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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Le Boucher ( The Butcher 1970)



She is a school mistress, he is a butcher, their everyday lives obscure great loneliness, and their ideas about sex are peculiarly skewed. They should never have met each other. When they do start to spend time together, their relationship seems ordinary and uneventful, but it sets terrible engines at work in the hiding places of their beings.

 

Claude Chabrol's "Le Boucher"  takes place in the tranquil French village of Tremolat, and like almost all of his films, begins and ends with a shot of a river, and includes at least one meal. It seems a pleasant district, if it were not for the ominous stirrings and sudden hard chords on the soundtrack. It is a movie in which three victims are carved up offscreen, but the only violence visible to us is psychic, and deals with the characters' twists and needs.

There is no great mystery about the identity of the killer; it must be Popaul the butcher, because no other plausible suspects are brought onscreen.  We know it, the butcher knows it, and at some point, Miss Helene, the school mistress, certainly knows it. Is it when she finds the cigarette lighter he dropped, or does she begin to suspect even earlier?


The movie's suspense involves the haunting dance that the two characters perform around the fact of the butcher's guilt. Will he kill her, too? Does she want to be killed? No, not at all, but perhaps she wants to get teasingly close to being killed; perhaps she is fascinated by the butcher's savagery.
Miss Helene has been in Tremolat for three years. She has never married; 10 years before, she had an unhappy affair, and has decided to do without men. He can talk of little but his 15 years in the French Army. He served in Algiers and Indochina, and he hints of indescribable brutality that he witnessed. He brings her a joint of lamb, wrapped in tissue like a bouquet, and they spend time together. 
News arrives from day to day about bodies found in the woods, and the police are everywhere. On the day of the trip to the caves, Miss Helene and her students rest on a ledge to eat their lunches, and a drop of blood falls on one little girl's bread. It is the blood of the latest victim -- the bride in the opening scene.As she discovers the body, Miss Helene also finds a distinctive lighter she has given Popaul. 
So much goes unsaid between these two people. So much is guessed or hinted. They're a pair, all right, and she senses it at the wedding feast. They don't fit in any ordinary romantic or matrimonial way, but what happens in this movie happens because of them as a couple. If you bring enough empathy to her character, you can read that final scene more deeply. It is a sex scene. They don't touch, but then they never did.
Chabrol, born in 1930, was like Godard and Truffaut a movie critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the voice of the auteur movement. He has outlasted many of his contemporaries and outproduced all of them, making more than 50 films. His good or great films make a long list, which should include four collaborations with Isabelle Huppert: "Violette Noziere" (1978), "Madame Bovary" (1991), "La Ceremonie" (1995), "Merci Pour Le Chocolat." Her face, like Audran's, is capable of maddening passivity -- a mask for ominous and alarming thoughts. Both actresses have that rare ability to compel us to wonder what in the hell they are thinking.







The film begins at a village wedding where Hélène, the sophisticated and beloved local school headmistress, meets Popaul, the village butcher. Popaul is a veteran of the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, carrying the psychological scars of fifteen years of military service. Despite their different backgrounds, they form a close, platonic friendship.

While their relationship develops, a series of brutal serial murders plagues the region. The tension escalates during a school field trip to the Lascaux caves when Hélène discovers a gruesome crime scene and finds a cigarette lighter—one she had previously gifted to Popaul—near the victim.







Artistic Style

  • The "Chabrolian" Gaze: The film uses long, sweeping takes and subtle zooms to build dread within a sunny, seemingly peaceful environment.

  • Atmospheric Tension: Rather than relying on jump scares, Chabrol uses the quiet of the French countryside and Pierre Jansen’s discordant score to create a sense of mounting unease.

  • The "Blood Sandwich" Scene: One of the most famous shots in the film involves a drop of blood from a clifftop murder landing on a schoolgirl's bread during a picnic—a stark intrusion of horror into the mundane.
















Legacy

Le Boucher is frequently compared to the works of Alfred Hitchcock (specifically Shadow of a Doubt) and Fritz Lang. It won the Best European Film award at the Bodil Awards and earned Stéphane Audran a Best Actress award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. It remains a quintessential example of "French Noir" and a profound study of human fragility.




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