A Disappointing Continuation

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

As my purpose in writing these reviews is primarily to impart enthusiasm for films I greatly admire, I have little taste or time for rushing into print over ones that fall far short of outstanding. Let me say at the outset that I am a great admirer of Claude Chabrol at his best, I will go even further and claim that the trilogy of works he directed in 1969 and 1970, "La Femme Infidele", "Que la Bete Meurt" and "Le Boucher", dark, mesmerising yet compassionate explorations of disturbed human psyche, are among the crowning treasures of French cinema. I suppose the problem with Chabrol was that he was so prolific. Good as some of his later films were such as "La Ceremonie" and "Une Affaire de Femmes" he never again scaled those earlier heights. There are potboilers galore, mostly fairly watchable, though disappointing when one thinks of the past greatness of their creator. What to make though of "La Rupture", surely the most bizarrely outlandish of those far too many disappointments? A formidably wealthy grandfather (the most over-the-top of Chabrol's many swipes at the bourgeoisie) will go to any extreme to wrest control of his grandson from the boy's morally impeccable mother even though the youngster has sustained a serious head injury by his drug-ridden son, the boy's father. Next move to hire a shady layabout with a nymphomaniac girlfriend to trump something up that will prove the mother morally unfit to have custody of the boy. What better than to get girlfriend to dress up as mum, then for both of them to kidnap the mentally handicapped daughter of his and mum's landlady, feed the girl with drugged sweeties that will enable her to respond with pleasurable excitement to a depraved movie. To give this nonsense a semblance of artistic credence a mysterious balloon seller pops up from time to time in the local park suggesting some sort of symbolism and Pierre Jansen's atonal score punctuates the action with an aura of awesomeness that suggests something disturbing could be about to happen. Why am I bothering with all this? Simply to counter the many user reviews that express the view that "Le Rupture" is one of Chabrol's finest works. Its character types, the goodies - mother, the hospital doctor and the good-natured lawyer, the baddies - grandfather, the layabout and the layabout's girlfriend, the sillies - the card-playing elderly biddies and the histrionic actor in the guest house are all two- dimensional. All are light years away in depth from the husband driven by love and jealousy to act as he does in "La Femme Infidele", the bereaved father seeking some form of consolation in home movies of happy days past in "Que la Bete Meure" and the eponymous butcher whose love of the school teacher is heartrendingly impossible to reach any fruition given his background; reminders of the greatness Chabrol could be capable of achieving. In these he had something uniquely special to say about the nature of love.

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 main problem with "La Rupture" / "The Breach" is that it goes on for a full two hours, but its story is really quite simple and did not need so long to play out. And this is much more of a drama than a thriller, so there is little tension or suspense. Chabrol's clever camera-work, Pierre Jansen's weird music score, and a plethora of kooky characters help create a hypnotic, sometimes even surreal effect. But the film is very slow and talky, and on top of that it ends rather unsatisfyingly. Stéphane Audran plays a strong female character, Jean-Pierre Cassel is excellent as her suave and manipulative new "friend", but the most fun performances come from the supporting roles; Catherine Rouvel spends much of the movie showing off her magnificent body in the nude. Overall, a film for patient and dedicated Chabrol fans. ** out of 4.

La rupture concerns a marriage that has imploded, the fight for custody between the bourgeois grandparents and the mother, and the ensuing dirty tricks.There's a quote from Racine at the beginning "Mais quelle épaisse nuit tout a coup m'environne", "What utter darkness suddenly surrounds me". That's the feeling Chabrol is trying to deliver, I presume. It didn't stack up that way for me, successive attempts to shock worked only sporadically, it was like a few firecrackers going off for me rather than a chain reaction building up to a grand finale; precious little tension was sustained. The overall feeling I got was more of the banality of evil.Stéphane Audran as the mother (Hélène Régnier) was almost anodyne throughout, soothing to the eye and nonplussed even when (metaphorically) the blindfold is taken away from her eyes and she finds a hooded cobra in front of her. I was worried that Marguerite Cassan as the "backwards" girl Emilie was hamming it up too much, and that the main concession to making her appear disabled was a large pair of silly glasses. Then I think Paul Thomas is an odd character, totally immoral, but not very human, we don't see that he's a sadist, or that he's upset about what he's doing. He seems almost bored at times. At the one point where there is fighting in the film it looked like stage fighting rather than film fighting.Chabrol even seems to sabotage his own efforts by introducing a superfluous character, the kindly and highly caricatured Thespian Gerard Mostelle, who defuses every scene he is in, and was not even good for laughs. La rupture is however, not as bad as I make out, there is some standout photography, generally involving a park and some balloons. There's also a very nasty scene involving some black and white pornography that stays with you.There has been some talk about this movie being a condemnation of the bourgeois, well in my opinion, the movie is about as ideological as a biscuit. I would far rather recommend another Chabrol's movie to those looking for that subject matter, his icy-cold movie Juste avant la nuit, co-incidentally it also stars Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet.I should note that some of the scenes in this movie will be far more poignant to individuals who have gone through nasty breakups of long term relationships, which is not something that has ever happened to me.