A Poisoned Well Well-Poisoned: The Collaborations of Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert

When director Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert are together, you can bet there will be poison. Classically known as one of the more “feminine” modes of murder, the lethal substance’s presence is somewhat predictable in female-centered thrillers. If Isabelle herself is not slipping it into something, she herself is being poisoned. Yet because Chabrol always includes social context, the poison becomes metaphorical and murky, the motives and operatives unclear or doubled. 

Poison is a good lens through which to drink in the consistently dry films of Chabrol. For a long time, it seems like nothing is there. He sets his camera back, objective and still, like an anthropologist. Hardly any action appears on screen as details shuffle through the background in passing dialogue and gossip. Suddenly, something clutches. But it’s too late, and we wind our way towards an unstoppable end. The sooner we can detect signs of poisoning, the more enjoyable the thrill.

In this way, and in honor of a new Criterion edition of La Cérémonie, we look at the collaborations between Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert:

Violette (1978)

In some cases, the audience is aware of the poison before the film begins. Sentenced to death for poisoning her father because of his alleged sexual abuse and nearly murdering her mother for turning a blind eye, Violette Nozière was a sensation when her story first broke in the 1930s—and it remains part of the French pop culture lexicon. Quite astonishingly, Isabelle Huppert comports herself into a shy 12-year-old in pigtails despite being 25 at the time, so we witness Violette’s light being suffocated. Because he’s always looking at the social milieu through his bushy eyebrows, over the top of his pipe, Chabrol sees middle-class morality as equally culpable in Violette’s crimes. It is a poison unto itself, one which forces the natural curiosities of youth to be forcefully repressed, necrotizing the spirit.

Story of Women (Une affaire des femmes) (1988)

While the forces that repressed Violette remain abstract, Chabrol poignantly externalizes them in Story of Women, and the poison seeps into metaphor. Set during the German occupation of France during WWII, the riveting film recounts the story of Marie-Louise Giraud (Huppert), who bravely administered clandestine abortions before facing her tragic end as the last woman to be executed by guillotine in the country. In this tense thriller, the horrors of fascism creep in slowly as Marie-Louise struggles to support her family and the community of women around her. The Nazis occupy their streets and their minds. Chabrol builds tension out of fascism’s web of legal hypocrisy that trapped abortion as a “crime of the state” despite providing no support for poor families. The spectrum of women we meet during Story of Women shows us that nearly any family planning during the Nazi occupation was a trap. But some angels risked everything to help. Giraud faces her execution like Joan of Arc thanks to the resounding humanity and humility that Huppert brings to the role.

Madame Bovary (1991)

When Emma Bovary poisons herself, it’s a shattering act of desperation. It comes at the end of a protracted downturn in fortune as her debts finally come due. The ending is one we know, one we can anticipate. What’s shocking is the way Huppert sets it off like a firecracker. There are many, many film versions of the canonical Flaubert novel. What makes this one exciting to watch is how Chabrol’s observational style mirrors Emma’s vantage as an outsider to the new society and how elegantly Huppert maintains her continuity. In Violette, her 12-year-old character appeared only in flashbacks. With Madame Bovary, Huppert guides us through an unbroken arc from mischievous youth to gambled maturity and finally destitution. She breathes a modern sensibility and an ironic Romanticism that deconstructs itself as Emma faces her consequences. When in love, she mocks the performativity of 19th-century romance, but by the time she’s in bankruptcy, the artifice is gone, and Huppert shows us raw emotion. Few people have run down a hill with more drama and inflamed passion than Huppert in Madame Bovary. When she drops her shawl, she leaves behind the last of any actorly pretense. As she comes careening to her epic conclusion, her sudden poisoning feels impulsive, almost improvised in a way that breathes new vitality into a classic text. 

La Cérémonie (1995)

As Bong Joon-ho says in his insightful introduction to the new Criterion release, La Cérémonie is far more abrupt. The explosive conclusion rings out from a shotgun with total surprise. Chabrol’s class parable begins when the meek and mild Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire, another in Chabrol’s troupe of women) is hired as a domestic for the wealthy Lelièvre family (Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel). As she acclimates to the small, insular town, she meets the fiery Jeanne (Huppert) and strikes up a bond despite Mr. Lelièvre’s stern cautions not to get involved. Yet Sofie can’t help but be drawn to Jeanne’s manic, self-assured ways. La Cérémonie is the funniest we will see Huppert in her collaborations with Chabrol; she swings to her own rhythm, hearing her own syncopated beat that puts her in immediate dissonance with everyone else. Fascinated by each other, the women soon fall into a folie à deux. Chabrol’s objective style lends credence to their actions. It appears logical. We’re fully on their side by the time they commit their atrocities, because Chabrol has shown us enough ego and detachment for us to understand that, in this installment, class is the ultimate poison that should be eradicated. 

The Swindle (Rien ne va plus) (1997)

Though La Cérémonie may be Huppert’s funniest appearance on this list, The Swindle is her most comedic, with perfectly calculated layers of humor and irony. It’s the one that has stuck with me the most. In this delightful film about a pair of con artists (Huppert and Michel Serrault), her character, Betty, is a woman of means and wigs, slipping in and out of personas with unsettling ease. Together, she and Victor travel around Europe, hitting up professional conferences where Betty can seduce and drug unsuspecting victims to rob. The Swindle is a film about deceptions in a world populated with deceptions, and Chabrol likes to remind us that filmmaking is a kind of acceptable con. But the film feels even more meta because the age gap between this platonic pair suggests we’re watching a movie about Chabrol and Huppert. Just like the much older Victor and Betty, throughout their collaborations, they have trotted around Europe with Isabelle in various wigs and costumes, drugging people on film for their professional amusement—and ours.

Nightcap (Merci pour le Chocolat) (2000)

After such a layered textual piece, it seems only fitting that Chabrol and Huppert would begin a new cycle with a return to form. Nightcap is a textbook poisoner thriller. Set amongst the beige bourgeois world at the so-called end of history, Huppert plays Marie-Claire Muller, an heiress to a chocolate factory that has recently decided to diversify into pharmaceuticals. She is an austere, barely existent, wicked stepmother who is alienated from herself and everyone around her. “I calculate everything,” she says, and we can say the same of Huppert’s performance, especially her detachment. Throughout this tale of paternity and poison, we watch a tangled net of characters vie for control. But when it seems Marie-Claire might be able to keep a lid on things, her world comes crashing down. Unable to withstand the unknown future any longer, she curls into a ball like a dead spider on her web. Chabrol gives us one long hold on Huppert’s face as the credits roll so that we can see and appreciate the layers of thought at work. We see a character desperately trying to think of her next move, and we also see an expert actress in an altered state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. 

Comedy of Power (L’Ivresse du pouvoir) (2006)

For their final film together, Chabrol and Huppert examine how power and capital poison everyone and everything they touch. Loosely based on a French financial scandal from the 1990s, L’Ivresse du pouvoir, which translates to “drunk with power,” follows Jeanne Charmant-Killman (Huppert), a self-assured judge dedicated to taking down powerful men. Huppert plays her with a clipped sense of certainty and a bubbling sense of no-nonsense. Jeanne controls the timing and space of every scene, even with her family. As she becomes more successful, she becomes poisonous. No longer a “stickler for principles,” her sense of justice blurs as paranoia increases. She becomes toxic to be around, driving her husband to attempt suicide. But as he always does, Chabrol leaves enough clues in the social context to tell us that the problem goes deeper than Jeanne. He points us to the pervasiveness of what Jeanne uncovers. Such dubious financial practices are not just the work of a few bad apples. They keep the system going; “money is the oil you use to grease the gears,” as Chabrol writes in his script. Corruption is the rule of the game. If Jeanne becomes poisonous, it’s because she was tainted by a poisoned well.

Claude Chabrol died in 2010, leaving behind a legacy of some 64 films in a consistent career that spanned from the birth of the French New Wave through the postmodern millennium. He remained committed to the mystery/thriller genre until the very end. His films with Isabelle Huppert are a great point of access to his work because they showcase his penchant for social commentary and his gentle way of letting actresses shine. And you don’t get an actress more dazzling or captivating than Huppert. If these films work at all, it’s because these collaborations are mutual, with Huppert bringing her exceptional talents to every film. They are both technical creatives, as a charming interview the pair gave that’s included on Criterion’s La Cérémonie release explains. They have a mutual understanding of filmmaking mechanics. In these films, we can see that the pair shared trust in each other’s skills and techniques. Though the worlds they reflect and play in are filled with poison, it’s evident that such camaraderie is the antidote.

B.L. Panther is a culture writer, scholar and Pisces from Northern Illinois. B! writes for outlets such as Honey Literary Journal and The Spool. A champion hermit, they enjoy reading, the indoors, afternoon naps and doing nothing at all.