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The Butcher

The Butcher

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Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color


Description:

This 1969 masterpiece by Claude Chabrol is a high point of the French New Wave director's mid-career, as well as that of actress Stephane Audran, Chabrol's then-wife. Audran plays a lonely schoolteacher who develops an inexplicable draw toward an ex-army butcher (Jean Yanne) who may or may not be a serial killer plaguing a small town. Drawing on Hitchcockian themes of exchanged guilt and shared secrets, Chabrol constructs an extraordinary relationship between the two characters that marries unspoken self-awareness with constant suspense over the unresolved nature of their bond. The film becomes so responsive to their tiny, meaningful gestures, their pregnant silences, and the comic-tragic synchronicity of their insulated world that the mere blinking of an elevator light speaks volumes about the hell of privileged knowledge. Le Boucher returned Chabrol to the backdrop of the French provinces, which he had visited before in his debut, Le Beau Serge, and later in La Ceremonie. --Tom Keogh
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