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Jovial and Deliberate
By Aaron W. Graham
It's hard to believe that BELLAMY, running in the Berlinale Special programme, marks the first time that actor Gerard Depardieu and venerable master Claude Chabrol have teamed up together, each being so prolific in the French film industry for the past thirty (or in Chabrol's case) fifty years. BELLAMY, the film, not the title character, is jovial and deliberate, containing the delicate craftsmanship beauty of an auteur working in his autumnal years.
Being that Chabrol's last several films – from LA FLEUR DU MAL, THE BRIDESMAID, THE COMEDY OF POWER and THE GIRL CUT IN TWO – have been female-centric, or, at the very least, dependant on the wiles of a woman who confuses our hero, BELLAMY is startlingly masculine. Gerard Depardieu and his portly frame jaunt around doing the detective legwork, and even though there is a mistress that temporarily causes puzzlement, the rest of the leads are uniformly men. The story concerns the laconic hero (Depardieu) and his involvement in a murder by a man who can't quite remember whether or not he did the deed.
Chabrol has said of the film that it was his attempt at a hommage to Georges Simenon, the Belgian author who created the fictionalised detective Jules Maigret. Comparisons could be made between Chabrol and Simenon himself, one of the most prolific writers of this or any other century. Both have been dedicated masters at spinning a yarn, slowly escalating their tales as the nooses are lowered on the protagonists.
The pacing could be said to be slow-blooded, downscaled, and even rigorously rigid. Chabrol continues to work in a formally restrained way, and there's an abundance of longer takes to compliment it – the style foregrounds the enveloping mystery with Bellamy in the thick of it.
We're not ensured that many more films from the director in his advanced age will follow. But like Bellamy's forever involvement in other people's stories of despair, one would hope that the type of methodical, almost austere tradition continued on by Chabrol, learned from watching the collective works of everyone from Hitchcock to Fritz Lang, will forever be somewhere, dawdling in the margins, deliberately crafting suspense gems that work on the spectator in a focused, perturbing way. Paralleling Bellamy's resolvement of criminal undertakings is Chabrol's investigations into the art-form, and at the end of the day, of life.