I wouldn’t even know where to start writing an obituary for Claude Chabrol, the French nouvelle vague master who passed away yesterday at the age of 80. His filmography is so vast — spanning 52 years and 54 features, many of which I have yet to see — and his influence so extensive that formal tributes are best left to those more learned than I.
Still, that’s not to say he hasn’t made a number of films that mean something to me, chief among them 1970’s “Le Boucher,” a character-study-as-thriller so perfectly and precisely formed it hurts a little to watch it. It was my first Chabrol, and indeed one of my first forays into the French arthouse canon, introduced to me in childhood by my dad — who counts it among his favorite films.
I’ve inherited his affection: the film’s simple set-up — shy young schoolteacher strikes up a friendship with a lonely village butcher who may or may not be a killer — is an undercoat for a deeply compassionate study of emotional repression and moral judgment, with a for-the-ages lead turn by his then-wife Stéphane Audran.