Le Boucher is one of Claude Chabrol's most underrated films since it seemed to get away from the recent string of French New Wave films of the 60s. When I first saw this, it caught me out of nowhere and was a little too much for me to take in at one viewing. A lot of films do that to me. Luckily this one demands to be seen again, even after you know what happens. This is a character study as well as an excellent example of films' possibilities. Le Boucher (French for The Butcher) is a romance, drama, horror, and thriller, all rolled into one. The majority of the time, movies that handle all these different genres don't have a clear-cut way of executing them. This has a way of handling it all that is just right and so original. Le Boucher takes place in a small town in France that resembles a time before. The town has stayed historic. We meet our two main characters at a wedding ceremony. Well-loved school teacher and headmistress Hélène, and war veteran and career butcher Popaul (Paul) are the characters in an-almost two-character film. They really hit it off and Paul falls for her. But she got out of a bad relationship ten years earlier that took such a toll on her that she is still not ready for a relationship. On his birthday, she gives him a lighter: a motif. So far, the film is a light-hearted romance. We hear about some of the horrors that Paul witnessed in war and we hope that they get together. Both would benefit from each other. When Hélène tells him that she wants everything to be platonic, we wish for her to change her mind. Then the film switches directions...Early on, cops say that a woman has been murdered. She wasn't raped which makes it a little bizarre. That's about as far as it goes when they talk about it. It's brief, but we all know it will be revisited in some form or another. Oddly, we are not too concerned with a recent murder, just with our main characters. Hélène takes her class on a field trip to a cave area on a mountain in a scene set up perfectly. This is when the film switches gears. It looks like the roof will cave in on the students, or that they will fall off the edge at any second. But a tiny bit of blood drips on a student, the camera then shows a bloody hand on the edge of a higher part of the cliff. She goes to check it out, but the corpse is very briefly shown and the audience is still freaked out. The victim was the bride at the beginning of the film. She finds Paul's lighter, so we know that it's him. He still tries to get with her, but there is tension: she is scared that he may kill and he is scared that he may be prone to kill. The final act is a horror-thriller, but mainly the latter. He finds out that she knows that he's the culprit in the series of murders and he finds a need to explain. She lives in an apartment just above the school where she teaches and she tries to flee him off while he worms his way through the school to her. This is when the audience finds out Paul's motives that really gets them to think. Paul is a butcher, he saw grizzly death in war and obviously killed some soldiers too. He has been around death for so long. It is also obvious that he has some PTSD, but he also loves Hélène. His murders to women were his own bizarre way of expressing himself. Is it a stupid way? Of course, but Paul feels the need to assert his masculinity through physicality and he is near death all the time and has PTSD. So his motive is entirely believable and our heart goes out. We wonder if he will kill Hélène or himself. He stabs himself, and a scared Hélène is frightened about what Paul may do next, but is also turned on and impressed by Paul going through such savage acts just for her. In a way, she provoked him. So is she the real villain?Although this is not much of a French New Wave film, it does have enough elements to be identified as one. The use of natural lighting and on-location is perfect. And one of the perfect aspects is the music. It is at the same level as Jaws and Halloween. And, of course, the actors are stellar. They make a character study out of a wildly meshed-together genre film. Not only was the film very well-done, it has a lasting impact on the characters. Who these characters are, and what their statuses are in terms of humanity are some things that make you think long after the movie ends.The movie is so bizarre, so original, and so great!

This film is a work of such blatant charlatanry that it calls into question the meaning of the word 'auteur' as it is applied to the French new wave directors. Such is the awe with which Chabrol was and continues to be regarded (including by Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby) that he apparently felt he could get away with anything. Le Boucher is a film so utterly devoid of dramatic interest that it would be charitable to regard it as a failed experiment that attempted to push the limits of cinematic exposition to an extremity of emptiness. I might forgive Chabrol for writing and producing it if his intention was to demonstrate the boring predictability of bourgeois culture in a place like Perigord, but I'd prefer to spend an hour and a half doing my laundry.

Le Boucher is quite possibly the best film that Claude Chabrol ever made. Considering the quality of his output at the turn of the 70's this is quite something. In line with all his best movies from this time, Le Boucher is part thriller, part psychological drama. Also like his other key works, this one doesn't really focus on the crime so much as its emotional fallout. In it a school teacher begins a restrained relationship with a local butcher, whom she subsequently suspects of serial murder. As is the way with Chabrol, this discovery only complicates her feelings for this man.Once more Chabrol's muse Stéphane Audran stars. And as usual she is quite excellent in the role of the teacher. She imbues the character with the requisite complexity, as well as being a fragrant presence throughout. Co-star Jean Yanne, too, is quite exceptional as the title character. Both actors give the movie a dramatic weight that gives it its emotional core. But where this film differs from other Chabrol thrillers, is that there is more emphasis on suspense than normal. This combination of tension and character-driven drama is exquisitely handled by the director. For this reason Le Boucher may be the primary reason why Chabrol was referred to as 'the French Hitchcock'. Sir Alfred would have certainly been proud of this one.

Claude Chabrol's film, The Butcher, is a brooding, menacing character study held together by two central characters occupying the space of a small, French town and getting along overly well with one another. Each of them share respective back-stories which flit between being emotionally tragic and gut-wrenchingly unfortunate; stories most certainly enough to visibly shake either member of this pairing and, you'd hope, enough to affect even that of an outsider to these two people hearing of times gone by in each of these respective people's lives. One of the two people, Jean Yanne's character named Popaul, is the town's local butcher; a man whom has fought on the front-line of war and has consequently witnessed bloody warfare. He finds solace, now, in chopping up meat and serving it to the locals whereas prim primary school teacher Hélène (Audran) has settled down as a live-in headmistress at a respected school raising and teaching the young pupils whom frequent; this, after still coming to terms with a relationship with a man which, in her eyes, should have resulted in a consequent marriage and the bringing up of children.The film is about the duality the pair of them share in this sense, their ways of finding personal parity with what it is that's happened to them in their lives in the form of respective tragedies, and how their ideas of respective 'treatment' concurrently are actually lifestyles more eerily linked to that of the ingredients of what it was that upset them in the first place. It is a darkly brilliant piece, an intimate character study about two people moving closer to the items that have effectively made them the near-enough to a psychological wreck that they are; Hélène's process of keeping a happy face and effectively nurturing young children with their education and during field days the emotional proving to oneself that she can, in fact, play the mothering role. For Popaul, his demons more broadly linked to that of a the bloody war-field upon which he served time sees him draw upon a grotesque fascination with blood; an obsession which does not allow him to keep away from the sight he hates most and consequently sees him mutate into a serial killer.No doubt lending great inspiration to the later works of about ten years or so in Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, itself a film about an innocent woman coming to bond with a serial killing male, Chabrol's piece fits nicely into that cinematic canon of around about the time when serial killers were permitted to be among us, have lives as well as jobs and were most importantly, constructed as human beings whom carried with them flaws that made them who they were rather than being rendered faceless, mindless monsters. The American study of similar subsistence begins with Hitchcock's Psycho and flows all the way through to The Boston Strangler as the best of the time exploring said ideas.The film is, of course, about this serial killer but it is not so much preoccupied with whom it is that's carrying out the killings told from the perspective of police officers as much as it is how somebody completely unbeknownst to such techniques of detecting comes to innocently bond with such a beast. It is hardly revealing that Yanne plays such a character, such a fact is core to the film's experience. The film begins with a series of cave paintings, odd works of art occupying a dark and dingy dwelling as compositions of objects periodically arrive on our screens in a fashion which makes it near impossible to make out; that sense of a distorted psychosis or of an unbalanced psyche furthermore causing an unwavered or unfocused perspective prominent. What then happens is a cut to an establishing shot of a quaint French town, somewhere cut off from most places and seemingly basking in the glory of anonymity and processes of eventlessness; but there is trouble within. Within the town, a wedding plays out; a young couple getting married with joy and happiness appearing plentiful; the wedding eventually giving way not to the story of the bride or groom and their tribulations but to the two eventual leads sharing a walk away from such items as marriage, companionship, exuberance, triumph and whatnot.Amidst the beauty lies ugliness; a young woman has already been found murdered nearby shocking everyone within the radius, the establishing of the killer's apparent lust for the death of people of the victim's age and gender not boding well when we realise the film will come to stick with young Hélène. Chabrol makes us symptomatically aware of both Hélène's vulnerability and Popaul's apparent untrustworthiness by lingering on Hélène as she walks away down a street from a perspective which is difficult to label as Popaul's, but is no-less a composition which additionally lingers by his side, inferring that it is his gaze. What follows is a quite brilliant exploration of these two coming to form a tie with one another, a platonic attraction seeing Popaul once again become infatuated with something he is supposed to feel such disdain toward, the results of which are violent outbursts, while Hélène herself cannot quite come to break down demons linked to that of refraining to engage in relations following her past tragedy. It is an unnerving but brutally effective piece, a studying of a serial killer at large whom of course we want caught, but seemingly not if it means our protagonist, whom we've come to care for dearly, must suffer further set-backs to that of the one she did before. The film is swift and decisive, an agonising character study cutting through what it is that makes its two leads tick and doing so with ruthless efficiency.