DVD of the Week: À Double Tour

In the clip above, I discuss Claude Chabrol’s third feature (and his first in color), “À Double Tour,” from 1959. The title means “double-locked”; it was released here, in 1961, under the title “Leda,” which is the name of the woman for whom the wealthy owner of a Provence villa and vineyard prepares to leave his wife. In his review of it in the magazine (available to subscribers), Brendan Gill wrote that

the conflict here is only partly between father and son; it is also between husband and wife, mother and son, mother and kitchenmaid, kitchenmaid and gardener, mother and daughter, daughter and fiancé, fiancé and prospective mother-in-law, and between practically all of the above and the beautiful young outsider who gives her name to the picture.

And he’s right: Chabrol depicts family life as a war of all against all, and the bigger the household, the more fronts each member must fight on. Yet, for all the emotional violence (and, ultimately, physical violence) that results, Chabrol can’t resist finding the bitter turbulence funny. He also—being a devout cinephile—ploughs a shovelful of movie allusions and reminiscences into the film, which suggests, at moments, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, Kenji Mizoguchi, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Tashlin, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, and not just their manners but their moods, with the effect of taking his already-manifold spectacle and multiplying it prismatically into a bewilderingly kaleidoscopic whirl of mixed emotions. So when Gill asserts that “M. Chabrol never quite makes up his mind what sort of picture he is aiming at—it’s neither a family tragedy nor a study of contemporary manners nor a whodunit,” he’s right and wrong: Chabrol made a film that was all of those things, and more (an anti-bourgeois satire, a screwball comedy, a quasi-religious redemption, an erotic riot), and that’s what he had made up his mind to do. As a young director, Chabrol (who died last Sunday at the age of eighty) was an utter wild man, but there was method to his madness; he never lost his method, but as, eventually, something of the madness calmed down to a simmer, the method, too, mellowed.

P.S. I heard a French friend call a detective story a “wood unit.”

P.P.S. This is the movie that Jean-Paul Belmondo was working on, in the spring of 1959, when Jean-Luc Godard tapped him to star in “Breathless,” which was shot later that year; in Chabrol’s film, he plays the sort of antic role for which he was already known on the stages of Paris.