Gerard Depardieu and Jacques Gamblin star in Bellamy.By Ed Rampell
Fifty years after the French Nouvelle Vague swept cinema, auteur Claude Chabrol, one of the masters of that innovative movie movement with classics like 1969’s La Femme Infidele, is back with the North American premiere of Bellamy.
In this mystery, death does not take a holiday, as vacationing Parisian police inspector Paul Bellamy (a more understated Gerard Depardieu) is swept up in investigating local crimes of passion. But rather than emphasizing the action inherently associated with violence like a typical policier thriller would, Chabrol instead concentrates on the characters’ emotional underpinnings. Not only of the criminals, but Bellamy’s own family politics, with his n’er-do-well half-brother Jacques (the resentful Clovis Cornillac) and Bellamy’s wife, Francoise (the seductive Marie Bunel). Their erotic playfulness suggests a 21st century, grown-up version of Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man series.
While stylishly directed this World Cinema selection doesn’t have any of the cinematic panache and inventiveness of 1959’s (and beyond) New Wave classics, such as the jump cuts in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless or the haunting freeze frame that closes Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (BTW, the best movie ever made about unhappy childhood). But with Bellamy’s focus on emotional intensity, rather than on mindless action, 79-year-old Chabrol continues the tradition of a New Wave that long ago ebbed -- although his talent never has.
(Bellamy screened Nov. 1, 1 p.m. at Mann Chinese Theater 1, 6801 Hollywood Blvd. For more info: 866/AFI-FEST; www.afi.com.)
