Le Beau Serge

Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy

Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge is his assured debut feature film from 1958. The film chronicles the return of François (Brialy) to his hometown of Sardent, a village in central France, for a period of rest and recuperation. François, who has been living in Paris, is suffering from tuberculosis, though this seems merely a pretext for Chabrol to contrast François' newfound urban sophistication with the local bumpkins. François is chiefly interested in the fate of Serge (Blain), his best friend from childhood with who he shares a bond that verges on the homoerotic. Serge had hopes to gain a degree in architecture, but he impregnated a local girl named Yvonne (Michèle Méritz) and ekes out a living as a lorry driver. The child, who had Down's Syndrome, died soon after birth. Yvonne is pregnant again and Serge is terrified that it too will not be a normal child. He spends most of his time drinking himself into oblivion.

Serge is, on the surface, glad to see François, but resentments lurk. Things get more complicated when François gets involved with an obliging local gal named Marie (Bernadette Lafont) who has had a tryst or two with Serge. At a local dance, Serge's anger towards François bursts out and he gives him a savage beating. François lays low for awhile, licking his wounds, while various local emissaries (the local priest, François' landlady) urge him to get out of Dodge. François feels he has to redeem himself before he leaves and the birth of Yvonne's child provides him that opportunity. 

I want to stress what a personal film this was for Chabrol. He was himself a city slicker, born and bred in Paris, but both his parents were from the Sardent region. Chabrol was himself sent to Sardent, out of harm's way, to live from 1940 to 1944 with his maternal grandmother. He retained great affection for the people of Sardent, but remained ambivalent, at best, about rural France for the rest of his life. He often spoke of how bored he was in Sardent and that feeling of rural indolence permeates Le Beau Serge. The locals are small-minded and insular, haunted not only by alcoholism, but incest. The townspeople of Sardent were certainly less than charmed by Chabrol's portrait of them at the time.

Bernadette Lafont and Jean-Claude Brialy

The primary stylistic influence on Le Beau Serge seems to be the transcendental neorealism of Rossellini, an apt choice for a bare bones rural production concerned with metaphysics. Chabrol's directorial touches are subtle, but effective. Notice the backwards dolly of the camera when Yvonne tells off François for his meddling, the camera movement signaling François' retreat from intimacy with the villagers. The most bravura shot in the film follows presently, a pan of the village square. The shot goes left to right, with children playing football in the foreground, while in the background, the village doctor strolls to the bar for a shot. There he announces the death of a village elder, so the sequence displays the continuity of life from birth to death.

The acting is exemplary, even from the non-professionals. Brialy is swishly sophisticated and Blain is a proletariot James Dean, a rebel without a clue. The revelation is Lafont, nineteen at the time of filming and newly wed to Blain. Her performance gives layers to what could have been a standard slut role. Her one close-up, a shot she advocated for, is both playful and powerful. 

I want to note that Chabrol is brazen in his depiction of Sardent's misogyny, but he is distant from it, an observer. I think there is a similar distance in his use of Catholic motifs in the film's finale. Leftist critics at the time of the film's release criticized this as reactionary, but Chabrol took pains in the film to criticize the Church. Both pillars of the village, the priest and doctor, are portrayed as craven and self-interested. The birth of Yvonne's child, a healthy baby boy born in the bleak midwinter, is not specifically a Christmas rite (the film was first entitled Spring Birth), but it is an event that gives renewal to the villagers and Serge. Francois finds the redemption he sought in his heroic effort, through a blinding snowstorm, to shepherd Yvonne's caregivers to her aid. I think Chabrol's use of Christian motifs is similar to Camus' similar in Exile and the Kingdom: both are utilizing Christian imagery for more broadly humanistic values. Mother Church was so central to French culture that it is no accident that two existential French geniuses would pilfer its images and themes.