Les Godelureaux (1961)
Directed by Claude Chabrol

Film Review

The failure of Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) came as a severe blow to director Claude Chabrol, so predictably he pulled in his enfant terrible horns and contented himself with much less controversial subject matter for his next film, a caustic satire on youth.  Adapting a novel by Eric Ollivier, Chabrol came close to virtually remaking his earlier film Les Cousins (1960), with a supremely dapper Jean-Claude Brialy once again camping things up disgracefully as a self-loving member of the bourgeois élite who blithely sets about destroying an innocent who falls under his Mephistophelian spell (Charles Belmont replacing Gérard Blain in his first credited screen role).  Les Godelureaux (a slang term referring to self-satisfied young folk who like to seduce others) does at times look like a crude parody of Les Cousins, but despite the obvious similarities these are two very different films.  Underneath the playful surface hi-jinks (which culminate in an anarchic toga bun fight inter-cut with a sedate meal in a restaurant), there are much darker and murkier undercurrents to Les Godelureaux - indeed, it is one of Chabrol's most cynical films, one that casts the most contemptuous and unforgiving eye on the shallowness and moral deficiency of modern youth.

Les Godelureaux was not a success.  Widely panned by the critics (few of whom had any idea what the film was meant to be about), it was one of Chabrol's biggest commercial failures and added to the prevailing view at the time that the Nouvelle Vague had run its course.  To this day, it is overlooked and regarded as one of the director's biggest misfires, and yet the film is not without interest.  In addition to being a humorous (albeit far from subtle) piece of social commentary, it presages so much of Chabrol's subsequent work, both in style and substance.  Helped by Pierre Jansen's score (which has more than a touch of the Bernard Herrmanns about it), Les Godelureaux has an unmistakably Hitchcockian feel and its theme of a man completely deceived by love (and unwittingly lured into a devious plot) has an obvious resonance with Vertigo (1955).  But it is Chabrol's burning contempt for the savage cold-heartedness of the bourgeoisie - crystallised in the form of the cruelly manipulative and emotionally barren character played by Jean-Claude Brialy - that is the film's most striking feature.  In this we have the foundation stone on which so much of the director's subsequent work would be built.

At first glance, Brialy and Belmont's characters appear to be the most grotesque caricatures of the central protagonists in Les Cousins, and we can see at once how the drama will play out, with Brialy luring the unsuspecting Belmont into his velvet web, relishing the exquisite moment when he is ready to inflict the coup de grâce.  Looking like some queer amalgam of Oscar Wilde, Svengali, Fu Manchu and Dr Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Show, Brialy's Ronald is childish malignancy personified and the only thing that could account for his victim's willingness to be duped by such an overt sociopathic freak is an overwhelming homoerotic attraction.  Bernadette Lafont is ostensibly the bait in Brialy's Machiavellian intrigue, as wild a temptress as any French filmmaker of the time could ever hope to lay his hands on, but whilst the over-sexed Arthur is throwing himself at Lafont whenever an occasion presents itself, you can hardly mistake the seedier, more subtle and intense bond that is growing between him and his male tormentor. 

Ronald's vigorous bisexuality isn't dwelled on (for obvious reasons) but it is pretty blatant, for wherever this totem to elegant youth stands his pretty houseboy is not far away - as demure and decorative as a Geisha - and it isn't too great a strain on the imagination that the latter is as much Ronald's bedtime playmate as his obedient servant.  Of the three principals, Lafont's canny Ambroisine is the only one who seems to be aware of what is developing between Ronald and Arthur - it's a virtual replay of the infernal triangle in René Clément's Plein soleil (1960), with just as much destructive potential.  It seems plausible that it is Ronald's repressed yearning for Arthur, rather than a damaged ego, that is fuelling his malice - and how else can we account for the his apparent show of remorse once the plan of vengeance has run its course?  In the climactic scene where Ronald confront Arthur with the truth of his deception he is in his bath and wearing an oriental mask - naked and hidden at the same time.

The evil that has taken hold of Ronald reveals itself when the mask is lowered and the poisonous confession is uttered, more as a ritual of absolution than a gleeful show of victory.  This is point at which our sympathies are suddenly reversed - Arthur is bound to recover from his disappointment and will surely find true love at a later date (the film's coda confirms as much), whereas Ronald is condemned to a loveless existence, filling his empty hours with childish pranks, futile games of deceit and sybaritic orgies - all because he has no capacity for love.  This unhappy, self-serving, pitiful wretch is the fullest embodiment of a particular form of cancer, one that thrives only in the bosom of the bourgeois class.  It is this malignancy, the stimulus for so much selfishness and unthinking cruelty, that Claude Chabrol would assiduously study in later films, probing with a pathologist's keeness as he tries to comprehend the vileness that lies within us all.

Film Synopsis

Ronald is a rich young idler who lives on Paris's Left Bank and amuses himself at the expense of others.  When he falls foul of a practical joke he embarks on a cruel plan of revenge, enlisting the services of an attractive young woman, Ambroisine, to snare his intended victim, a student named Arthur.  A naive romantic, Arthur has no inkling of Ronald's malign intentions and mistakes him for a friend as he embarks on a passionate love affair with the seductive Ambroisine.  Incapable of experiencing love for himself, Ronald savours his victory when, on the day that Arthur persuades his beloved to marry him, she disappears from his life altogether...