Au coeur du mensonge (1999)
Directed by Claude Chabrol

Film Review

With Au coeur du mensonge (a.k.a. The Color of Lies), director Claude Chabrol continues a long cycle of films in which man's dual nature is reflected in a self-sufficient community that harbours a dark malignancy beneath its surface gentility.  The film is a continuation of the director's previous Masques (1987), although there are also easily discernible elements of other works, including Le Boucher (1969), Poulet au vinaigre (1985) and Inspecteur Lavardin (1987).  What all of these films have in common is the central moral that no good can come of the gulf that exists between hidden truths and the glib lies that are trotted out to maintain the flimsiest illusion of order and decency.

At the heart of this typically warped drama is a psychologically damaged painter René who, having failed to gain acceptance by the inhabitants of a close-knit Brittany town, finds himself suspected of being a child killer.  René's disturbed frame of mind alerts us to the sickness that pervades the district, a deeply ingrained suspicion of outsiders hinting at a paranoid obsession with ensuring that the community's hidden secrets remain hidden.

Played with harrowing conviction by Jacques Gamblin (Au coeur du mensonge's main asset), René comes to embody the two-visaged nature of the world in which he now lives in exile.  As the vulnerable outsider who is both a threat to a closed society and its natural victim, he is effectively a cross-between Normal Bates and the Wicker Man.  We soon realise that the danger lies not in the diseased mind of one man, but rather in the collective behaviour of a warped group of people who lie about everything and see truth as the ultimate taboo.

The character who most accurately personifies this societal malaise isn't the increasingly misanthropic pariah René, but rather the ultra-smooth, ultra-vapid television celebrity Germain-Roland Desmot, a role that allowed real-life TV star Antoine de Caunes the chance to indulge in some flagrant self-mockery.  Here we have a typically odious Chabrol creation, a close cousin of the viciously duplicitous sociopath played by Philippe Noiret in the director's earlier Masques.

Desmot's saccharine charm and ability to spout glib turns of phrase as easily as breathing are doubtless what made him France's 'national glory', but in the raw natural setting of the Brittany coastline these are as grotesquely artificial as a lifesize wax model of Lady Gaga would be in a Cistercian monastery.  And yet Desmot's brazen incongruity is accepted far more easily by the unfriendly locals than René's hermit-like presence, probably because this serves as a convenient distraction from the insidious perversions that are festering around him.  It is indeed ironic that the egoistical TV star should be working on a book about lies whilst casually adding to the morass of deceptions that will ultimately cost him his life, an incident that ends up as another falsehood.

The brunt of the damage that Desmot causes is borne by René's wife Vivianne, a seemingly incorruptible soul who, unlike her husband, has found favour with the locals through her work as a district nurse.  Even she is not as innocent as she seems and has to wear a mask like just about every other character in the film to conceal her secret life.  Her sin: to succumb to the vacuous showbiz charms of her celebrity neighbour. Au coeur du mensonge isn't quite a deliberate retread of Madame Bovary (a subject Chabrol has already dealt with), but as in Flaubert's great novel the heroine is visibly ruined by an ill-judged extramarital affair arising from boredom and foolish delusion, her tragic outcome all but assured as a necessary penance.  Sandrine Bonnaire's acting is so subtle and understated that Vivianne is scarcely noticed in the first half of the film, but ultimately she emerges as the central victim, the character who is most severely mutilated by all that we see.

Viviane's pathetic inability to protect herself or her husband  (or indeed anyone else) is mirrored in the apparent weakness of the other main female character in the drama, Frédérique Lesage. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's portrayal of the surprisingly naive and inexperienced police superintendent in charge of the murder investigation is so unwaveringly low-key that she seems to be pitifully lacking in both presence and causal power.  Lesage's obvious inadequacies, however, do not make her a weak and feeble person.  Au contraire, she is the most proactive and morally correct character in Au coeur du mensonge.

The fact that Lesage's investigation appears so desultory and ends in partial failure has less to do with the woman's abilities as a cop and far more to do with how she is regarded by a misogynistic and morally lacking society.  Her efforts to find a child killer are earnest but constantly frustrated by the locals who fail to take her seriously - indeed, their lack of faith in her would seem to be vindicated when the case is efficiently resolved by an amateur sleuth in the guise of a boy in his early teens.

It is interesting to compare Lesage's well-meaning but ineffectual character with Chabrol's Inspector Lavardin, who acts like a dodgy Marvel superhero, mopping up the bourgeois bad guys regardless of whether or not they actually committed the crime in hand.  Neither is a model cop, but whereas Lesage's dogged scrupulosity prevents her from doing anything, Lavardin's warped sense of justice at least allows him to achieve some social good.

Au coeur du mensonge is one of Claude Chabrol's most haunting variations on a recurring theme, and this it owes in part to its frighteningly mercurial location in and around the Brittany town of Saint-Malo.  Echoing the ever-changing moods of the central protagonist René as paranoia, fear and guilt gnaw away at his soul, his distress relieved only fleetingly in moments of intense creative exultation, the raw Breton setting changes constantly, one minute luxuriating in sublime placidity, the next louring with a fiercely oppressive malevolence.  Matthieu Chabrol's eerily discordant music has its own sinister poetry, fusing perfectly with the stark images to create a potent sense of all-pervasive menace.  As you watch the film you can easily convince yourself that derangement and perversity are not merely defects of the human brain.  Rather, they are all around us, infecting everything, a fundamental component of the fabric of reality.

As the film reaches its grim dramatic climax, the darkening skies and monotonously grey seascape bring a sense of impending doom and through this we are at last able to see through all the lies and glimpse the terrible truths that lie beneath - not just in one small Brittany village but in the world at large.  The revelation of one killer's identity appears totally inconsequential when this is set beside the terrible discovery that malignancy lies not in one person but in an entire community and the lies that this collection of souls insists on telling itself.  Rape and murder are bad but letting out the truth is by far the greater crime.

Film Synopsis

René Sterne was a successful artist before a terrorist attack left him maimed for life.  Now, beset with scars that are both physical and psychological, he struggles to regain his inspiration in a quiet fishing port on the coast of Brittany.  He leads a secluded life with his wife Vivianne, the district nurse, giving art lessons to his neighbours' children.  When one of his pupils, a ten-year-old girl named Eloïse, is found dead in the woods not far from his coastal abode, René becomes the obvious suspect, since he was the last person to see her alive.

The fact that Eloïse was strangled and raped convinces Frédérique Lesage, an inexperienced police superintendent leading the murder investigation, that the killer must have been a man.  From the manner in which Lesage interrogates him, René realises that he is the prime suspect, and it isn't long before the rest of the coastal community reaches the same conclusion.  Only Viviane professes his innocence, but even she will have her doubts before the real culprit is identified.

Unbeknown to her husband, Viviane has been carrying on a covert love affair with Germain-Roland Desmot, a celebrity journalist who has recently taken up residence in the area to work on his next book, on a subject he knows well - the art of lying.  It isn't long before Viviane sees through Desmot's false charms and shallow intellectualism.  Realising her mistake, she abruptly ends the affair, but not before her lover has made a dangerous enemy of René.

After an acrimonious dinner at the Sterne household, Desmot is too drunk to make his way home alone, so René insists on taking him back along the coast in his rowing boat.  The following morning, Desmot's battered dead body is found on the rocks beneath his luxury dwelling.  Superintendent Lesage has no doubt that the TV star was murdered but the medical report concludes that the death was most probably accidental.  The recovery of Eloïse's last drawing unmasks the man who killed her, but for René the nightmare is far from over.  Visibly traumatised by the events of the past few days, the troubled artist confesses to his wife that he was provoked by Desmot into murdering him.