Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime (1/9/26–6/10/26)

This autumn BFI celebrates Claude Chabrol’s cool, precise, entertaining and deliciously wicked thrillers with a BFI Southbank season, Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime, running from 1 September–6 October, including the BFI Distribution rerelease of La Femme infidèle (1969) in the UK and Ireland on 11 September. The first of Chabrol’s great run of bourgeois psychological thrillers, La Femme infidèle is one of three of the director’s films that BFI Distribution has acquired: Le Boucher (1970) and Les Biches (1968) will also be available. A curated Chabrol BFI Player online collection will also be available for audiences UK-wide.

A number of films in the season are screening on 35mm. Often cited as the first French New Wave film, Chabrol’s first feature Le Beau Serge (1958) announced its director's preoccupation with the darker side of human nature. Shot on location in his mother’s hometown, the film uncovers violence and despair in the ordinary everydayness of provincial life. The Hatter’s Ghost (1982, pictured below), Chabrol’s underrated and often overlooked adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel, stars French screen legends Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour as two men playing a murderous game of cat and mouse.

The Cry of the Owl (1987) is a thrilling adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, where the boundaries between victim and perpetrator blur when the object of a man’s voyeuristic gaze looks back. Chabrol is arguably at his most Hitchcockian here in this homage to Rear Window. The Bridesmaid (2004) stars Benoît Magimel as a shy, somewhat passive young man who meets a woman at his sister’s wedding, falling hopelessly into an all-consuming affair. La Rupture (1970) finds Chabrol working in a more overtly melodramatic mode—and all the more disturbing and unhinged for it—in a film about the institutions that fail women.

Other titles in the season include À double tour (1959), a lurid and transgressive adaptation of Stanley Ellin’s novel starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, which prefigures the look and feel of later Hitchcockian thrillers. The Third Lover (1962) is a precise study in voyeurism and manipulation that anticipates the claustrophobic domestic dramas that would define Chabrol’s greatest period to come. Les Biches (1968), a gender-swapping riff on The Talented Mr Ripley, is a polarising work, with a story that mines the seduction of privilege and marks the beginning of Chabrol’s creative and personal partnership with Stéphane Audran.

Source/images: BFI