Lies and Deceit: Madame Bovary (1991), Betty (1992), Torment (1994) (Review)

After the Inspector Lavardin films, the second half of Arrow’s box set Lies and Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol takes the duplicity promised in the title from the criminal to the domestic sphere. These three films also show Chabrol working with one of the key themes of the French New Wave he rose to prominence as part of the link between literature and cinema. The movement’s intellectual foundation, after all, was auteur theory, the concept that a director is to their film as a novelist is to their novel.

Despite this, when a film is described as “literary” these days it’s usually a backhanded way of implying that it isn’t very cinematic. 1991’s Madame Bovary, a substantial success for Chabrol on release, dares to invite this criticism with its ultra-faithful approach to adapting Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel of adultery. Chabrol’s initial idea was almost experimental in its lack of experimentation: he wanted to make a film where we saw only what Flaubert describes in his novel, and although this proved impossible the result is easily the most complete version of this frequently-filmed novel.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best version, although you wouldn’t get laughed at for claiming it is. Chabrol’s Bovary sometimes drags; at two hours 22 minutes it’s the longest film in this box set, and it sometimes feels it. It fits perhaps too neatly into that pastoral mode of French cinema that Claude Berri was having hits with around the same time; there is a lot of Flaubert in here but Chabrol seems content to wear other people’s clothes. That said, there are worse sins than being too faithful to a brilliant novel. Flaubert’s prose is read on the soundtrack by François Périer, allowing the film to include the author’s final, stinging judgement on Charles. His film is also blessed with Isabelle Huppert as Emma Bovary, meaning Chabrol gets closer than most to the uncrackable problem of Madame Bovary adaptations – actually getting inside Emma’s head. The novel was a sensation because no author had captured this kind of psychological realism before, and Huppert’s emotive performance allows Chabrol’s film to suggest this while preserving the character’s interior, introverted qualities. There is a particularly brilliant tracking shot through a party where the camera remains firmly trained on Huppert’s face, saying nothing but showing everything; it stands in comparison to Nicole Kidman’s famous wordless scene in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth.

Madame Bovary was a controversial novel in its time, even though Flaubert remains carefully discreet; the most famous ‘sex scene’ in the novel is the carriage ride, where the author describes what Emma and Leon aren’t seeing while they’re otherwise engaged. Chabrol’s PG-certificate film maintains this tone, but Betty shows an altogether different, less inhibited side of the director. Betty is also an adaptation, albeit from an author perhaps better known for the film and television he inspired than his prose. It’s based on a novel by Georges Simenon, the Belgian writer who created Inspector Maigret, and it shows Chabrol in full neo-noir mode.

The story of a helpless alcoholic whose drinking and promiscuity turn out to have deep psychological roots, Betty is something like a crime story without any actual crime. Stéphane Audrane plays Laure, an older woman who takes it upon herself to unravel the title character’s tormented history. (The relationship between two women was a favourite structure of Chabrol’s, all the way back to 1960’s Les bonnes femmes) It has the pace of a ticking-clock thriller, despite nothing really being at stake: Marie Trintignant’s Betty clearly isn’t going to be saved, but her performance is so emotional, so intense and so electrifying that you find yourself completely invested despite that. It’s a tremendous depiction of an exploited, abused woman, one which becomes even more painful when you remember Trintignant’s murder at the hands of her own boyfriend in 2003. The psychology of Simenon’s 1974 novel might look a little simplistic these days, but there’s no doubting the conviction the cast bring to it.

Both these films have plenty of strengths, but the pearl of the collection might well be the final film, 1994’s Torment. Also known as Hell, it’s also the only film in the set without a literary source, although it is still an adaptation. Chabrol is filming Inferno, a script that Henri-Georges Clouzot tried to make with Marie Trintignant’s father John-Louis Trintignant in 1964. Clouzot’s attempt imploded spectacularly enough for a feature-length documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, to be made in 2009 by Serge Bromberg. Bromberg’s film is extremely entertaining, but for all its remarkable excerpts of Clouzot’s test footage, it didn’t persuade me that his Inferno would have been a great film. A visually spectacular one, yes, but underneath all the dazzle Clouzot’s core idea struck me as a very run-of-the-mill, potentially sexist tale of jealous males and female temptresses.

Perhaps I was wrong, or perhaps Chabrol has found something special in Clouzot’s story, but this Torment strikes me as something close to a vicious satire of that kind of thriller: cold-blooded, horrifying and utterly compelling. Clouzot’s test footage contains abundant nudity from Romy Scheider, but Torment pares this back to one underwear scene from Emmanuelle Beart (which is, somewhat inevitably, featured on most of the film’s posters). The reason for this is simple: despite her husband Paul (François Cluzet) restlessly imagining her seducing most of the men they meet, her infidelities are all in his imagination. Torment initially promises to be a modern-day Madame Bovary, but once Paul’s true, disturbing character is revealed it becomes a psychological thriller – and a subversive one, seeing as the bland, successful, middle-class Paul is exactly the kind of character who French thrillers normally present as an uncomplicated hero.

It’s a suitably subversive end to a collection of films that are never quite as generic and straightforward as they initially appear. Extras include commentaries – the ones on Betty and Madame Bovary are from the tireless Kat Ellinger – a video essay by Ginette Vincendeau considering Betty as a Simenon adaptation, an archive interview with Chabrol where he explains how the Inferno project made its way to him, and more.

Graham’s Archive – Lies & Deceit: Madame Bovary, Betty & Torment