With its sweeping vistas, brilliant colors, and unimaginable privilege, Claude Chabrol’s À double tour appears to be quite the opposite of noir, but the immorality and malevolence lurking in the film’s soul more than compensates. Often lauded for his Hitchcockian flourishes, Chabrol here creates a visual feast to contrast the death — physical, moral, spiritual — that’s clearly present in every member of an elitist French family, including the daughter’s goofy boyfriend Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who enters the household as if holding up a mirror that reflects everyone’s ugliness. (Note Chabrol’s extensive use of actual mirrors and broken glass throughout.) Madeleine Robinson plays pitiful matriarch Thérèse Marcoux (the performance won her the best actress award at that year’s Venice Film Festival) while Jacques Dacqmine plays her spiteful husband Henri, who is so repulsed by her, but so apparently dependent on her wealth, that he has an affair with pretty, red-headed neighbor Léda (Antonella Lualdi) right under her nose. Against a backdrop of a vast winery and magnificent estate, Léda’s eventual murder is both the culmination of hatred and the spark that sets the family ablaze. André Jocelyn is exceptional as the off-kilter mama’s boy Richard: note the way he ambles like a toddler to and from the crime scene. Working with revered cinematographer Henri Decaë, Chabrol paints compositions that will take your breath away: the extended murder flashback alone is like a gallery exhibit, each shot — through aquarium glass, against shimmering white curtains — more stunning than the last.
By Michael Bayer
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