudiced in a way that they are not – they do not share her hatred of
Paul Delamare.
Chabrol has a better sense of the realities. In the last scene a police officer asks
the couple why they didn’t just move away. They don’t know.
They hadn’t even thought about it!
For these people such an idea is too big and too radical to even
conceive, trapped by their own habits and the customs of a place that is
driving them insane. The world they inhabit is too tiny to escape. Their small town mentalities are not
original enough to see the obvious.
Although they can, of course, create huge fantasies. Murdering a partner easier than leaving
for Lille or Rouen. How true this
is!
It is perfect.
And yet I had to really think about this scene before I arrived at this
interpretation. It wasn’t my initial
opinion. While watching the film I
couldn’t understand why Hélène wrote that letter. My first thoughts were that it was an example of innocent
cruelty; Hélène punishing her mother because she believed the love affair would
threaten their own relationship.
Closely related to that idea is this one: that Hélène, with her
adolescent obsession with certainty, has a compelling urge to know the truth
that overrides everything else.
Logic before feelings!
Alternatively, her behaviour may be nothing more than a simple impulse; manifested
in this case in the desire to spread malicious rumours. That is, there may be no reason at
all. It is just another game that
kids play. All these
interpretations are possible, especially if we bring in old doctor Freud and
poke around in inside Hélène’s subconscious. So many ideas!
They confuse us, and we become entangled in our own thoughts, more
interested in them than the movie.
We have become Pierre and Lucienne! They spent too much time imagining what other people
would believe; while we are losing sight of this film in speculations about
Hélène’s mental state. We are
distracted. Our imagination is set
free. We are adding superfluous
elements to a story that doesn’t need them; its main theme sinking down into
our marshy fantasies…
There is another possibility which may account for Chabrol’s
decision: Hélène’s behaviour confirms the belief of Lucienne and Pierre that once
their love is common knowledge the public will think them killers. Hélène can thus be seen as a touchstone
for the community’s reaction.
However, in the paradox that is reality she is actually the town’s
exception; her peculiarity embodied in her odd behaviour that is a parody of
their original fears – she forces a police investigation to clear their
names not to arrest them! How sad
and comic is fate. For of course
if the couple had declared their love Hélène would have easily accepted her
mother’s lie; the truth too outlandish to be taken seriously if the rebuttal is
firm enough. Hélène, a child that
can see with great clarity but who also gets many things wrong, destroys
Lucienne with her foolish innocence.
Crucially she cannot see that apart from her mother and herself (and
Pierre of course) no else would share their suspicions; blind to the real
nature of an adult world that is so mundane and egocentric in its
concerns.
If only they had made their love public, they would have
been safe. Instead they are caught
out by their own timidity, which allows a child to believe she can save them.
She did it out of love. Hélène is not as disconnected from life as Clotilde Maury or
as cold as Paul Delamare.
In a fascinating scene we see what a monster Lucienne’s
husband can be. After a lunch
where it is obvious there is some emotional connection between the two friends
Paul manufactures a situation where he catches his wife out. He then invites Pierre to the marshes,
where he shows his arrogance and complete indifference to Lucienne whom he
treats as a whore; the affair an opportunity to secure a crooked scheme by
using it as leverage to guarantee his deputy’s support. Sexually and emotionally uninterested
in his wife he treats her as if she were a disposal object. He even says that he is glad they are
sleeping together - it makes this deal easier. Lucienne simply the pen he uses to sign this contract, the
only thing that excites him. For
Paul Delamare his wife has no existence as a person. She is an object d’ art
he uses to decorate the house, in which he has little interest. Only money and power, and the sleeping
drug that is TV, can hold his attention.
People exist only as opportunities to achieve his selfish aims; thus his
choice of the leftist Pierre as running mate only because he could win the
workers’ votes, and so secure his own election. Politics is simply business by other means. Ideology doesn’t
exist in a mind like Delamare’s.
Paul is a very cold and calculating person, and interestingly, the only
one in the town who is connected to the French establishment. We are told he represents its
population to the minister in Paris, a place he visits regularly, and where he
gets the authority for his corrupt deals; able then to acquire land for
property development, in which he makes large profits, although ostensibly it
is all for the community’s benefit.
Pierre suspects the proposed factory is a fake.
Although this film is primarily a study of the incapacities
of provincial life, the Paul Delamare character also suggests some scepticism
about the metropolis. In Paris the
politicians and technocrats treat the villages and market towns
instrumentally. They are not seen
as living places with their own integrity but considered only as investments
and business opportunities; its people little more than anonymous things. Above a certain height everything looks
small, and everyone looks unreal.
But always we must be careful. Generalisations have a habit of running their own fast race…
to quickly leave behind our little plots of land, which become forgotten and
unwelcome.
Paul Delamare is not simply a metaphor for national
politics. He is too inhuman for
that. Most Parisian industrialists
and bureaucrats are warm-blooded human creatures. He is not. A
caricature, of course, but a good one.
Paul Delamare is a monster.
And he is also something else: that particular type of character who
outgrows their origins, and yet who doesn’t move away from them. Thus he still lives in his old town,
amongst his childhood acquaintances, which he dominates it with his powerful
personality. Elevated too far
above his provincial associates he comes to look down on their lives and
capacities; his neighbours and colleagues simply the tools he uses to fulfil
his own more expansive purposes.
Although he too is trapped by the town’s habits and customs, which he has
changed a little through his influence and the alien ideas he has introduced
from the capital. He is too big
for this place! He should have
moved to Paris long ago.
He flourishes because other people when they get to know him
devise their own survival strategies; they adapt to his weaknesses. Hélène and Lucienne usually treat him
with disdain and sly amusement: one night they watch him sleeping as if he is a
cartoon character in some bedroom farce.
There is little feeling in the relationship. This has strange effects. Emotion tends to tie the intellect down. Remove it, and the mind rises above the
surface of things and sees all too clearly the faults that surround it: in this
case Paul’s boorishness. This kind
of critical intelligence is emotion’s safety valve, and protects the person for
as long as their own feelings are not overly stimulated; although it can also
trap them inside unfulfilling relationships; Lucienne’s hate not strong enough
to propel her into leaving a comfortable but emotional sterile domestic life.
An affair unleashes the passions. Suddenly Paul is a barrier over which the lovers must climb;
creating all sorts of frustrations, and even rage, as they catch and scratch
themselves on the hard edges of the busted cars and broken tables, the chairs
piled like wrecked scaffolding, they must now clamber over to get to even the
next street. Everything would be
all right. All the roads would be
clear! If he was out of the way…
But there is something else, and the scene at the marshes
brings this out very clearly. In a
moment of crisis our dominant characteristics become more extreme; thus the
uncaring and purely calculating nature of Paul Delamare is here displayed in
its purest form. He is a
fantastically ugly moral character, revealed in his complete lack of feeling
for Lucienne; his wife treated as a hooker he can sell to a client to clinch a
contract. But he has gone
too far. Lucienne rages against
her husband as Pierre drives her away from this fateful meeting… Paul has crossed a forbidden line; and
it will result in the inevitable denouement - Aeschylus is quoted during the
open credits. Once the first
unjust act is committed it unleashes a sequence of events that are beyond the
control of the individuals concerned.
Killing his wife in order to free themselves Pierre and Lucienne have
become entangled in ever increasing difficulties. Now they must make an even bigger effort to be free, which
of course generates an even stronger reaction. Fate has become too powerful for them to control. By taking the first fateful step to
kill his wife Pierre has initiated a riot of new facts that neither he nor
Lucienne has the ability to overcome.
Blown away by the revolution they have started.
But why didn’t they leave? This meeting at the marshes was the perfect
opportunity. Paul thinks the
affair started after the death of
Pierre’s wife when Lucienne was comforting a distraught widower. Clearly they are not listening
carefully to what he has to say.
It is a nice touch, for it highlights that lack of curiosity I mentioned
earlier, as well as confirming that the lovers’ views about the local
population are mistaken - like Paul they are more likely to believe that the
affair began after Clotilde’s murder.
All they have to do is to tweak their story a little: “we fell in love
while organising the funeral”; “I felt so sorry for him”; “I was touched by
Lucienne’s kindness….” However,
such a small concrete detail is too enormous to think about when huge phantoms
are flying around inside their heads.
If only they were as cool as Paul Delamare, and could see it
from his coldly rational perspective.
If only they could distance themselves from their
relationship, and see it from the outside.
If only they would think more accurately about the
environment in which they live.
For this is the provinces, where murder, especially by local
dignitaries, does not happen. It
is a logical impossibility! In
such places sudden deaths are explained by other stories; those that are
familiar and ready to hand – like suicide or a fatal car accident. In small provincial towns, dominated by
routine and custom, where the culture is deeply conservative, even the most
extreme acts will be transformed into the most banal of incidents, if given the
chance. Lucienne and Pierre are
protected by their history. Yet
they cannot see it. Blinded by
their own imaginations.
Of course this is not all.
There is not enough to do in a small market town. It is no surprise, therefore, that the
couple spend too much time putting their own fictions into other people’s
heads. Too much effort is spent
speculating about the future; that great obstacle to creative thought and
rational activity. In Paris the
small details of their past would have been removed from their consciousness by
their daily negotiations with its crowded streets and busy offices. Paul and Clotilde bumped and barged and
finally knocked into the gutter by the relentless traffic of the French capital. Large cities those great erasers of
time! After a few months their
minds too full to accommodate their recent history; squeezed out of the door by
the onrush of Parisian facts and Parisian things and their own expansive sense
of freedom. How easy to forget
when there are so many new things to see! And do. And buy.
There is also another reason for their tragedy. These characters have been watching too
much TV. In the nineteenth century
it was romantic fiction that led Madam Bovary astray, while it was sexual
passion that destroyed her. One
hundred years later popular entertainment has progressed by a fraction. Now it is televised “trash” that
provides the escapist fantasies, while it is metaphysical fears that destroys both lovers.
Life has become just a little more abstract and equal.
By the 1970s sex was unimportant as a moral issue. Thus Paul’s complete indifference to
his wife’s affair. This is the new
twentieth reality the couple refuse to see; too consumed with their sexual
passion to notice this obvious truth.
If only they had been satisfied with adulterous sex they would have been
all right. But for them fun is not
enough. These lovers are living
inside a different fantasy: the contemporary one of love and freedom.
At the height of their passion they want to be together all the time. Complete independence is their
ideal. It is the reason why,
unlike Madame Bovary, they are not jaded by the relationship: because they are
striving after a goal they will never reach. Television and the habits of
modern life – Pierre’s wife is kept going by modern medicine - has created a
new kind of romantic fiction, which they try to act out in their own
lives. Sex alone can no longer
satisfy them. No! They want more! They must be free of all restraint, and
their love must be permanently on tap; a tension that is not easy to sustain
over the long term, as both of their failed marriages illustrate. But of course a new affair always
promises the impossible. Love the
great illusionist and salesman: “That first kiss the first page of an
‘astounding’ new book that will ‘revolutionise’ the nature of
relationships.” It is the promise
of an October Revolution without the Leninist dictatorship and Brezhnev
bureaucracy.
Paul and Pierre’s wife are murdered because of their
emotional indifference. If either
had shown some common feeling they might have survived. Paul treating everyone as objects,
Pierre’s wife treating her husband as a servant, have severed the human
connection between themselves and other people; and have thus reduced their
partners’ intuitive sense of their individual worth. Therefore, although they dominate their respective
relationships, they are (curiously) relatively easy to kill when in the midst
of an intense affair they are experienced as cruel and unjust obstacles. The emotional involvement in their
deaths is not very high. Love, it
seems, can make monsters of even the most respectable of folk.
The motivations and causes are different but the effects are
very similar: both those in and out of love can treat others with indifference. Yes, even love can make us
inhuman. We become like animals
living inside a compulsive present; while the future is imagined as enormous
and impossible, made up, as it is, of our daydreams and crazy fears.
The couple wants to escape into a paradise. They want to be free! That is, Pierre and Lucienne want to be
human animals of the richest kind, which requires the unconstrained expression
of their natural sexual and emotional impulses. Chabrol knows this is not possible. All life is compromised. The more we strive to be free the
greater the bonds we create to hold ourselves down; until one day a copper
comes and puts the handcuffs on.
Click!
(Review of Les Noces Rouges)
[i] See my comments on earlier Chabrol films in This is
Love. He seems to have grasped the essence of Freud: emotional
fulfilment comes from restraints and tensions, not liberal tolerance.
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