Docteur Popaul (1972)
Directed by Claude Chabrol

Film Review

Although it deals with themes that are peculiar to his oeuvre, Docteur Popaul was a rare departure for director Claude Chabrol, away from dark psychological drama towards coarse black comedy and farce.  It was a subtle form of revenge perhaps against French cinema audiences who had previously shunned Chabrol's films, thinking them too high brow.  Adapted from Hubert Monteilhet's novel Meurtres à loisir, Docteur Popaul is a shamelessly populist film - a near-return to the intellectual nadir of Chabrol's Le Tigre films of the mid-1960s - but Chabrol still manages to impose his distinctive auteur stamp on the film and it fits neatly within his series of films mocking the false ideals and double standards of the bourgeoisie.

Docteur Popaul was the second of just two films that Chabrol directed with Jean-Paul Belmondo, the first being À double tour (1959), made just before the actor became a massive star.  (After this, the two appeared together in Claude Zidi's L'Animal (1977), with Chabrol happily sending himself up.)  It was the first film that Belmondo produced for his newly established film production company, Cerito Films, and this could explain the film's overtly populist slant, with Mia Farrow cast as the ugly wife to Belmondo's typically narcissistic Don Juan.  Both Farrow and Belmondo play extreme caricatures of the kind of roles they were known for at the time, perhaps to the detriment of the film as this drowns out the more subtle kind of humour that comes more naturally to Chabrol.  A dream sequence in which Belmondo finds himself on trial (playing the judge, the defendent and a host of other characters) acquires an off-putting Pythonesque silliness through the actor's attempts to play it purely for laughs.

At the time of its release, many critics in France judged the humour and cynicism to be in decidedly bad taste and this might explain why the film ended up with a 13 certificate.  In a later decade, Belmondo's toe-curling attempts to lure the world's ugliest women into bed would be deemed unacceptably politically incorrect, and a nasty whiff of callous misogynism still clings to the film, marring its enjoyment value somewhat.  Another sequence in which a succession of husbands meet a sudden demise feels like a lazy homage to Truffaut's La Mariée était en noir (1968), and Belmondo's bed-hopping antics later in the film (bed-somersaulting would be a more accurate way to put it) propel us into vaudeville of the cheapest kind.  Docteur Popaul is crude, silly and casually offensive, showing precious little of the finesse that we would expect of an auteur of Chabrol's standing, but this did not prevent it from being a mainstream success.  It attracted over two million spectators in France and was one of Chabrol's most commercially successful films.  For a film which pours scorn on an individual who cynically betrays his ideals (switching from ugly spinsters to buxom belles), there is a delicious irony in this fact.

Film Synopsis

Dr Paul Simay is a lady's man who claims to prefer ugly women and he makes his point by winning a bet that he can sleep with the world's plainest women.  This is how he comes to meet Christine, a short-sighted spinster with buck teeth.  When he learns that Christine is the heiress to a fortune, Paul wastes no time whisking her down the aisle to marry her, but it isn't long before he notices his wife's far more attractive sister, Martine.  The wedding bells have scarcely stopped chiming before Paul has thrown himself into a torrid extra-marital affair with Martine.  One day, Paul wakes up in hospital to find he has lost the use of both legs.  Apparently the casualty of a road accident, he realises that his days as a Don Juan are over, but at least Christine is there to play the devoted wife.  And then he discovers the truth...