Cop au Vin and Inspecteur Lavardin

Cop au Vin (Poulet au Vinaigre)

Kino, $24.95

Inspecteur Lavardin

Kino, $24.95

In making its big move, the French New Wave was never about polarizing class, but that hasn't stopped some critics and contemporaries from all but labeling Claude Chabrol's work as bourgeois, processed, and better-suited to the small screen. His is less about experimentation than variation on the same theme: where and how we belong. He can make us comfortable or he can make us uncomfortable, but nobody's worldviews are ever in any real danger; if anything, they're somehow reinforced amid the murder, infidelity, mystery, and winking satire. In the commentaries accompanying these odd little mid-Eighties "provincial detective movie[s]," the writer Joël Magny asserts that Chabrol has always been most comfortable in the small-town family milieu. Maybe, but considering that his idol is Hitchcock, things aren't always as they seem. It would seem that things here couldn't get more Hitchcockian, from the original trailers featuring the puffed-up director smoking a pipe to the alternately playful and unsettling plot devices to the stripped-down and depowered blondes to the shot-for-shot confidence of the filmmaker (frequent collaborator Jean Rabier DPs both).

So confident was Chabrol in co-adapting with novelist Dominique Roulet the latter's Une Mort en Trop as the unconventional ensemble whodunnit Cop au Vin that he doesn't introduce us to Inspector Lavardin – his "trump card," as Magny calls him – until 41 minutes in. Possible homicides abound in a present-day village, and they're linked to a land dispute. Chabrol's wife, Stéphane Audran, plays Madame Cuno, a wheelchair-bound widow fending for her home, who, to give you an idea, beautifully screeches her way through the film looking like a cross between an aged Téa Leoni and a Twin Peaks-era Grace Zabriskie. Enlisted in the battle against a greedy lawyer-doctor-butcher trio is her son, Louis (Lucas Belvaux), serving as a spy/saboteur when not serving his unhinged and immobile mom. Meanwhile, Delphine, doctor's wife and financier of the impending Cuno deal, goes missing in Switzerland. "What's the slut doing in Switzerland?" Madame Cuno wonders. Inspector Lavardin wonders what the slut is doing in Switzerland, too, or whether she's even there. He hits the village with force, literally, although he says he's just going to "nose around a bit."

As the hard-nosed but polished cop, Jean Poiret drills through Chabrol's autumnal haze of blues, golds, browns, reds, silvers, and whites. Like the film itself, he's crisp, cool, and just something else. As naturally as he inhabits Lavardin, we get a glimpse of his craft from Magny's commentary: "In my entire career," he quotes Chabrol, "I've never met such a nervous actor." That nervousness probably had something to do with a 65-year-old Poiret's heart failure a decade later, but he would go on to do four Lavardin TV movies and a big-screen sequel (Inspecteur Lavardin; here, we see him four minutes in) – all directed by Chabrol – before his death. None would match Cop au Vin (which feels timeless, while, with its cocaine and discotheque, Inspecteur Lavardin feels very much of its time), and both theatrical releases probably belonged on the small screen, anyway. Not because they're inferior to anything in their genre; rather, because they would prefigure some of the best cable shows that would come some 20 years down the line. Intricate, sophisticated, risky, sexy, and smart, they're not TV. They're Claude Chabrol.

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