Overview: For five decades Claude Chabrol navigated the unpredictable waters of Cinema, leaving in his wake fifty-five feature films that remain among the most quietly devastating genre movies ever made.

The Swindle sees Chabrol at perhaps his most playful as a pair of scam artists, Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault, get in over their heads. But who is scamming who and who do you trust in a life built on so many lies?

The murder of a 10-year-old girl sparks rumors and gossip in The Color of Lies, as suspicion falls on René (Jacques Gamblin) the dour once famous painter, now art teacher, who was the last person to see her alive.

Enigmatic, perverse, seductive, Isabelle Huppert encapsulates everything that makes Nightcap a film John Waters calls “Cinematic Perfection” in this tale of suppressed family secrets.

Finally, in The Flower of Evil, incest, old money and intergenerational guilt come under the scalpel as an outwardly perfect bourgeois family begins to unravel when the wife involves herself in politics.

Though influenced by Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir, Chabrol’s voice was entirely and assuredly his own, influencing in turn filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho, James Gray and Dominik Moll. His amused, unblinkered view of life and refusal to judge his characters makes his films timelessly relevant and accessible to all.

Arrow Video is proud to present this second collection of films by Claude Chabrol with a wealth of new and archival extras.

Blu-ray Verdict: First up is The Swindle (1997), which is about an older conman named Victor (Michel Serrault) and a woman named Betty (Isabelle Huppert) who are clever but mainly smalltime thieves. We see Betty at a casino flirting with a businessman and when he’s not looking she spikes his drink.

They end up in his hotel room and he passes out. They steal some but not all of his money so that when he wakes up he won’t be sure if he gambled it away or not. Then Betty decides to run a scam on a financial courier (Francois Cluzet) for a crime syndicate who is suppose to transfer 5 million Swiss francs, but of course they plan the old switcharoo.

After this happens the head of the syndicate named Monsieur K (Jean-Francois Balmer) escorts the two of them to his place and wants his money back! This is definitely not Chabrol’s best effort, but its not because its not well made, for it is.

But the material is so familiar that at times the film seems run of the mill. There are some nice touches like Victor always being mistaken at the hotel for an employee. The script does have you guessing about certain things like the relationship between Betty and Victor. Are they lovers? Is he her father?

A few times during the film Betty calls him father, but it might be a pet name and they might also be tutor and student. And the caper itself is never clearly defined as we suspect that Victor had the whole thing planned ahead of time.

Usually the characters in Chabrol’s films are complicated and challenging for the viewer, but that’s not the case here. It’s definitely a lightweight effort and while its mildly interesting mainly for watching another re-teaming of Chabrol and Huppert, it’s nowhere near Chabrol at his best.

Then comes The Color of Lies (1999) and which is a whodunit, Chabrol-style: by limiting the number of suspects (who matter) to a minimum and basically focusing on the central character and one burning question - did he or didn’t he?

Here Chabrol gives us plenty of time (some might say too much) to contemplate the implications of each possible answer: either an ordinary everyman is hiding a monstrous, inhuman killer inside, or a chronically unlucky, innocent man gets unfairly stigmatized by rumors and small-town-talk.

For me the answer, when it finally comes, was quite a well-hidden surprise, but Chabrol adds another last-minute twist that does not really hold up; conclusive film endings are not his forte. On the other hand, making his films look and sound great IS his forte, and this one is no exception.

There is something admirable about the way he sticks to his own measured, methodical style even at the turn of the millennium. Sandrine Bonnaire is wonderful, but Valeria Bruni Tedeschi seems both too young and too soft-voiced for her role as a police Inspector, though she gives it her best shot.

Up next is Nightcap (2000) where in Lausanne, the aspirant pianist Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis) has lunch with her mother Louise Pollet (Brigitte Catillon), her boyfriend Axel (Mathieu Simonet) and his mother.

Jeanne leans that when she was born, a nurse had mistakenly told to the prominent pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) that she would be his daughter. André has just remarried his first wife, the heiress of a Swiss chocolate factory Marie-Claire Mika Muller (Isabelle Huppert) and they live in Lausanne with André’s second marriage son Guillaume Polonski (Rodolphe Pauly).

Out of the blue, Jeanne visits André and he offers to give piano classes to help her in her examination. Jeanne becomes closer to André and visits him every day; sooner she discovers that Mika might be drugging her stepson with Rohypnol. Further, she might have killed André’s second wife Lisbeth.

Nightcap (aka Merci pour le Chocolat) is another ambiguous film by Claude Chabrol about evilness, alienation and manipulation. Isabelle Huppert, who is one of Chabrol’s favorite’s actresses, performs her role as a wicked lady to utter perfection.

The essence of her evil is not explained, but she is capable to drug and kill her best friend and incapable to love or donate to help children.

Jeanne Pollet is manipulative and greedy, and uses the incident in the maternity hospital to get closer to André. When she sees the photo of Lisbeth in the bedroom, she returns to the pianos room where André is and puts her hands on her face exactly the same way Lisbeth did.

André Polonski is alienated and lives his life in the world of music, and doping to sleep and ignoring to see what Mika did to Lisbeth. They live a hypocrite life with Guillaume, who does not have any objective in life.

Again though, this film is not among the best works of Claude Chabrol, but anyway it is highly entertaining.

Lastly comes The Flower of Evil (2003) where despite its deceptively calm exterior, the film is probably one of Claude Chabrol’s most ambitious movies.

One where he tackles a wide range of topics such as marital infidelity (plus the thought of it), some possible incest, the joy of happy memories and the pain of sad ones, the burden of guilt, political ethics, and history repeating itself to an almost supernatural degree, et al.

However, the script (which he co-wrote) is a bit too muddled overall, for my liking. I’ve watched this film twice now and I probably still couldn’t draw an error-free family tree for these characters if I had to!

The exact nature of the relationship between Benoit Magimel’s and Melanie Doutey’s characters remains puzzling to the end (are they cousins? Half-siblings? Step-siblings?); nonetheless, their first intimate scenes together are highly erotic (Doutey is amazingly beautiful).

Thus, for my money, and regardless, the film is splendidly acted all around, especially by Suzanne Flon as Aunt Line. An eclectic film, and one not without bouts of dark humor, including a truly bizarre sequence related to an accidental murder, stylistically, this is a film experience with lush cinematography of the contemporary Bordeaux region, filled with sensitive compositional choices and careful set-ups. Delightful and exquisite, from all angles. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

High definition Blu-ray presentations of all four films
New 4K restorations of The Swindle, Nightcap and The Flower of Evil
Original lossless PCM French stereo audio on all films plus DTS-HD 5.1 on Nightcap and The Flower of Evil
Optional English subtitles
80-page collector’s booklet of new writing by Sean Hogan, Brad Stevens, Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and Pamela Hutchinson
Limited edition packaging featuring newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella

DISC ONE - THE SWINDLE
New commentary by critic Barry Forshaw and author Sean Hogan
New visual essay by scholar Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze
New interview with Cécile Maistre-Chabrol
Behind the scenes
Interview with Isabelle Huppert
Introduction by film scholar Joël Magny
Select scene commentaries by Claude Chabrol
Trailer
Image gallery

DISC TWO - THE COLOR OF LIES
New commentary by critic Barry Forshaw and author Sean Hogan
New visual essay by film critic Scout Tafoya
New visual essay by film critic David Kalat
Behind the scenes
Introduction by film scholar Joël Magny
Select scene commentaries by Claude Chabrol
Trailer
Image gallery

DISC THREE - NIGHTCAP
New commentary by film critic Justine Smith
New visual essay by film critic Scout Tafoya
Interview with Isabelle Huppert
Interview with Jacques Dutronc
Behind the scenes
Screen test for Anna Mouglalis
Introduction by film scholar Joël Magny
Select scene commentaries by Claude Chabrol
Trailer
Image gallery

DISC FOUR - THE FLOWER OF EVIL
New commentary by film critic Farran Smith Nehme
New visual essay by Agnes Poirier
Behind the scenes
Interview with co-writer Catherine Eliacheff
Introduction by film scholar Joël Magny
Select scene commentaries by Claude Chabrol
Trailer
Image gallery

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