Merci Pour Le Chocolat (99 mins, 12) Directed by Claude Chabrol; starring Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc
The Crimson Rivers (105 mins, 15) Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz; starring Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel
Claude Chabrol has made 53 feature films in 42 years. The nouvelle vague of the Sixties still beats on our shores while he toils indefatigably away. Mathieu Kassovitz, only four features in, is France's great hope for the future after the triumph of La Haine. Both have movies out this week. Both are thrillers. Put them together for a glimpse not just of masters old and new - but of where Europe's most prolific cinema industry goes next
Merci Pour Le Chocolat is not vintage Chabrol; but - small, meticulous, intense - it could have come from no other hand. Jacques Dutronc, long hair flopping around his mournful, self-absorbed face, is Polonski, a concert pianist who lives in a chateau high above Lausanne with his wife, Mika (Isabelle Huppert). They married when they were very young and swiftly divorced. Now, after the death of Polonski's second wife in a road accident, they're back together again. Enter Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), a young girl who may or may not be Polonski's daughter. She certainly looks like the dead wife; she's an aspiring pianist, too, unlike the glum teenage son of the marriage (Rodolphe Pauly) still hanging morosely around. Dutronc and Mouglalis, teacher and pupil, disappear into a cocoon of their shared art. Huppert simmers and emotes and - because she owns a chocolate factory - keeps bringing them steaming cups of the stuff. But is she quite what she seems? And why did the second wife, who got her nightcap from the same source, fall asleep at the wheel?
The devilment is in the detail. When Dutronc and Mouglalis (a lithe, fresh talent) play together, their hands and their eyes move in rapt harmony. Every tic and twitch on Huppert's gaunt, freckled face hints at fires down below. She, too, lives in her own world - a mother to Dutronc's hypochondriac baby, a lover who has reclaimed the prize she lost. Once Chabrol worked ceaselessly with Stephane Audran; now, time after time, it's Huppert who gives the holding performances his tales of warped imagination depend on.
There's the feel, as so often, of an old French family restaurant here. Chabrol spotted the book - The Chocolate Cobweb by Charlotte Armstrong - and co-wrote the script. Other Chabrols look after the words and the music. Everything is solid, grounded; the kitchen - and he's always terrific at food, the rituals of eating - knows exactly what it's doing. You can order the dish of the day and reckon on satisfaction guaranteed.
Does this quite have the zest, the hypnotic drive of his best work? No, because Dutronc and Huppert are left to work too much in their own capsules, and the further we go, the less we understand. The cobweb doesn't so much gather as come apart. But is still recognisably the work of the three-star chef who gave us Le Boucher three decades ago, a film quality which, within its narrow, measured confines, still explores the contradictions of taste and texture. Hitchcock, as it happens, made 53 films, too. Chabrol hasn't finished yet.
If this Chocolat is a hallowed neighbourhood bistro, though, Kassovitz's The Crimson Rivers comes from the smarter end of town, a giant brasserie full of stainless steel and trendy chat ter. Call it the French Se7en, with deliberate homages to David Fincher strewn liberally throughout. Can the nation of Chirac do serial killers as well as the land of George W? Are Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel up to the challenge of Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt?
It would be hard to find a more promising beginning. Reno's a top cop from Paris hauled down to Guernon, a university town high in the Alps where the local librarian has met his awful fate (which includes hands cut off and eyes hacked out). Meanwhile, in a town far away, Cassel is the lieutenant in charge of a far more mundane affair. Some local yobs have desecrated a child's grave. But wait, what's this? There's a trail which leads him to Guernon as well (where Reno, accompanied by a lissome student, Fanny Ferreira, keeps upping his corpse tally). They join uneasy forces and the crimson rivers - of blood, stupid! - flow free.
Has Kassovitz pulled it off? The French box office (Chabrol times four) would seem to say so. He is as visually brilliant as you remember, swooping from the mountains in great tracking shots, stalking his camera among the brown shadows of the library, almost caressing the bodies of his killer's victims, lingering over the scars and sutures. He never shoots a boring frame and yet - unlike Luc Besson, for instance - he never tips into surface flashiness either. He allows Reno and the younger, more volcanic Cassel to bond and develop, a truly dynamic duo.
What finally unhinges the enterprise, however, is what unhinges most such slasher epics. You probably haven't read the original novel by Jean-Christophe Grangé but if Grangé's own screenplay is any guide, you probably won't want to: a seeming melange of James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell and Robert Ludlum featuring Nazi cults, eugenic plots and the kind of university system which would make Gordon Brown think kindly of Oxbridge. No need to try to spot the ending because you wouldn't understand it if you did. The question is whether it matters. Are serial-slaughter movies supposed to make sense? If they aren't - and most of them don't - then Kassovitz has shown, at a stroke, that anything Hollywood can do, he can do just as well.
Is this the future for French films? Set it alongside the measured craft of Chabrol, and pray not. But both offerings have one vast strength in common. They have actors and actresses who work constantly and fruitfully in a firmament which language and style and tradition keep miraculously intact. Huppert and Reno, always stars.
Philip French is away
