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Poulet au vinaigre More at IMDbPro »
| Index | 9 reviews in total |
9 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Sunny Chabrol frolic darker than it first appears., 20 December 2000
Author:
Alice Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from dublin, ireland
It is true that Chabrol loosened his grip after 'Les Innocents Aux Mains
Sales', possibly horrified by his own insights. This is probably a shame;
but the light, comic mysteries and thrillers he has largely produced since
are by no means negligible, always entertaining and full of Chabrolian irony
and motifs. In this film, believe it or not, he seems to believe in the
God of marriage. Normally that venerable institution is the site in Chabrol
of repression, a (usually literal) stifling of humanity, a closed, rigid
world not too far from hell. With the relaxing of his style comes a
relaxing of his world view.
As ever with Chabrol, a young man is being emotionally strangled by his
mother's dependence, her emotional paralysis somewhat unsubtly figured in
her being crippled. Although the title punningly refers to the detective,
and the film is nominally a mystery story, Chabrol seems more interested in
his rites-of-passage narrative - the detective doesn't make his first
appearance for forty minutes, and doesn't dominate the movie until the last
third.
It would be wrong to claim that this is Chabrol in 'realistic' mode, but he
certainly gets a sense of a rural town community, its unexpected
connections, the malicious schemes of its most respectable citizens; pure
soap opera, maybe, but the idea of a society turning in on itself, almost
incestuously, is convincing. Louis Cuno is the unexpected centre of the
town's secrets, a sullen, gangly, lovestruck teenager, but as postman he
connects as no-one else can, betraying his civic trust as he takes home to
his mother incriminating letters to peruse, as a defence against plans to
demolish their property, destroy their home.
Chabrol usually deals with the threat to the home from within; the extending
of focus here, leads to a more relaxed film. Because the film focuses of
Louis, whose not always legal actions are treated indulgently by director
and detective alike, the other characters are more shadowy, more like
caricatures, minimising the mystery, making its potentially horrifying
conclusions somewhat perfunctory. Chabrol doesn't let his hero off too
easily, as we suspect Louis is exchanging one mother for another; his
initiation into the delights of sex is in the grounds of a country house, a
typically Chabrolian green space blighted by the surveilling eyes of the
detective.
Spying is one of the main themes of the film, from the camera taking
pictures at the beginning, to Louis' nocturnal amateur detective work. In
such a community, private and public space are not so clearly marked, and
one's identity is as much defined by one's public role (doctor, butcher
etc.) as by any personal merit, so there is something creepy as well as
comic about this police (the Law) spying on the sexual act.
There is something creepy about this policeman, anyway. Unlike the rooted,
defined villagers, he is a rootless stranger, without motive, personality,
role, except to solve the crime (he keeps insisting that he is the 'flic'),
in order to do which he resorts to alarming thuggery, even more
objectionable than Harry Callahan, whose heart at least was in the right
place. Don't be fooled by Chabrol's autumnal cheerfulness - this is a
vinaigre with a very bitter aftertaste.
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Real estate, 3 May 2006
Author:
jotix100 from New York
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
There is a conspiracy in the small Normandie town where a group of
upright citizens want to get their hands in the Cuno's property. The
Cunos, are by no means innocent themselves, they know a lot of the
movements their enemies are trying to do because Louis Cuno has access
to a secret weapon: their mail. Louis, who works in the local post
office, has a way to read the letters with his mother before they are
delivered.
Because of the accidental death of Filiol, caused in part by Louis
Cuno, propels inspector Lavardin to investigate. This detective has a
personal way of investigating what appears to be foul play; his methods
are unorthodox. at best. He deals with Lavoisier, one of the men in the
conspiracy, with an iron hand, as he discovers that Anna, his mistress,
has disappeared without trace.
Louis is hounded by the detective, even though he has nothing to do
with all that is going on around him. By arising suspicions in the
inspector's mind and by being careless when he attracts undue attention
by going out with Henriette, his postal co-worker, he feels the heat.
Fortunately, Lavardin solves the mystery that clears the young man and
his mother, who almost dies when she tries to set the house on fire.
A minor Chabrol, like the case of this film, is still interesting to
watch. The film is based on a novel by Dominique Roulet, who also
adapted it. Claude Chabrol works with great economy in the way he sets
his film in the small Normandy town and uses it to great advantage.
The performances are not up to some of the best efforts by the
director. Jean Poiret's Lavardin presents a man who could be accused of
police brutality in the way he deals with the people under suspicion.
Michel Bouquet has some good moments as Hubert Lavoisier, an ambitious
man who wants to get the Cuno property for himself. Stephane Audran, a
frequent Chabrol collaborator, doesn't have much to do as the invalid
Mme. Cuno. Lucas Belvaux, who has the best part in the story, gives an
uneven performance. Pauline Lafont and Caroline Cellier are also seen
in small roles.
See the film as a curiosity from Claude Chabrol.
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
one can do everything my bloke when one is in the police force!, 15 April 2006
Author:
dbdumonteil
I have sometimes written in some reviews about some Claude Chabrol's
flicks that I didn't find "Poulet Au Vinaigre" a memorable work.
However I watched it recently and it's not that bad after all. Of
course, it is several notches below such incomparable works as "La
Femme Infidèle" (1969) or "Le Boucher" (1970) but it remains thoroughly
watchable. Congratulations to the English film distributors who found
an equivalent for the translation of the French title into English. It
is perfectly well translated.
When in 1984, Chabrol starts the preparation of this "Poulet Au
Vinaigre", he endured three fiasco in a row. The eighties didn't look a
fruitful decade for him. "Le Cheval D'Orgeuil" (1980) got bogged down
in a spate of clichés about Brittany and betrayed Pierre-Jakey Hélias'
book. "Les Fantômes Du Chapelier" (1982), his first venture in Georges
Simenon's universe was well received by French critics but hardly
anybody went to see it. "Le Sang Des Autres" (1984) was a turgid and
impersonal film in his spotty but riveting career.
So, what could Chabrol do to get things back on an even keel and to be
reconciled with both critics and his public? Very simply, to cook them
a typical Chabrolesque dish to the core with a minimum of money (the
filmmaker wanted to show that it was possible to shoot good films with
a modest budget in times of inflation) and time (a few weeks of
shooting were sufficient for him to shoot his film). Thus, he kept
turning over the staple ingredients which made his hallmark
recognizable. He needed the apparently peaceful scenery of a small
provincial town. Here, he chose Forges-Les Eaux in Normandy which isn't
very far from I live in Rouen! The perfect backdrop for his story.
Then, precisely a solidly structured story with several functions.
First, to grab and entertain the audience and his fans with a certainly
derivative but catchy storytelling. Louis Cuno is a timid postman who
lives under her mother's thumb (Stéphane Audran). They refuse to sell
their house to a trio of perfidious, perverse bourgeois, the doctor
Morasseau, the butcher Filiol and the notary Lavoisier (Michel Bouquet)
who want to set up a momentous and shady estate business. As he is a
postman, Louis gets information about this trio of upper-class people
At night, Louis spies them and one night, he kills the butcher by
pouring sugar in the essence of his car and the maverick inspector
Lavardin (Jean Poiret) keeps on harassing him... Then, Delphine
Morasseau, the doctor's wife seems to have absconded while Anna
Foscarie (Caroline Cellier) a prostitute is found dead in a car crash.
With his unconventional methods, Lavardin will find the truth...
It is at this reading that we fully understand Chabrol's mainspring for
the last function of his scenario and perhaps the most essential
ingredient: to unearth skeletons in the closet of his trio of bourgeois
and to shatter the respectability of the provincial bourgeoisie which
has usually been Chabrol's trademark. He tapped it again with gusto
here. But his scenario also encompasses a dash of psychology to better
construe the persona of his characters and it gives more substance to
his work.
Chabrol served his film (and his recipe) with ingenious camera work
too. It encompasses neat camera angles and fluid camera movements which
can only rejoice the gourmets. To enable them to fully savor the film,
Chabrol shot his story on an unhurried pace. There was also effort on
the lighting and framing which are up to scratch to the aura the film
conveys according to the circumstances. And the director didn't put
aside his pronounced taste for gastronomy. The inspector Lavardin is
nutty about paprika eggs. He has eaten 30,000 of them in his life! At
last, the chef Chabrol spiced up his work with a soupçon of deadpan
humor essentially provided by the apparently nice Lavardin. By the way,
is it innocuous humor? One has to admit that Lavardin's methods to make
the suspects speak aren't really reassuring.
Maybe the cast contains a few little drawbacks. Lucas Belvaux is not
bad but often bland. Pauline Laffont's acting is sometimes annoying.
Jean Claude Bouillaud acts a caricatured character. But Stéphane Audran
(once Mrs Chabrol) is excellent as usual. Like in "la Rupture" (1970),
she was Michel Bouquet's enemy. This is precisely Bouquet who dominates
the cast at the level of the quality of the acting with of course Jean
Poiret.
In the end, the chef Chabrol concocted the audience and his fans an
eatable even tasty "Poulet Au Vinaigre" which pleased a lot to the
chef's connoisseurs. It was succulent enough to prompt Chabrol to do it
again with a sequel which opened the next year: "Inspecteur Lavardin"
(1986). That said, Chabrol's "pièce De resistance" in the eighties came
with the contemporary "Masques" (1987) which stood the test of time
quite well.
1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
COP AU VIN (Claude Chabrol, 1985) ***, 11 June 2010
Author:
MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta
After another undue interruption in my ongoing Chabrol tribute –
incidentally, I messed up the date and he will only turn 80 on the 24th
of June rather than last May! – I plan to tackle it in earnest now, a
task which will occupy me till the end of the month (to go along with a
parallel Dennis Hopper tribute).
Anyway, this proved to be another stepping-stone in the French
director's erratic but prolific filmography; by the end of the 1970s,
his career had suffered a decline but it got back on track with this
enjoyable award-winning thriller (incidentally, the hybrid retitling
for U.S. consumption was an unusual touch), one that was successful
enough to warrant a sequel – INSPECTOR LAVARDIN (1986; a viewing of
which is to follow this one) – and a brief TV series made between 1988
and 1990 which seems to be unavailable for re-appraisal.
Still, for all the film's typical elements of detailed setting, nuanced
characterization and ironic outlook, it does not quite scale the
heights of Chabrol's finest work due to an essentially flimsy plot:
indeed, even such later – and ostensibly lower-profile – efforts as the
recently-viewed THE CRY OF THE OWL (1987) involve a denser and more
gripping narrative! This is not to say that COP AU VIN lacks suspense
or surprise: actually, the latter concerns most of all the iconoclastic
Inspector himself – in spite of a dapper facade, he is blasé,
forthright (even referring to a character's effeminacy as "AC/DC"!) and
not above breaking into premises sans warrant or intimidating suspects
to get at the truth – belatedly called in to investigate a murder, only
to be met with a very similar one soon after and, later, the
disappearance of a woman, all of whom are tied to a property
development company whose methods are not the most ethical either.
Jean Poiret, ideally cast here and who would of course reprise the
central role in the sequel(s), had garnered a reputation as a
playwright and even secured an Oscar nomination for co-writing LA CAGE
AUX FOLLES (1978); then in 1992, the same year he died of a heart
attack (at 65), he stepped into the director's chair with LE ZEBRE
(which won him a posthumous Cesar for Best First Film)! Incidentally,
later on in the decade, he married one of his co-stars here i.e.
Caroline Cellier (who, years before, had been the leading lady in
arguably Chabrol's masterpiece THIS MAN MUST DIE [1969]); besides the
latter, the film under review featured two of the director's frequent
protagonists in supporting roles: ex-wife Stephane Audran (playing an
invalid) and a very slim Michel Bouquet. Also on hand is amiably kooky
Pauline Lafont (daughter of Bernadette, another "New Wave" regular and
who would actually co-star in INSPECTOR LAVARDIN) – whose promising
career was brought to a premature end when she perished in a fall, at
just 25 years of age, in 1988!
3 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Let's talk about Jean Poiret, 29 January 2004
Author:
Bob Taylor (bob998@sympatico.ca) from Canada
Poiret worked with Michel Serrault on several films, and wrote the
script for La cage aux folles, one of the most successful French films
of all time. He's a veteran in the industry, so Chabrol must have
figured Poiret could improve the box-office figures for this tight
little noir. Here again, Chabrol is condemning the provincial
bourgeoisie for all the venality and murderous lust they're capable of.
Poiret doesn't disappoint. He's very rough with some slimy characters
in this small town; it's fun to watch him dunking the lawyer's face in
the sink full of water as he cheerily goes through the interrogation.
He's a lot more fun to watch than Clint Eastwood ever was. The
expression "pince-sans-rire" could have been invented to describe this
actor.
7 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
The coldest, most insipid poulet au vinaigre ever served?, 11 June 2000
Author:
jameswtravers (jameswtravers@netscapeonline.co.uk) from London, England
This is a pretty conventional crime thriller of the 1980s, with some
criminally dull characterisation and limp acting performances. None of the
principal characters, except the formidable Lavardin, appears to have any
substance, and the end result is by and large lacklustre and
plodding.
Thankfully, the film does have its saving graces. Firstly, the character
of
Lavardin is well played by Jean Poiret. The police inspector's methods and
persona are so unconventional that he comes across as more frightening and
sinister than any of the murder suspects. Then there is Mathieu Chabrol's
eerie background music which imbues a sense of menace into even the (few)
lighter scenes. But the strongest selling point is the camera work,
heavily
embossed with Chabrol's style. This film has some very chilling moments
which are achieved through a clever combination of lighting and camera
angles. The style is that of a very sophisticated suspense thriller, even
if the content isn't.
Although the films does succeed to some extent at a technical level, the
shallowness of the characterisation and the overly complex plot drag the
film down to the ranks - almost - of a somewhat mediocre television
movie.
The first Chabrol film I've really liked, 10 April 2011
Author:
zetes from Saint Paul, MN
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I've seen two of Chabrol's earlier, more famous films, Le boucher and
Les biches (The Butcher and The Does respectively), and, honestly, they
did little for me. I've been meaning to seek out more since he passed
away last September, and I finally got to one here.
And I liked it. Quite a bit. Chabrol's genre of choice is the murder
mystery, and, from what I've seen, they're kind of subtle, scaled-back
ones. Cop au vin involves a small town beset by murders and
disappearances. Kindly-seeming police detective Jean Poiret shows up in
town and begins to unravel the mystery. What's particularly good about
this film is that we, at first, suspect Poiret is pure business. He's
neatly dressed, seems nice, but also smart enough to figure out what's
going on. Frankly, what I was expecting was a French version of Matlock
when he showed up. But then Poiret begins revealing his true colors,
and we find out his nice guy appearance is just a facade. This is the
type of guy who thinks nothing of beating the crap out of anyone he
suspects might be lying. And I certainly am not the type to think
that's cool. We're meant not to like him very much. It's kind of a neat
reversal of expectations.
Thankfully, Poiret is not really the center of the movie. Lucas Belvaux
plays a sweet, kind of dumb postal worker who lives with his
domineering, crippled mother (Stéphane Audran, Chabrol's ex-wife and
frequent star). Their dilapidated mansion is the center of a real
estate conspiracy which is connected to the murders. Adorable Pauline
Lafont plays Belvaux's nutty co-worker with whom he begins a
relationship.
Poiret's character, Inspector Jean Lavardin, got his own sequel the
next year, and a television series a couple of years later.
Fair Chabrol mystery, 1 March 2010
Author:
gridoon2012
The first half of "Cop Au Vin" is kind of muddled, and even borderline dull at times: lots of characters and backstories are thrown at you as if you're supposed to know them already (you may need a second viewing to take it all in). Things start to get more interesting when a vengeful prank misfires into something much worse, and then get even more interesting when Inspector Lavardin arrives on the scene. Lavardin is like a strange cross between Hercule Poirot (in his eccentricity and intuition), and Dirty Harry (in his unorthodox and occasionally even violent methods of investigation and interrogation). Another character I really liked was the hero's girlfriend (played by Pauline Lafont, who tragically died in an accident only three years later): every boy should be so lucky to get his emotional / sexual maturing via such a beautiful, affectionate and playful girl. The (good-looking and well-acted) movie ends with a couple of Agatha Christie-type twists: two of them blindsided me, but the one about the mother (Stephane Audran), for some reason I suspected it from the beginning. Leonard Maltin gives this ***1/2 out of 4 stars, but IMO he's overrating it; I'll give it **1/2.
1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Later, lesser but still worthwhile thriller from Claude Chabrol, 16 March 2008
Author:
The_Void from Beverley Hills, England
I've seen a handful of Chabrol films and have so far been impressed
with all of them. This film is my first experience of Chabrol's work in
the eighties and while I'm not surprised at the fact that it gets
lambasted by some; and it's not quite up to the great French director's
previous high standards, personally I found this to be yet another
great example of Chabrol's moody and brooding direction coupled with an
interesting plot line and some good performances. The plot is not quite
as deep as the ones seen in previous Chabrol films, but there's still
plenty to chew on. The base of the story is Madame Curo and her son
Louis. They live in a house that is wanted by two unscrupulous people
in the village, but what they don't realise is that the son can read
their mail, owing to the fact that he works at the post office - which
gives them an advantage. The plot kicks off properly when Louis puts
sugar into the tank of one of the men's cars, which soon results in a
fatal car accident. After the disappearance of the other man's wife, a
hard nosed police officer is brought in to investigate.
This film has one of the strangest titles I've ever heard of - 'Poulet
au vinaigre', translating literally as "Chicken with the Vinegar".
Quite what that means, I have no idea. The film has a fair few
different plots going on, but the one that Chabrol seems most
interested in is the one surrounding Louis, who finds himself in the
middle of a "war" that is a bit too big for him and has to deal with
his needy, sick mother at the same time. The murder investigation does
provide the film with one of its main narratives; but since it doesn't
kick off until we're halfway through, it's clear that it wasn't
Chabrol's main concern. The acting is very good all round, with Lucas
Belvaux making a convincing lead and getting good support from
Chabrol's ex-wife and regular muse Stéphane Audran, Jean Poiret; who is
excellent as the formidable police officer and my personal favourite,
the exquisite Pauline Lafont as the love interest. Chabrol seems to
have a thing for ending his films abruptly, and that is the case here
as while everything is wrapped up by the end, it is done in a matter of
about five minutes. Overall, it's not hard to imagine why this film
isn't as well liked as some of Chabrol's other work - but for my money
it's still a more than worthwhile thriller and comes recommended.
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