LE BOUCHER Movie Review

The Butcher

In a small French village, a serial killer is spreading deep shadows of fear through the normally quiet, sheltered streets. A schoolteacher (Stéphane Audran) suspects the town's butcher (Jean Yanne) of the crimes, yet she doesn't want to believe that it's so. The clues that lead her to suspect him are also clues to the man's tortured, traumatic military past, and the more she understands about him, the more sympathetic—and emotionally close—she feels. There's more than a touch of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in Claude Chabrol's brooding and surprisingly poignant Le Boucher (The Butcher). Like Hitchcock's film, which portrayed a serial killer hiding in a small California town, Chabrol is concerned not only with the lasting impact of evil on the innocent, but with the more subversive notion that good and evil share common emotional ground. In Shadow it was the widow-murdering Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) who shared a psychic bond with his namesake, his trusting niece Charlie (Teresa Wright). Here, Audran also knows what she must do to eliminate the evil in front of her, yet she's aware that she'll be changed forever by the experience. The true horror, in both this film and in Hitchcock's movie, is that the evil cannot be objectified; what gives us—and the protagonists/survivors—nightmares is knowing that the enemy's thoughts, feelings, and unquenchable drives are far from incomprehensible.

NEXT STOP … M, Shadow of a Doubt, Just Before Nightfall

1969 94m/C FR Stephane Audran, Jean Yanne, Antonio Passallia; D: Claude Chabrol; W: Claude Chabrol. VHS, LV CVC