Le Beau Serge [Bitter Reunion] **** (1958, Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, Bernadette Lafont, Michèle Méritz) – Classic Movie Review 3553

The 28-year-old film critic Claude Chabrol made his leap onto the screen as writer-director of this influential 1958 first film which had the distinction of being the very movie that set off the French Nouvelle Vague cinema movement.

Jean-Claude Brialy stars as the sickly, supercilious religion student François Baillou, who comes home to his French village of Sardent, Creuse, after a decade away and tries to reform his alcoholic old school buddy, handsome Serge (Gérard Blain), whose wife has given birth to a still-born child. Bernadette Lafont also stars as Marie, with Michèle Méritz as Yvonne.

The winner of the Prix Jean Vigo in 1959, this important film is lifted by its fine, intense acting from the three principals and the screenplay’s intelligent story and study of rebirth and second chance.

Chabrol relishes filming in his birthplace Sardent, which he gleefully portrays as a dull small town (atmospherically photographed by Henri Decaë and Jean Rabier), but otherwise this capable melodrama cum modern-day religious parable is not at all a typical work of the director, who later specialised in small-town thrillers as a master in the mystery genre.

Also acting in the movie are Michel Crueze, Jeanne Pérez, André Dino, Edmond Beauchamp, Claude Cerval, Philippe de Broca and Claude Chabrol. He also uses local Sardent people in small parts.

Blain and Brialy were re-united with Chabrol for his second movie, Les Cousins. Brialy and Lafont were re-united with Chabrol for his 1986 thriller Inspecteur Lavardin.

The film was partly financed by an inheritance of Chabrol’s first wife, Agnès Goute. After he divorced her in 1964, Chabrol would joke that he had married her for her money to make the film.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3553

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/