the unnecessary savior
by
Douglas Messerli
Claude
Chabrol (writer and director) Le Beau
Serge (Handsome Serge) / 1958
Le
Beau Serge,
Claude Chabrol’s sudden entry into the French film-making scene, as many
critics have suggested, contains a great many mirror-images that would later
become a thematic issue in Chabrol’s prolific contributions. But this movie,
itself, is also a kind of mirror-image to his second film, Le Cousins. Both star Jean-Claude Brialy and Gérard Blain, each
representing a city dweller and a kind of country bumpkin, Brialy representing
the seemingly innocent city-dweller, François, returning to his hometown of
Sardent in the first film, while Blain stands in for the country cousin come to
town in Le Cousins.
In that film, I argued, the heterosexual domination of women is actually a deep statement of the unexpressed homoerotic sexual relationship between the two. And in Le Beau Serge, the same undercurrent is even more clearly established. Serge, the handsome one, has been the best childhood friend of François’ as they were growing up. And now, upon his return to Sardent, supposedly to recover from his vaguely diagnosed tuberculosis, cannot stop asking others about his former “beau” friend, demanding to know why this future architect has become the town drunkard.
François’ return certainly does not make
life for Serge better, knowing how his now apparently refined friend must see
him. If, at first, the two embrace one another with all the love of the past,
their relationship soon becomes a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—battle
between them that involves education, class—and, inevitably, sex.
François,
moreover, is a kind of self-righteous prig who criticizes the local priest for
not having worked more closely with his now straying flock, and takes it upon
himself to attempt to reform not only his constantly drunken friend, but to
alter the entire community. “I think they need me,” he self-righteously
proclaims. Yet, François is so visibly confused that he quickly begins an
affair with Marie, as in Chabrol’s The
Cousins perhaps an attempt to “take over” his would-be male lover’s bed.
What begins as a possible resurrection
of their childhood friendship, quickly turns sour, when, one by one, the
so-called ignorant citizens of Sardent begin to perceive that François is
perceiving them like insects, desperate to find a way to alter their ordinary
patterns of living. The intruder even goes so far as to suggest that Serge
leave his wife and return to his youthful dreams.
When Marie is raped by her own
“supposed” father (it is clear that she is not his child), whose house she
cohabits, the prudish François drops her—particularly after Serge seemingly
sides with the old man, who, he claims, had waited for years for the “chance”—and
with total disgust hides out in his room at the local inn, realizing that he
has caused more devastation than his hoped for “salvation.”
Indeed, Serge brutally beats his former
friend in what is clearly a psychological response to François’ intrusions upon
his unhappy life. In a sense, the bloody face he rewards François is not so
dissimilar to the beatings of women he has given to his wife and others. Violence
and murder are always, in Chabrol’s films intimately interconnected.
The film attempts to “save” both of its
heroes, ultimately, by Yvonne asking, during the final moments before her
child’s birth, that François drag in both a doctor and (quite literally) her
drunken husband to her through the snow. Her new baby, a boy, is a beautifully
“normal” child, and perhaps will grow up to be just as handsome as his “beau”
father.
So does Chabrol’s bleak film offer some
sort of spiritual resolution; even as we perceive that, perhaps, François will
not survive the winter to be able to return to the clinic in Switzerland and to
a normal life. The hardy drunkard, in this case, is the survivor, as opposed to
the country boy’s death in The Cousins.
But we now also know that their fates will always in intricately interlinked.
Le
Beau Serge is often described as the earliest film of the Nouvelle Vague or
the French New Wave. Certainly, despite its on-site filming, it looks and behaves
very little like some of the New Wave’s later films by Godard, Rivette, and
others. But there is some subtle humor throughout, particularly when “handsome”
Serge introduces his friend, filmmaker Philippe de Broca as another New Wave
filmmaker friend, Jacques Rivette. Clearly Serge keeps better company than the
wan city-dweller scolding the rest of them.
Los Angeles,
September 6, 2017
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