LA RUPTURE Movie Review

The Breakup

One of Claude Chabrol's more lurid and intense thrillers, La Rupture (The Break-Up) wastes no time plunging you into its alarming premise. Charles, the husband of Helene, is in a rage. Before the movie's credits he picks up their young son and throws him, injuring him severely enough to be hospitalized. After the credits, Charles has run off to his rich parents' house, where they shelter him and baby him, and—in true enablers' fashion—blame Helene for making their darling boy into a violent psychopath. But it's not enough that Charles's parents manage to keep him out of jail—they want to ruin Helene lest she get the judge's sympathy in the upcoming custody battle over the recuperating child. Charles's parents hire a ruthless and perverse private detective to nail Helene, and at this point La Rupture goes steadily and pleasurably off the deep end. Chabrol, one of the earliest of the French film critics to take Alfred Hitchcock seriously as both an entertainer and an artist, is aware that an apparently conventional thriller can also be a superb vehicle for affecting audiences on a much deeper level. La Rupture does just that, presenting us with a disquietingly grotesque parody of the family dynamic at its most savagely self-destructive. As usual, Stéphane Audran (Helene) provides the center around which Chabrol's anxious universe revolves.

NEXT STOP … This Man Must Die, Le Boucher, Psycho

1970 124m/C FR Stephane Audran, Jean-Claude Drouot, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Catherine Rouvel, Jean Carmet, Annie Cordy; D: Claude Chabrol; W: Claude Chabrol; M: Pierre Jansen. VHS CVC, FCT