"La rupture" might be the best Chabrol.I've recently seen it and I think it has improved a lot with time,more than any other movie of the Chabrol 1967-1973 heyday,even more,in several respects,than "le boucher" or "que la bête meure".Completely overlooked,there is a lot of Chabrol fans that don't even know the existence of "la rupture",and the critic-when they know it - has always been condescending.

Why is it the best Chabrol?Because it has almost everything that we find in the director's other works:love,suspense,bourgeoisie contempt,mystery,humor-mostly black-,and even surrealism.Two influences are glaring as far as"la rupture" is concerned: Alfred Hitchcock 's(the actor,telling the heroine that the world is a dirty place recalls Uncle Charlie in "shadow of a doubt")and Henri-George Clouzot's(the boarding house recalls "l'assassin habite au 21")

The main topic is the power of money;never Chabrol has been as convincing as here.Michel Bouquet,the accurate prototype of a French bourgeois circa 1970 is terrifying.He's got a wallet by way of heart and he stalks his daughter-in-law as a spider on its web,to get the custody of his grandson.When Audran ,desperate,comes back from the airport,two scenes pack a real wallop:the first one shows the reunited couple,desperately trying to pick up the pieces,whereas they know they are bound to fail.Audran and Drouot are harrowing and the spectator wish they could get out of this money pigpen.A second scene,just following this one,shows Audran telling her contempt to the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.Chabrol is actually speaking out here,and his voice has never been so devastating.

There 's a lot of subplots and never a Chabrol supporting cast has been so important.He achieves a real tour de force:every character is interesting,be it the owner of the boarding-house,her alcoholic husband,her retarded daughter,the three old ladies,the villain (Machiavellian Jean Pierre Cassel),his nymphomaniac accomplice,the good doctor....

Money allows very bad things,the right to pervert an innocent child is not the least.The scenes between the villains and Elise,the poor idiot have a contemporary feel .Money allows the over-possessive mother(an Hitchcockian influence again) to pick up her beloved child (in his thirties!), to read him "the knights of the round table",and to poison him with protection.Money allows to tarnish a brave mother's reputation when she makes her best to cope with her plight.

The movie eventually drags down the whole cast for an astounding finale,complete with drugs,deaths,hallucinations (a bit dated,admittedly)and the balloon release comes as a relief.

Stephane Audran ,more than 15 years before "babette's feast" is wonderfully cast as a mother who 's got to fight for her child and her honor.Her beauty radiates in this filthy world.Once again,"la rupture "

contains whole everything that Chabrol had done before and heralds the best that he has done since.It deserves to be restored to favor.

NB:It's superior to Charlotte Armstrong's "balloon man" which provided the story.All the names but one (Sonia)were Frenchified,Sherry becoming Helene.

LA RUPTURE is one of Claude Chabrol's most devastating critiques of the bourgeoisie and it's one of his finest films. It's about a working wife and mother fighting for custody of her small son after the boy's drug-addicted father has attacked them, only to find her husband's rich parents have hired a sleazy, corrupt investigator to destroy her reputation. The film isn't flawless; there are too many extraneous and eccentric characters but the main plot is beautifully handled, (it's based on a novel by Charlotte Armstrong), and Stephane Audran as the wife and Jean-Pierre Cassel as the investigator are both terrific. Of course, you may think Chabrol's decision to treat such a serious subject as domestic violence purely as a thriller a little tasteless but fundamentally this isn't really a film about domestic violence at all but an almost Dickensian study of evil; the bourgeoisie parents are distinctly rotten, the investigator even more so. If the film were more 'realistic' it might be unbearable; there's a scene of potential child sex abuse, and the child is mentally handicapped, that is almost too bizarre to be really disturbing and the film gets very bizarre towards the end. However, even with its convoluted plot it works superbly both as an outright thriller and as a scathing indictment of a highly amoral society.

The plot: Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot) is a tentative writer with a drug problem who goes berserk and attacks his own wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and their baby boy in a rage fit (in yet another of those amazing Chabrol opening sequences!). Hélène files for divorce and custody of their child, but Charles' wealthy father Régnier (Michel Bouquet) is ready to fight dirty for the boy's custody: Régnier promises money and a job to shady Paul Thomas (Jean-Pierre Cassel) if he can find out nasty things about Hélène. As Paul tries hard but fails to find skeletons in Hélène's closet, he begins to scheme foul plans to do her in. But things go terribly wrong.

"La Rupture" (1970) is a study about misleading appearances and the destructive power of money and of social conventions. In the film, conventions play a very important part: Hélène used to be a stripper so people assume she's something of a whore, which she wasn't and isn't. Régnier is a rich and respectable bourgeois, but ready to play dirty to have things his own way. Paul is seductive, funny and good-looking, so everybody likes him -- even Hélène -- though he is rotten to the core.

The film belongs to a very rich period in Claude Chabrol's career, including "Les Biches" (1968), "Une Femme Infidèle" (1969) and "Le Boucher" (1970), all of them Hitchcockian in surface but much darker, more violent and tragic, rather closer to Fritz Lang in core, acid criticism and virulent spirit. These four films portray Chabrol's perennial (self)-criticism on the French bourgeoisie, while dealing with apparently "normal" characters going berserk (Jean-Claude Drouot here, Jacqueline Sassard in "Les Biches", Jean Yanne in "Le Boucher", Michel Bouquet in "Une Femme Infidèle"). They all star his then-wife, beautiful, fascinating Stéphane Audran, here in a terrific performance, whose detached acting style, world-weary heavy-lidded eyes, fabulous legs, peerless cheekbones and deceptively cold sexiness is only comparable to the 1930s Dietrich.

In "La Rupture", not everything in the plot strives to be "believable" - this is not the standard Hollywood thriller! It's rather a tragedy with surrealistic overtones and a very black sense of humor. To fully enjoy it, one must forget about "plot logic" and marvel at the rich character study, particularly of the main trio (Hélène, Régnier, Paul) but also the supporting characters depicting the "evil ways" of human nature (Régnier's wife; the three MacBethian "witches" who live at the pension; the understanding lawyer; the pension landlady and her alcoholic husband played by the great Jean Carmet; Paul's nymphomaniac girlfriend etc). What is refreshing with "La Rupture", as in Chabrol's best movies, is that things never happen the way we expect them to - there's always a welcome offbeat element waiting around the corner.

Don't watch this film if you only like thrillers with Cartesian logic, lots of action and gunshots; but do watch this if you like to see an experienced, talented filmmaker in full power of his craft who, though dealing with a below par material (the novel on which the film is based), manages to make a virulent attack on social conventions while thoroughly entertaining you. PS: The final scene may be too symbolic, psychedelic and "loose" for some tastes -- but that was 1970, folks!