Film Notes #1

Diabolique (Henri-George Clouzot, 1955)

I heard of Diabolique from reading Hitchcock/Truffaut. I became enamored of Vertigo and learned that there's a rumor Hitchcock wanted the rights to the source novel for Diabolique but Clouzot beat him to the punch.

There's a lot I could say about Diabolique but I want to focus on the use of the boarding school and its inhabitants to reveal character traits.

One of the more thrilling aspects of Diabolique is the use of the school children to create multiple moods. In the background of the early going on young boys play games with each other, get up to mischief, and in general careen around like so many pinballs. This creates a sense of constant movement and life in the picture, which is contradicted to good effect in several early scenes, most notably when the headmaster brings them to silence during supper to humiliate his wife. The constant play-making of the children also sets up a wry juxtaposition to the far more grim game the adults are playing.

Oftentimes creating too busy a milieu can unnecessarily complicate or obfuscate a text. Detail can be added for the sake of itself instead of to enrich the properties of the narrative, character, or theme. Note I don't consider this bad or wrong, this is just to point out the ways aesthetic superfluousness can affect a text. This  complication can be done in a couple ways.  The first I call the Mad Men effect. After Mad Men, many inferior programs and movies emphasized aesthetic attributes over (useful thematic) content and form. Additional material was included for pure aesthetic purposes -- particularly costuming and set-dressing (the problem extends further back than Mad Men, but it is a strong recent example of this phenomenon). The other way is in the formal realist manner, a la Flaubert (there's a Shklovsky reference I can't find that says this better than I can) where the sole purpose of environmental detail is to create verisimilitude. It is a welcome abundance in the service of milieu.

Diabolique is a good example of judicious mise-en-scene in this regard. The background activities of the children and staff of the boarding school are not mere window dressing--they are an essential part of the psychical space of the film. The children are a liability, they are a point of contrast, they are objects of scorn and guilt, barometers of character. We can see immediately the contrast of Christina and her husband by looking at how they each treat the children. Christina sympathizes--her husband scolds and punishes, sees them as a means to financial gain. Christina and Nicole rely upon them to uncover the crime they have committed and so they take on the dual significance of both a liability for the criminals, i.e. an object of loathing because they contain the power to expose, but also this exposure is necessary for their plot to come to fruition. This sends Christina into paroxysms of fear, an ultimate expression of repulsion.

There is also the sense in which Christina is regularly treated like a child. Her husband explicitly calls her a child on a number of occasions. He forces her to chew and swallow her dinner the way you would a toddler. And ironically, as it turns out, her grim game is no more real than the children's. How much of what transpires against Christina is a result of her inability to perform adulthood as well as her husband and Nicole? To play a game completely to the end? To not fight the enactment of her own plot or express her will completely? She is neither as diabolical as her husband and Nicole nor as clever and insightful as the private detective. She remains to her last moments a naif. The point at which she sheds her naivety is also, not unexpectedly, the point of her death.