Twisting the Knife: The Swindle (1997) and The Colour of Lies (1999)(Review)

Following on from February’s Lies and Deceit, Arrow have returned to the films of Claude Chabrol for their new box set Twisting the Knife. Twisting the Knife has a slightly different remit to Lies and Deceit; the former box set selected various films Chabrol directed between 1985 and 1994 but left plenty of his work during that period out. Twisting the Knife is a comprehensive collection of his cinema work between 1997 and 2003, with only the 2001 short Coup de vice excluded. The box set contains The Swindle, The Colour of Lies, Merci pour la chocolat and La fleur du mal; I’ll be looking at the former two in this review, with m’colleague Rob Simpson taking on the latter pair.

In between the periods covered by the two box sets, Chabrol made 1995’s La Cérémonie, an adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s novel A Judgment in Stone which gave him one of his last big international hits. Both of his next films can be read as attempts to follow that up, albeit in very different ways. The Swindle might be a conscious attempt to produce something commercially appealing, with his regular lead Isabelle Huppert joining Michel Serrault as a pair of con artists whose latest mark appears to be planning a multi-million-franc scam of his own.

Through the ups and downs of his long career, Chabrol could always rely on getting great actors to star in his films, and The Swindle offers some insight as to why. Who else would have the breadth of vision to see an actress – even one as accomplished as Huppert – as Emma Bovary, then cast her in the lead of a light caper comedy? It’s not Huppert’s natural territory, nor is it Chabrol’s, and it shows. Barring a pleasingly goofy performance by François Cluzet – whose lead in Torment closed out the last Chabrol box set from Arrow – The Swindle is never exactly funny, but it has the mood and the tone of something that might be funny. That carries it through the first hour or so, after which Chabrol starts putting arias from that classic chuckle-fest Tosca on the soundtrack. The gangsters show up, there is some jarringly grisly violence, and it feels as if the effort of keeping the story light has defeated the director.

Chabrol wrote the screenplay for The Swindle on his own, but for The Colour of Lies he collaborates with Odile Barski, whose work with the director would span from 1987’s Masques to Chabrol’s final film, Bellamy, in 2009. The result is a minor masterpiece of complex, naturalistic crime drama, the sort of thing that might lead the audience to fruitlessly scour the credits trying to see which classic author he’s adapting this time. The depiction of a sleepy, offbeat village torn apart by the rape and murder of a young girl has shades of Twin Peaks; the way the darkest suspicions form around our protagonist harks ahead to Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt.

Once again, the success of La Cérémonie hovers over the film, albeit in a more rewarding way than it did over The Swindle. La Cérémonie saw Chabrol collaborate for the first time with Sandrine Bonnaire, an excellent actress perhaps best known for her extraordinary performance in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, but who has collaborated with most of the great French directors of the late 20th century. She brings a genuine unpredictability and depth to what could have been a thankless, reactive role as the wife of Jacques Gamblin’s beleaguered schoolteacher René. René’s status as the last person to see the victim alive makes him the target of vicious rumours, rumours which are taken seriously by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s police inspector.

Tedeschi’s character is a yardstick of how ambiguous the film is prepared to be; she’s not a zealot persecuting our hero, but equally, she’s not a bumbling idiot believing obvious lies. She appears reasonable and diligent, and the fact that someone so intelligent can suspect René makes us suspect him too, despite our better instincts. The Colour of Lies is not as dark a film as you might think, with the eccentricities of the villagers frequently hampering Tedeschi’s investigations. There is also a wickedly satirical subplot about a pretentious, aphorism-spouting media intellectual played by Antonie de Caunes, best-known to British audiences as the host of Channel 4’s Eurotrash. But Chabrol and Barski aren’t treating that unspeakable central crime glibly, and as the film moves towards its ending it gains a gimlet-eyed quality that persuades you they have the moral authority to tackle subject matter like this.

Extras are pleasingly consistent between the discs, both of which are handsomely restored, allowing you to appreciate Eduardo Serra’s evocative cinematography. They also both feature commentaries by Barry Forshaw and Sean Hogan, scene-specific commentary by Chabrol and archive introductions by Joël Magny, as well as some film-specific video essays, trailers, behind-the-scenes featurettes and image galleries.

Graham’s Archive – The Swindle (1997) & The Colour of Lies (1999)