POULET AU VINAIGRE
With Jean Poiret, Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet, Jean Topart, Lucas Belvaux, Pauline Lafont, Jean-Claude Bouillaud, and Caroline Cellier.
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I guess I’m an eternal optimist. About a month later the film opened in England, where the distributor made a game try at translating the pun in the title and called it Cop au vin. (The original title literally means “vinegar chicken,” but poulet is also French slang for “cop.”) But American distributors passed on it. So, apart from a truly dreadful made-for-TV item in English called The Blood of Others, which turned up briefly on cable, no Chabrol movie has been commercially distributed in this country for over a decade. Two of them, however, are surfacing at the Film Center this weekend: Poulet au vinaigre and the subsequent Masks (which is good, serviceable, quasi-Hitchcockian fun, but not quite as memorable).
In a way, most of the other characters have distinct oddities of their own. Dr. Morasseau, for example, is also a sculptor who specializes in female nudes, and one night Louis and Henriette spy him embracing one of the statues in his garden, and falling to the ground with sobs. Henriette is a predatory flirt who plies Louis with expensive meals, offers him a steady string of sexual overtures, and is in some ways just as conspiratorial an accomplice as his mother. (Morasseau’s mistress, moreover, is also served daily a late breakfast in bed, by a bartender at a nearby cafe: the internal rhymes between characters in this movie are many and complex.)
French TV, of course, is not exactly immune to American influences, but it still relies mainly on continuous, uninterrupted narratives that are often preceded and followed by empty patches–extended shots of the channel logo or of clocks that run on between the separate programs. (We see one such channel logo in the Cuno living room while Louis and his mother are busy machinating elsewhere.) The French pleasure in gazing is such that it was a common occurrence in the 70s–and for all I know may still be–for French people to sit transfixed watching clocks or logos on their TV screens when no program was on.
