Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
Le Boucher (1969) is often regarded as Chabrol’s finest work and his one unqualified masterpiece. I wholeheartedly agree on both counts. Le Boucher is the finest Chabrol film that I have seen thus far. This is a psychological thriller of the first order, worthy of the attention of any Hitchcock fan.
Historical Background: Claude Chabrol, born 1930, was one of the French New Wave auteurs, having cut his cinematic teeth, like Truffaut and Godard, as a critic for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Chabrol has directed over fifty films, with one as recently as 2003 (La Fleur du Mal). His films are consistently good, though most, in my opinion, fall just shy of masterpiece status. I particularly recommend Les Cousins (1959), Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), Bad Girls (1968), and This Man Must Die (1970).
The Story: The setting is the small rural village of Tremolat in the Perigord region of France. The film opens in a butcher shop where the staff is preparing food for a wedding banquet nearby. The wedding is for a schoolteacher, Leon Hamel (Mario Beccaria), and his bride. Seated next to one another among the guests are Helene (Stéphane Audran), Leon’s colleague and the headmistress of the small village school, and Popaul (Jean Yanne), the town’s butcher. They enjoy some conversation together and a bit of dancing and, after the event, Popaul walks Helene home.
On the surface, the two have little in common. Helene is intelligent, lovely, and sophisticated. She is also strong, just short of domineering, as one might expect of a school headmistress. She lights up a cigarette while walking down the street, which was not typical for French women of the time, and even lets the cigarette dangle from her mouth as she speaks. This is no prissy damsel. Helene has the beauty of a Greek statue and its impenetrable demeanor. It is nearly impossible to read what she is thinking or feeling. Later, when asked by Popaul why she is not romantically involved, she tells him that she had been emotionally devastated by a relationship with a man ten years earlier and had decided to do without men. She had come to Tremolat three years ago for tranquility and escape. Helene, in short, is emotionally blunted, which serves her well in one sense. She is completely unflappable with the children and always in control.
Popaul, by contrast, is a seething cauldron of emotions. In his profession, he daily deals with slaughtering animals and chopping up meat. He grew up in Tremolat and was abused as a lad by his father. He went away and spent fifteen years in the French army, with tours of duty in Algiers and Indochina, where he saw people slaughtered, corpses in piles, and enough horrors in general to scar him for life. He had returned to Tremolat after his father’s death to take over his father’s butcher shop. As a boy, he had sat in the very classroom where Helene now reigns supreme.
Walking home from the wedding, Popaul offers to provide Helene with the best cuts of meat. True to his word, the next day he show up at her classroom near the end of the school day with a leg of lamb – which he presents to her much as one might present a bouquet of flowers (which the leg of lamb resembles in shape). He calls her Miss Helene. You can sense his admiration for her. He joins her and a couple of her students in a mushroom hunt and is pleased when she praises him for finding a large stash of mushrooms. He sits in an inferior position when with her. He offers to repaint the ceiling of the classroom, sharing the classroom with a student who has stayed after to work on an assignment. We sense that Popaul’s feelings about Miss Helene are an odd mix of passionate romantic desire and the admiration of a young boy for a lovely and awe-inspiring teacher. For her part, Helene behaves toward Popaul like a warm and supportive friend, gently rebuffing his sole effort to advance the relationship into a romantic and sexual vein. She gives him a lovely and distinctive cigarette lighter for his birthday.
The town of Tremolat is traumatized by a string of murders. The first occurs in the adjacent village of St. Martin. The second strikes closer to home. Miss Helene has taken her class on a field trip to visit the famous and nearby Lascaux limestone caves, where Cro-Magnon Man once lived and left wall paintings which rank among the oldest known works of human art. Stopping for lunch on the trail down from the caves, one of the children is startled by red drops that fall onto her bread from overhead. Miss Helene spots an arm hanging out from a ledge above, dripping blood, and proceeds to investigate. The arm belongs to a woman, recently murdered. It turns out to be the bride of the opening scene – the recent spouse of Helene’s colleague. Helene spots and picks up a cigarette lighter lying next to the corpse – identical to the one she had given Popaul for his birthday.
Helene decides to keep that information to herself when later questioned by the police. She places the cigarette lighter under some rags in a drawer in the schoolhouse. Later that day, Popaul comes visiting with a jar of marinated cherries as a gift. Helene lives in an apartment immediately above the school. We wonder what she is imagining and thinking. They talk about a third murder that has occurred in nearby Bergerac. She weeps a bit and Papaul tries to console her. She takes out a cigarette and he offers her a light – with the lighter she had given him for her birthday. She laughs uncontrollably out of a sense of relief and cries a bit more, asking him to stay for a while longer. She needs him. He helps her give vent to her bottled-up emotions.
SPOILERS AHEAD. SKIP TO THEMES SECTION TO RETAIN SURPRISES IF YOU INTEND TO SEE THIS FILM.
Later, Popaul spills paint while continuing his paint job in the school room. While looking for a rag, he finds the cigarette lighter that Helene had picked up from beside the second corpse. He pockets the lighter, realizing that Helene must have at least suspected that he might be the killer. Helene returns and notices that the lighter is gone. The boy who had detention tells her that Popaul had been looking in that drawer for a rag. Now Helene realizes that Popaul is, in fact, the killer and that the cigarette lighter he had earlier produced must have been a duplicate.
No sooner has she locked the main door to the school and her apartment than she hears Popaul at the window, stating that he urgently needs a few minutes of her time. She has no intention of letting him in. She sits in her apartment then suddenly races down the stairs to lock the door to the shed adjacent to the schoolroom. He calls her repeatedly but she begs off on grounds of not feeling well. Then he stops calling her. She races down the stairs again to lock the outer door of the shed, then relocks the inner door. He, however, had already entered the shed and has now entered the schoolhouse.
The two are face to face and alone in the classroom. Popaul acknowledges to her that he knows that she now knows that he is the killer. He reveals the knife that was the murder weapon. Still, she is calm, trying to reassure him. He approaches, explaining how he cannot rest until he has completed a killing. She shuts her eyes expecting death to follow momentarily. Instead, she hears him begging for her help. He has stabbed himself instead from the shame of her knowing he is the killer – the shame of a small boy caught red-handed by a beloved teacher.
Helene helps Popaul to her car and frantically drives him to the hospital. He is bleeding profusely but talks to her about how much he loved and desired her. She urges him to keep quiet, like a schoolmarm scolding a child. He is transferred onto a gurney and rushed into the elevator toward emergency surgery, but the medical personnel soon appear to report that he died calling her name. Helene drives away and stops and sits next to a river, as it flows ceaselessly past. The mist descends over the river signifying that Helene will once again be putting her feelings into deep slumber.
Themes: Although this film seems, on its surface, to be a mystery thriller or a slasher film, it really is neither. There is no mystery for viewers as to who the killer is because the film provides no alternative suspects – a key requirement of mysteries. It’s also not a slasher film because none of the murders occur on-screen. I actually held back in seeing this film out of fear that it would be a slasher film because I detest such films. I needn’t have worried. This film is really mainly a psychological thriller.
Popaul and Helene are, to some extent, psychologically complementary. Both have been traumatized by their life experiences, but they’ve adapted in opposite ways. Helene is emotionally blunted. Her face is usually a model of serene passivity. She meditates to calm herself emotionally and maintain her center. She has sworn off romance to further insulate herself from painful feelings. Popaul, by contrast, is damaged goods because of the combination of childhood abuse and traumatic war experiences. He is a jumble of emotions bubbling at the surface ready to erupt into violent activities. In some respects, he’s like a needy child with behavior problems. The two enjoy each other's company because each is something of an answer to the other’s emotional limitations. Helene provides comfort, acceptance, and approval to Popaul. Popaul awakens Helene’s emotions, first, by his general emotional intensity, and, second, through the fear stimulated by the murders and the possibility that he might be the murderer. Popaul helps Helene feel more affectively alive than she has for many years. Popaul’s effect on Helene is epitomized at the hospital when he has been taken into the elevator. Helene stands transfixed watching an electrified sign reading “Occupe” (“Occupied”) blinking intently. For the moment, Helene’s cranium is emotionally occupied. Then, when Popual dies, the light goes out. Her source of renewed emotionality is gone.
Roger Ebert is correct when he points out that this film is much more about the psychology and transformation of Helene than it is about Popaul. Popaul’s psychology is relatively straight forward – if frightening – and similar to what has been addressed in many films pertaining to serial killers. Helene’s psychology, brilliant in its complexity, is what makes this film special. I disagree with Ebert, however, on several other points. He interprets Helene’s interest in Popaul as sexual. The evidence is to the contrary. She calmly declines his one effort in that direction. I think the issue broader and more general than sexual arousal. Popaul excites Helene’s emotions which she has tucked away in a dark corner for ten years.
Ebert claims that Helene “is excited in a perverse obscure way by the danger he represents.” I don’t believe she knows that he is a danger until the moment that she finds the cigarette lighter missing from the drawer. We know he is a danger because the film structure demands that he is the killer but Helene is not privy to knowledge of the film structure. When she finds the cigarette lighter next to the second corpse, she takes it and withholds the information from the police because she doesn’t want her friend tainted by suspicion caused by what she hopes will prove nothing more than a coincidence (the killer owning the same kind of lighter). She is genuinely relieved, to the point of uncontrollable laughter, when Popaul produces “his” lighter to light her cigarette – seemingly clearing his name in her eyes. She even asks him to stay, feeling safer with him present. This is not the behavior of someone needing a perverse thrill from danger. Then, when she discovers the cigarette lighter stolen from the drawer, she finally realizes that he is, in fact, the killer. Everything she does from that point on is designed to keep herself safe by keeping him at a distance. She frantically locks each successive door as her mind recognizes each potential entry threat. Again, that is not the behavior of a woman flirting with danger.
Ebert also raises the issue of moral responsibility for these crimes, stating that “some think that Chabrol even blames Miss Helene for the crimes – if she’d only slept with Popaul, his savage impulse would have been diverted.” One reviewer, for example, states that “Helene’s game is to attract men, get them to make an emotional investment, then dump them before she can be dumped – whether out of fear of being abandoned again herself or as twisted revenge on men in general.” These are laughably absurd interpretations. These are ludicrous examples of the old male transference of responsibility for their own actions to women under the “cock-tease” rationalization – she excited me, she won’t have sex with me, so she’s responsible for the string of homicides I committed! Let’s look at the facts. Helene was friendly with Popaul, treated him respectfully and with kindness, they enjoyed each other’s company, but she gently and honestly let him know early on that she didn’t want to become involved with him romantically or sexually. She bears no guilt whatsoever in relation to Popaul or his actions.
Popaul and only Popaul is responsible for the murders that he committed. There are mitigating circumstances to be sure – an abusive childhood and a society that sent him off to fight in brutal, ill-advised conflicts in Algiers and Indochina. We all understand, these days, the potentially devastating psychological effects from war experiences, especially when a war turns out to be unpopular at home. These circumstances would provide ample justification for Popaul being a psychologically distressed person, maybe even depressed, but they in no way justify murder or reduce Popaul’s moral responsibility for his crimes. Helene’s unavailability sexually, or that of any other woman, to Popaul doesn’t even qualify as a mitigating circumstances. To claim otherwise is the grossest kind of misogynistic nonsense.
Production Values:Le Boucher is blessed with a magnificent script. Much of the film’s time is spent on little details that enrich the characters and the setting. We watch Popaul and Helene spending time together, sometimes engaged in nothing more than chitchat. We watch the chickens pecking away along the road and folks wandering in and out of shops. We observe the sumptuous details of the wedding repast. There’s some subtle use of symbolism, such as the statue of a soldier outside the school as if standing guard, windows as both a barrier and an access in the relationship between Helene and Popaul, and Cro-Magnon Man as emblematic of the savagery of a serial killer.
The cinematography takes maximum advantage of the setting in the rural French countryside. The woods have the feel of being haunted, the river rolls along peacefully, and the much-heralded limestone caves are magnificent. The soundtrack by Pierre Janson is really something special, as well. It is comprised mainly of electronic music something in the manner of Stockhausen. Very eerie and intriguing.
It is Stéphane Audran who makes this film a classic. She has one of those “ice-goddess” exteriors (like Catherine Deneuve) – classic in its beauty but giving away nothing of what is happening inside. For some films that quality would spell disaster, but for this film, it is all part of her mystery and the film’s enigmatic appeal. Half the enjoyment of this film comes from guessing what Audran’s character is thinking and feeling. I’ve seen Stéphane Audran in a number of films, now, but I’d have to rate this as her finest performance. She was married to Chabrol from 1964 to 1982. Her other credits include Bad Girls (1968), La Femme Infidèle (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Coup de Torchon (1981), and Babette’s Feast (1987). Jean Yanne was very effective as the butcher. He is otherwise best known for Weekend (1967), This Man Must Die (1970), and Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001).
Bottom-Line: To my mind, this film ranks with the great Hitchcock thrillers such as Psycho and Vertigo. Le Boucher is not quite as tense as some Hitchcock dramatic thrillers but it provides extraordinary riches as a psychological study. The performance by Audran is more than worth the price of admissions by itself and the soundtrack and cinematography add luster to a splendid tale. I highly recommend this film. Le Boucher is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 93 minutes.
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