Psychology of Slaughter

LE BOUCHER

Directed by CLAUDE CHABROL

Screenplay by CLAUDE CHABROL

In this trim, beautifully managed psychological thriller, a series of bizarre murders takes place. The mystery is not whodunit, but why; for Director Claude Chabrol (This Man Must Die) is fascinated by motivation, not detection. "I am not interested in solving puzzles," he has explained. "I am interested in studying the behavior of people involved in murder."

The murderer is a butcher (Jean Yanne) recently returned to his home town of Tremolat in the province of Perigord after more than a decade in the army. He begins a casual flirtation with a schoolmistress (Stephane Audran), a woman of distinctly cosmopolitan charms who invites his friendship but spurns his affection. An unhappy love affair has left scars, and she is unwilling to risk another commitment.

The butcher apparently accepts with equanimity the delicate emotional balance imposed by his new friend. But then the murders begin. The victims, always women, are found stabbed to death in the surrounding countryside. The schoolmistress herself discovers one of the bodies on an outing with her class. Lying against a nearby stone is a cigarette lighter like the one which she had given the butcher. She slips it into her pocket. Later a police inspector tells her that the woman had been killed only moments before the teacher found the body. Clearly the butcher meant the woman's death as a signal, and the teacher accepts it as such. But instead of fright, she feels a strange excitement that makes her lead the killer on.

Le Boucher is rich in its details of village life, a deceptively benign milieu for such a sinister film. It begins with a magnificent scene of a wedding, where the butcher and the teacher meet. It is the bride at this wedding who will become one of his victims. In Chabrol's hands, such pat plotting seems part of a fateful, remorseless order.

Nor does Chabrol fall victim to melodrama in his direction. He gets impact from understatement and from two superb, low-key performances by Yanne and Audran (who is Mrs. Chabrol in private life). In Chabrol's treatment, the schoolmistress not only triggers the killer's dormant psychopathy but becomes a partner in his crime. Perversely, as he becomes more dangerous, she is all the more drawn to him. Finally, knife in hand, the crazed killer confronts her late at night in her apartment. It is only then, in a violent, weird, but somehow touching denouement, that the two finally embrace.

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