Things don’t always turn out the way you expect. Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge pounds home that message in many different ways as a man revisits his childhood home only to discover his oldest friend Serge has had his life run into the ground. Here was a man with the potential for scholarly pursuits and a rewarding career as an architect, but an unexpected pregnancy and the death of the newborn drove him into a spiral of depression and booze. Le Beau Serge reveals just how complicated human relationships can be, setting up the protagonist’s very simplistic notion that he can arrive on the scene and set things right just by pointing out where they went wrong. In so doing, he gets his own bitter pill; one that cures him of his illusions about the way things should be and lets him finally see how things are. In the end, the solution to his best friend’s funk comes from within, on a very literal level. To get to that point, Chabrol’s film undulates across the emotional spectrum, riding moments of depression and disappointment only to subside upon thoughtful retrospection that helps it average out to a dry but well-acted piece and what is, essentially, the first French New Wave film ever.
Returning home for the first time in years from the big city, Francois arrives in the sleepy town to discover that for as much as things have stayed the same, the most important factors have changed. His once close friendship with Serge didn’t survive Francois’s departure and he’s shocked to find his brilliant friend who once spoke of big dreams has resigned himself to the life of a drunkard, boozing away his depression for the child he and his wife lost at birth. Francois thinks he knows exactly what Serge needs to get back on track and keeps pushing and pushing regardless of the consequences. When the dam finally bursts, Francois’s plan gets washed way and leaves him with a moment of clarity as to what Serge truly needs.
The French New Wave movement rejected the sanitized emotions and conversations of cinema at the time in favor of characters that spoke their mind and made choices that didn’t always leave everyone happy at the end. Le Beau Serge embodies this tradition at its very core and consequently it’s theme of “Things don’t always turn out the way you expect” has every opportunity to manifest in the unpredictable behavior of the village Francois once called home. Adding another wrinkle to Le Beau Serge’s rejection of classic cinematic sentiments, the films sees Francois butt heads with the town’s cynical priest, a man who has become bitter and cold towards those around him, passing judgment upon them for no longer showing up to his institution on Sundays with any regularity. At first Francois doesn’t see the similarity between himself and the priest, holding onto his insistence of that what he was doing would ultimately help Serge out of his slump. The contrast with religion serves not only as the ironic device that reveals to Francois his powerlessness in Serge’s struggle, but as the gap between the past of French cinema and the future that Chabrol and his contemporaries were about to blaze.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
To start, the disc has an audio commentary for the film recorded by Guy Austin, who literally wrote the book on Chabrol. Both of the featurettes included in the set have to do with the small town of Sardent, where Le Beau Serge was filmed. The first is a document covering the film’s creation with plenty of retrospective interview footage with Director Claude Chabrol and archival footage and photographs of the crew at work. As his first film, Chabrol has quite a bit to say about the experience, calling it an exercise of pretention while being something of an overwhelming undertaking. The second trip to Sardent sees Chabrol spending a weekend in the small town, where he filmed Le Beau Serge and where he grew up, and thus reliving both as an episode of the classic French television series L’invité du dimanche. The interviews have Chabrol at a very relaxed state and it makes for some great anecdotal humor. The last bit of content on the disc is the film’s theatrical trailer.
The booklet insert includes an essay by Terrence Rafferty titled “Homecomings” which discusses Chabrol’s place within the French New Wave and Le Beau Serge as a prime example of the movement as well as a perfect example of themes important within his own life.
"Le Beau Serge (The Criterion Collection)" is on sale September 20, 2011 and is not rated. Drama. Written and directed by Claude Chabrol. Starring Gerard Blain, Jean Claude Brialy, Bernadette Lafont, Michele Meritz.
