A line by Bernadette Laffont in this movie was often mentioned by French critics to depict Chabrol's finest hour afterwards : "you watch us as though we were insects ". Claude Chabrol was considered the French entomologist director : a critic wrote that if a historian wanted to know what an early seventies bourgeois was ,he had to watch Michel Bouquet(who's just passed away) ....
"Le beau Serge" does not take place in Paris or a province town ,but in a rural milieu ,though it's likely that François comes from a well-to-do milieu ; but Chabrol's depiction of a small village is extremely precise (see also "le boucher" for that matter) , with its gossips, its vicar who sees his congregation diminish over the years ("only six old women ,when they're gone ...") the way of life before the sixties when there was no contraception .And mainly ,the beginning of the rural exode after WW2 epitomized by François whose perspectives are bright ; Le beau Serge ,like him,wanted to escape a dead end by becoming an architect ,but in a small French village,when you got a girl pregnant ,you had to marry her.
Le Beau Serge is par excellence the dropout ; strange how Chabrol saw Gérard Blain as the loser in both this movie and "les cousins "; in the former work , he never knew who his father really was ,which was prophetic as far as the actor was concerned ;when Blain became a (brilliant) director, all his movies , in a remarkable overall coherence , would deal with the longing for a family (Blain's father left home when he was young) .The best scene ,in the cemetery, belongs to him and it seems that the actor improvised his lines .
Brialy plays here a role diametrically opposite to his part in "les cousins" ;he's not the cynical Parisian ,but the compassionate chum ,who really wants to give a human wreck a helping hand .The ending remains ambiguous though, predating those of the latter works of late sixties/early seventies works.
"Le beau Serge" does not take place in Paris or a province town ,but in a rural milieu ,though it's likely that François comes from a well-to-do milieu ; but Chabrol's depiction of a small village is extremely precise (see also "le boucher" for that matter) , with its gossips, its vicar who sees his congregation diminish over the years ("only six old women ,when they're gone ...") the way of life before the sixties when there was no contraception .And mainly ,the beginning of the rural exode after WW2 epitomized by François whose perspectives are bright ; Le beau Serge ,like him,wanted to escape a dead end by becoming an architect ,but in a small French village,when you got a girl pregnant ,you had to marry her.
Le Beau Serge is par excellence the dropout ; strange how Chabrol saw Gérard Blain as the loser in both this movie and "les cousins "; in the former work , he never knew who his father really was ,which was prophetic as far as the actor was concerned ;when Blain became a (brilliant) director, all his movies , in a remarkable overall coherence , would deal with the longing for a family (Blain's father left home when he was young) .The best scene ,in the cemetery, belongs to him and it seems that the actor improvised his lines .
Brialy plays here a role diametrically opposite to his part in "les cousins" ;he's not the cynical Parisian ,but the compassionate chum ,who really wants to give a human wreck a helping hand .The ending remains ambiguous though, predating those of the latter works of late sixties/early seventies works.