In Claude Chabrol’s first go-round
with Jean Poiret’s Inspecteur Lavardin, Poulet au vinaigre, the character flagrantly roughs up suspects and
tramples over the rule book, ultimately solving the big case but letting one of
the guilty parties off the hook altogether, based on his own notion of morality
(or, just as likely, his assessment that some people are just too idiotic to be
marked as criminals). At the start of the second film, there’s a brief
reference to how those previous excesses earned him a transfer, but no sign
that he’s in any way reformed, his ultimate solution to the crime this time
being to frame an innocent man to whom he’s taken a dislike. Perhaps the film’s
most intriguing aspect is the apparent utter lack of self-examination
surrounding this denouement, and the absence of any sense that Chabrol means us
to reflect on its wider implications; not for the first time with the director,
it’s hard to know where manipulation shades into indifference. Certainly the
presence of Jean-Claude Brialy and Bernadette Lafont, both of whom worked with
the director at the dawn of his career, suggests a broader and more personal
context, but the latter in particular is kept at a strange distance. The film
plays enjoyably enough with the genre’s inherent affinity with voyeurism,
through its use of mirrors and hidden cameras and the Brialy character’s
strange hobby of crafting eyeballs – Lavardin’s major breakthrough comes simply
from rewinding a video tape and sitting down (alone, in darkness) to see what’s
on it. But the revelation of guilt hardly seems to matter, given its lack of
correlation with punishment and justice, in the context of a town where
well-known moralists turn out to be kingpins of the sex and drug scene, where
people long presumed dead secretly live on, and so forth.
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