Le beau Serge
1958, directed by Claude Chabrol
Le beau Serge is widely, albeit reluctantly, acknowledged as the first French New Wave film. Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte came earlier, but Varda was not one of the young Cahiers du cinéma critics whose parallel ventures into filmmaking originally defined the Nouvelle Vague. Claude Chabrol was the first among his colleagues to make the leap into directing, and Le beau Serge opened the floodgates, even if in retrospect it doesn’t seem to share the movement’s avant-garde hallmarks. It’s a realist film made on a low budget, but to most eyes there’s not much daring in its form or technique. A closer look should change this opinion. In its way Le beau Serge is a model for radical films like A Woman Is a Woman and Last Year at Marienbad.
If the film’s innovative qualities remain unappreciated, it’s probably because they don’t show until the end. The slightest change to the ending could have turned it into a conventional moral tale, but instead it’s as open-ended as films like Marienbad or Persona, only without being ostentatiously arty. Any viewer might miss the extraordinary ambiguity though, because it’s tempting to pick sides. It’s possible, for example, to regard François as noble for saving Serge from self-destruction at the risk of his own health, dragging his drunken friend through the snow to witness his baby’s birth. It’s equally possible to view him as a disruptive do-gooder motivated by a sense of superiority. This ambiguity governs the entire film, to such a degree that it’s hard to say anything definite about it.
In its final seconds the film turns blurry. This diminishing focus is a metaphor for the indistinctness of the story and characters, but it also lets in new layers of ambiguity. At first the tone seems uplifting when the baby is born and François rouses Serge from his stupor. After wallowing through the whole film in self-pity and anger, Serge finally brightens up like a changed man. Once so full of promise, he plunged into alcoholism when his wife Yvonne bore a stillborn baby with Down Syndrome, but now, against Serge’s expectations, she’s just had a healthy baby boy. Serge laughs with apparent relief in the final shot, but as his laughter continues it becomes harder to interpret. There may or may not be madness in it. As the picture loses focus, specks of dirt show on the lens or the window as if portending some undefined bad news. Serge’s face starts to look skeletal, without quite turning into a literal skull like in the final shot of Psycho. The score too is ambiguous… it could be read as ominous or triumphant.
It’s not just the rightness or wrongness of François’ actions, or Serge’s aspect toward his new life as a father, that’s hard to pin down. The plot itself is uncertain. François is a recovering tuberculosis patient who shouldn’t be running back and forth in a snowstorm under stress, but he’s reportedly close to recovery, and the movie never tells us whether his efforts are fatal or even harmful to him. Nor can we say whether he’s done any good. Bringing the doctor was prudent in any case, but it’s not clear that Serge had to be present at the birth to feel his curse lifted. François seems to have made a mess of things with Marie and Glomaud, confirming to the old man that he’s not Marie’s father, precipitating his rape of her, then assaulting Glomaud, precipitating an apparent heart attack… but it’s hard to believe the situation would have turned out well without his involvement. It’s more Glomaud’s fault than his, and the man drove the secret out of François at the bar.
For anything one could say about the events or characters, there’s always a “but….” Glomaud certainly looks monstrous, but Serge is not exactly wrong when he challenges François’ disgust. If the villagers live in abjection, “like animals” with “no purpose in life” as François says, it’s because of their soul-crushing struggle for survival. Glomaud doesn’t go so far as to redeem himself, but he finally shows a shred of humanity, telling the doctor to go tend to his grandson’s birth. On one hand François is quick to judge, but on the other hand he recognizes this in himself and resolves to do better. He tries to separate Serge from Yvonne but later realizes he was wrong to do so. François acts reprehensibly at the dance, rejecting the recently raped Marie as if she were somehow “damaged goods”, but he pays for this wrong later that evening, allowing Serge to beat him up.
The priest is a mirror of François, interfering in the villagers’ lives with words instead of actions. Where François is disruptive, the priest is merely impotent, but each of their motives is an ambiguous mix of care and condescension. It’s hard to say whether the two of them regard the villagers with contempt, with genuine love, or both at once. François acknowledges this ambiguity when he says to the priest, “So what? What the hell do I care if it’s pride or not? All that matters now is to do something for them.” His question is valid enough, but given François’ past actions it’s not clear how much wisdom there is in his resolve. He’s wanted to do something for Serge since he arrived, but his efforts have been counterproductive. Is his persistence stubbornness or an act of faith? His last words, “I believed,” indicate the latter, but the ambiguous hints of madness, misfortune, and death in the last shot of Serge’s laughing face could just as well negate that faith. We’re left with a thoroughly open ending.
Such extreme ambiguity could devolve into ambivalence if the film were simply refusing to take sides, but in Le beau Serge the point lies elsewhere. Instead of drawing lessons from its characters’ faults and virtues, it affirms the near impossibility of doing so. It’s ambiguous because life is ambiguous. The film is an attack on the unwarranted simplicity of religious and social morality. Once we appreciate how complicated life is, we should have the foundation for a new idea of justice that excludes moral judgments. If nothing else, Le beau Serge lays the ground for Chabrol’s many later films that are preoccupied above all with justice, combined with an appreciation for the paradoxes in people’s motives and behavior.
In his analysis of Le beau Serge, critic Robin Wood compares it to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, another film about a sophisticated city dweller’s disruptive reunion with people from his past in a small ordinary community. His comparison focuses on the extensive doubling in both films, but it steers his analysis off track because the similarity is ultimately superficial. The two films have drastically different aims, and Hitchcock’s use of doubling is not as unique as Wood seems to think it is. Still, Wood is perceptive about the symmetry in Chabrol’s film. It’s built around two friends the same age from Sardent, one who wanted to leave and one who did. They’re paired respectively with half-sisters Yvonne and Marie, and each also has an older male counterpart, Glomaud or the priest. Each has an ailment (drinking or TB), and each goes searching once for the other. There are two shots of Serge in front of a blazing fire, and two conversations between François and the priest. Yvonne wakes Serge by splashing water on his face, and François rouses him by rubbing snow in his face.
Beyond the echoes that Wood catalogues, there are also two one-sided beatings; Serge and Yvonne have two babies; and François peers twice around a boulder while Serge peers once around a tree. There’s also an intricate symmetry to the two male-female pairs: just as François tries to persuade Serge to leave Yvonne, Serge discourages François’ relationship with Marie. Moreover, toward the end Serge draws closer to Marie physically while François draws closer to Yvonne platonically.
Dualities like these can be a general framework for ambiguity, but their role here is even more specific. As Wood recognizes in the parallels to Glomaud and the priest, the dualities remind us that life could go one way or the other at any time, building a powerful sense of life’s contingency. If he hadn’t left, François could have become the priest, and if Serge’s life doesn’t change he could become like Glomaud. Likewise, Serge could have gone to university like François, only life wasn’t as kind to him. Given Marie’s promiscuity, she easily could have ended up like her sister. In one circumstance the priest cajoles François to be more devout; in another he forcefully discourages François from setting a Christlike example. The babies represent the contingency that worries Serge most of all – his second baby could become like the first.
If life is so ambiguous and so contingent, then justice demands that we refrain from making moral judgments of others. Henceforth Chabrol will spend his career making films about crime and transgression, always sensitive to the innocence that lies even within the guilty. Le beau Serge is a template for his future filmmaking. It’s not unprecedented in the degree of its ambiguity, but the ambiguity is put to an original purpose, presumably inspired by the realist principles of André Bazin. It’s an exercise in making the most honest film possible. If this is the assignment Chabrol gave himself, that would tell us why he thought it important to return to Sardent, the village where he grew up, the territory he knew best. This motive also makes Le beau Serge a guiding light, if not a template, for the French New Wave, which at its best aspired to bring a new honesty to filmmaking.
CONNECTIONS:
Shadow of a Doubt – A sophisticated city dweller returns to family or friends in a small community, disrupting their lives; extensive doubling
Les cousins – Reversed scenario of friends/cousins from the city & country, using the same actors
Psycho – Image or implication of a skull in the final shot
A Woman Is a Woman – Film conceived as an effort at total honesty
Last Year at Marienbad – Radical exercise in ambiguity, representing an extreme of either realism or formalism
Le boucher – Story about the paradoxes of human nature, with extensive doubling
Dogville – Visitor to a struggling village; story shows the inappropriateness of judgments
REFERENCES:
Wood, Robin & Walker, Michael. Claude Chabrol. Studio Vista, 1970, pp. 8-10.