MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Inspecteur’ a Mordant, Witty Gem

The success of “Madame Bovary” has triggered the release of Claude Chabrol’s wonderfully cynical “Inspecteur Lavardin” (at the Monica 4-Plex). It was one of several films the New Wave pioneer directed for producer Marin Karmitz (who also produced “Madame Bovary”) that revived Chabrol’s career in France in the mid-’80s. This 1986 production is a sequel to “Poulet au Vinaigre” (“Chicken in Vinegar”), made the year earlier and shown locally only in a Marin Karmitz retrospective at UCLA in 1989.

In that film, which also expressed the director’s mordant, witty view of the more lethal aspects of human nature, Chabrol introduced the shrewd, debonair Inspecteur Lavardin (Jean Poiret), who investigates a murder that occurs unexpectedly in the course of a wheelchair-bound widow’s bitter struggle with those in power to hold on to her home. This time Lavardin arrives in a similarly provincial community where the paunchy nude corpse of a rich, pious writer (Jacques Dacomme) is found face down on some rocks by the sea. Someone has scrawled across his back in lipstick Porc (Pig), presumably the same person who stabbed him to death.

Arriving at the writer’s large, handsome Second Empire country estate, Lavardin is met by the writer’s chic, glamorous widow (Bernadette Lafont), who unexpectedly turns out to be a lover of his from some two decades earlier. She makes no pretense at grief, freely informs him that it was strictly a marriage of convenience. Taking the same open attitude is her gay brother (Jean-Claude Brialy), who regards his late brother-in-law’s books as a more effective remedy for insomnia than sleeping pills. Clues are few, but the inspector is intrigued to discover hidden in a fine Napoleonic desk the phone number of the local discotheque’s smooth, insinuating proprietor (the lanky, Jean-Luc Bideau, best-known from such Alain Tanner films as “La Salamandre”).

Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Chabrol’s work knows his abiding passion is exposing the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, but this time he and his co-writer Dominique Roulet (who also collaborated with him on “Poulet au Vinaigre”) suggest with Machiavellian glee how sweet the uses of that hypocrisy can be--how someone as subtle and perceptive as Lavardin can make hypocrisy serve his own--and ironically, just--purposes.

Chabrol is content to let his film unfold without undue flourishes--and with the talky interrogations that give it the feeling of a genre piece--only to turn back everything upon itself with a finish of stinging in-your-face bravura. Chabrol’s throwaway confidence is well-matched by the ambiguous Lafont and the sly, mischievous Brialy; Lafont appeared in Chabrol’s first film “Le Beau Serge” (1958) and Brialy in his second, “Les Cousins” (1959), both landmark New Wave films. “Inspecteur Lavardin” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and situations) probably can’t be called major Chabrol, but it is rich in that amusing subversiveness with which he has amused audiences for 35 years.

‘Inspecteur Lavardin’

Jean Poiret: Inspecteur Lavardin

Jean-Claude Brialy: Claude Alvarado

Bernadette Lafont: Helene Mons

Jean-Luc Bideau: Max Charnet

An MK 2 presentation. Director Claude Chabrol. Producer Marin Karmitz. Screenplay by Dominique Roulet, Chabrol. Cinematographer Jean Rabier. Editors Monique Fardoulis, Angela Braga-Mermet. Music Mathieu Chabrol. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. In French, with English subtitles.

Times-rated Mature (for adult themes and situations).