Attention ! La fourchette ! (Or, Watch Out For That Fork!!)
The last time I saw Claude Chabrol he was on Taddeï. As in Frédéric Taddeï––the super-cute, loosened tie-wearing, boyish-grinning super-cute French TV host that I happen to have a super-huge crush on. (Not only because he’s super-cute in that boyish tie-wearing loose-grinning French kind of way but also because he happens to be super-smart––he’s soooo super-cute when he’s being that!––and super-knowledgeable, too. You know, about what his guests are talking about.) (And as we all know, that’s super-rare for a TV talk show journalist.) (Which is so super-sexy-cute.) (His show is called Ce soir ou jamais !) (Means “Tonight Or Never!”) (!!!) (!!!)
Anyway. Chabrol. So the last time I saw him he was on Taddeï and they were talking about les maisons closes. (“Closed houses” for you amateurs; “bordellos” for you connaisseurs.) Before Sarko got his Pétain on and started racially profiling and racially organizing and racially categorizing and categorically, systematically, racistly deporting racially rendered Romas, the news was much more fun. Hence the discussion about les maisons closes. (They’re thinking about legalizing them.) (I’m all for it.) (As long as my boyfriend promises to stay the hell away.) Putain.
(A side note?) (Just to kind of break the fourth wall?) (“Pétain” kinda sounds like “putain” and in French “putain” means “whore.”) (HA!)
Anyway, yes, Chabrol. He was on Taddeï (well, not literally on him, but you know…) telling a story. It was about les maisons closes. He was the only guy on the set who had ever been to one, back in the day. Back in the day his dad had taken him there and bought him a Coke. Claude was nervous, but he drank it anyway. And that, comme on dit, was that. Back in the day. According to how he told the story.
I know that you know that I know that you know that aside from alive-and-well French talk show hosts, I already have my fair share of crushes on a fair share of dead guys, but it’s hard not to have a crush on Claude Chabrol. Just ask France––or anybody from here. If Victor Hugo was France’s son, then Claude Chabrol was kinda like France’s uncle, only not in the creepy-sugar daddy-drinking-a-Coke-in-a-bordello kind of way. There’s a saying, or at least the newspaper Libération recently, rightly, righteously, just right the other day, the day right after his death, at the right time, kinda compiled and created one: Chabrol, c’est la France. (Chabrol is France.) When you think of the joyous, jolly, jovial, jubilant bon vivant-cum-cinéaste movie director––and you live in Paris––it’s hard to make the connection between the fun-“here kid, have a dollar”- type of uncle and, well, la France. But if you think about it a moment longer, you kinda get the drift. “La France perd son miroir,” Libé went on to say, in big, bold, black, bold emboldened letters: “France Loses Its Mirror.” And this is where it starts to get interesting.
The thing about Claude Chabrol’s films is that someone always ends up with a fork in the eye. Or a knife in the back. Or a bullet in the head. That kind of thing. I don’t know if the French stick more knives in each other’s backs or more forks in each other’s eyes or more bullets in each other’s heads than anybody else from any other country, but when you’re watching Chabrol, that’s pretty much how things turn out. Complete with crazy, classically-inspired, it’s-three-o’clock-in-the-morning at the campus radio station-and-the pianist-and-horn-section-just-went-apeshit type of music. Often composed by Chabrol’s son, Mathieu. You know, just to create un peu d’ambiance. The kind of ambiance that makes the rich look, well, bitch.
“I’ve always taken pleasure from proving that the bourgeoisie was stupid,” Chabrol once said, conveniently––or not––forgetting that his first film, Le Beau Serge, a classic, was financed by his first wife, a bourgeoise. The French love to hate the bourgeoisie, but they love to love them more, which explains why Karl Lagerfeld – who isn’t even French––is such a star here, Louis XVI-powdered pony-tailed mullet et al. The French Revolution may have stuck the proverbial fork in the monarchy’s proverbial eye, but that doesn’t mean that for proverbial pomp and circumstance, the French don’t feel a bit of nostalgie. Chabrol got this about his countrymen, and then he promptly stabbed them in the eye, and for that, he was, and will continue to be, adored. Hey, it’s the birthplace of Sade, as in le sado-masochisme . . . Live here for five minutes, fork protruding from eye socket, and you’ll see what I mean.
Someone’s eye always ended up with a fork in it; and chances are they were rich or richly associated, and chances are the reasoning was richly dumb. In between? They ate, richly, with forks and knives and otherwise, something Uncle Claude with his savoir-vivre knew all too well how to do. “We’re not really going to call this film Chicken With Vinegar?!” he is said to have said about one of his seventy-odd movies, which in the end, was called Poulet au vinaigre. It was a play on words: poulet is slang for “cop,” and vinaigre . . . well, that could mean “bad wine.” But what else could he have titled it, really, when you think about it? It would have been too obvious––and slightly gauche––to call it Let Them Eat Cake. Dessert forks are smaller, but just as pointed.
First published on The New Vulgate in 2010.
