Claude Chabrol celebrated with BFI Southbank season, re-release of La Femme infidèle, BFI Player collection and BFI Blu-ray releases
Our season of Chabrol’s cool, deliciously wicked thrillers runs at BFI Southbank from 1 September to 6 October, with a BFI Distribution re-release of La Femme infidèle returning to cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 11 September.
Often considered one of the French New Wave’s most neglected filmmakers, Claude Chabrol might also be the most important, argues Catherine Wheatley, the curator of a new BFI Southbank season. Celebrating Chabrol’s cool, precise, entertaining and deliciously wicked thrillers, Claude Chabrol – Elements of Crime runs from 1 September to 6 October, including the BFI Distribution rerelease of La Femme infidèle (1969) returning to cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 11 September.
The first of Chabrol’s great run of bourgeois psychological thrillers, La Femme infidèle is one of three of the director’s films that BFI Distribution has acquired. Starring Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet, the film traces the fallout following a husband’s discovery of his wife’s affair and his quiet, unnerving devastating act of revenge. It has recently been remade as Minotaur by Russian auteur Andrey Zvyagintsev. Le Boucher (1970) and Les Biches (1968) will also be available for cinemas to book to complement the season and La Femme infidèle’s release. A curated Chabrol BFI Player online collection will also be available for audiences UK-wide, spanning a selection of 10 films from across his prolific career.
Dubbed the ‘French Hitchcock’, Chabrol’s career spanned some 50 years and 80-odd films, and as Wheatley argues “few directors have mapped the darkness beneath respectable surfaces with quite the wit, precision and relentless productivity”, successfully creating one wicked thriller after another. The season highlights 20 titles, from his daring 1958 debut Le Beau Serge to 2007’s The Girl Cut in Two, shining a light on some of Chabrol’s darkest and most compelling films.
Wheatley adds: “Beneath the elegantly composed surfaces of Claude Chabrol’s bourgeois thrillers lies something altogether more poisonous: a cinema of corrosive irony, wicked wit and simmering violence.” His work skewers the French bourgeoisie, exposing a “seam of malice” that runs through French society. Chabrol’s masterful films share affinities with acclaimed thriller writers including Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell, each of whose work he has adapted. Chabrol has also been recognised as a kindred spirit to the most recent generation of Korean filmmakers with Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook both citing him as a key influence on their work, with what Wheatley describes as Chabrol’s “peculiar cocktail of the mundane and murderous, the ordinary and the obscene”.
Wheatley delivers the season introduction on 1 September with an illustrated exploration of Chabrol’s cinema, peeking beneath his elegant surfaces to reveal the rot lurking beneath. Considering his most acclaimed titles alongside lesser-known gems.
Other events include Philosophical Screens: Le Boucher on 9 September, with film philosophers Lucy Bolton, Ben Tyrer and curator Catherine Wheatley taking a close-up look at Chabrol’s masterpiece that cuts to the heart of the themes which shaped the filmmaker’s entire body of work on the nature of violence.
Few directors have understood women as complex, dangerous agents of their own destiny quite like Claude Chabrol. Mean Girls: Claude Chabrol’s dangerous women panel on 23 September brings together experts, including filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond (Censor), film scholar Virginie Sélavy and season curator Catherine Wheatley, to examine the extraordinary actresses such as Stéphane Audran, Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire at the heart of Chabrol’s work who have embodied these characters.
10 classic Chabrol titles will also be available UK-wide on BFI Player with Que la bête meure (1969), Le Boucher (1970), Cop au Vin (1985), Inspector Lavardin (1986), Betty (1992), L’Enfer (1994), The Swindle (1997), The Colour of Lies (1999) and Merci Pour Le Chocolat (2000) all available online from 7 September and La Femme infidèle (1969) from 2 October.
The BFI will also be releasing a selection of Claude Chabrol’s films on Blu-ray in 2027.
Tickets for Claude Chabrol – Elements of Crime go on sale to Patrons 3 August, Members 4 August and General Sale 6 August