[on
The Breach (1970)] I've always enjoyed [Claude] Chabrol movies, but not until "La Rupture" was I struck by how dumb they are. Which is not to put them down. But they do follow formulas which aren't intelligent so much as abstract: frames fitted around an actress, always the same, his wife. Film after film features
Stéphane Audran in identical situations to which she reacts identically, icy in the heat, cold-blooded before hot blood. Of all his dumb films, this is Chabrol's dumbest. Suddenly we find that Audran can't act her way out of a paper bag. Like
Faye Dunaway, she is so wondrously fake, so fair of face, elegant of posture and so carefully posed, that we don't realize that she' not "interpreting", but merely moving from stance to stance like a mannequin. But I'll buy her: she's a star who does know how to walk, which American women don't (question of actioning the legs independently of the midriff, and daring to take long strides). The film is too farfetched to fear, and old-fashioned. LSD today seems so sixties.
