The Morality Play as Thriller

DURING ONE of the heavier-handed scenes in Wedding in Blood, Stephane Audran, playing the wife of a boorish and corrupt French politician, appears in her town's library to donate a volume on ethics. The librarian, impressed by the tome's weightiness and its complicated-sounding title, accepts the book and remarks, "It must be very difficult." Audran's precocious little daughter, who understands the surface of things better than any adult character, closes this little lesson on ethics by chiming in with her typically mocking tone, "Oh yes, very difficult."

By the end of the film, which will have its New England premier tomorrow, the sarcastic little girl learns to her great sorrow just how right she was in that library: Ethics--in their day-to-day application and not just the textbook variety--are excruciatingly complex. The balance between the demands of personal happiness and the demands of bourgeois propriety is well-neigh impossible to attain. Most people load the scales on the side on propriety. Wedding in Blood is a movie about two people living Thoreauian lives of quiet desperation who choose to throw the scales in the other direction, becoming willing murderers along the way.

The film's main characters, played to perfection by Audran and Michel Piccoli, are both middle-aged victims of unrewarding marriages. Picolli acts the part of a subordinate political figure wedded to a bed-ridden woman who is at once depressed and depressing. The sickly woman is self-conscious of the fact that she has made her husband's life dreadfully dull, but she is of neither mind nor body to change the course of things. The husband, were he to remain faithful to the invalid and to convention, would be condemned to the life of a wet-nurse in his small and somewhat shabby apartment.

Audran, on the other hand, appears to have the best that bourgeois society has to offer. Her husband is a rich and important man, her home is luxurious and her daughter (by a teenage romance) is intelligent and sympathetic. Despite the rewards of her position, Audran remains an unfulfilled woman; passion is lacking from her life, and, according to the logic of the film, that is the crucial element. The blame for her suffering is placed, rightly enough, on her husband, one of those soulless all-business types who possesses little talent for either love or sex.

The two desperately unhappy spouses find each other and enter into an affair which changes their once passionless existences into lives of all-consuming passion. The fervor of the love-making during their secret trysts is adolescent, almost humorous, in quality. Their desire for each other and the escape which their romance represents become uncontrollable. Like most people in their position they complain about having to sneak around, and console each other in their matrimonial misery. Unlike most people, though, they decide to release themselves from their bondage. Their means are incredibly simple: Piccoli poisons his infirmed wife and conspires with his lover to beat her husband to death during a midnight trip to Paris.

If this were all there was to Wedding in Blood, it would hardly be more than routine. Films depicting crimes of passion proliferate, only very few show any signs of brilliance. Fortunately, there is much, much more to Chabrol's masterful effort, and the movie manage sto become a stunning intellectual and emotional experience. Wedding is, in the end, a work of incredible depth--a depth that is all too hard to find in motion pictures today.

ON A PURELY technical level, Chabrol has achieved a near-perfect control over his medium. Frame by frame he has created a photographically beautiful movie. The beauty is not of the slick sort that many commercial directors so easily mass-produce nowadays, but instead it evolves from the way Chabrol's cameras treat the spatial relationships between persons and things. It's as if the director turned the literary search for the mot juste into cinemagraphic terms and then succeeded in his quest. The excellence of technique is hardly for its own sake; like the most mature directors Chabrol has subtly integrated it into the whole of the work so that it doesn't infringe on the film's other component parts.

Wedding's depth and ability to influence are most largely due to the remarkable characterizations given to each of the major personages in the story. Without exception the performances are first-rate, and the actors--most notably the two stars and girl who plays Audran's daughter--infuse their roles with such life that they almost bound off the screen and take on three full dimensions. Chabrol was extradinorily lucky to have access to these quality performances, because when the story begins to sag--as it does in too many places--the actors manage to carry things along until the narrative begins to pick up again.

Despite the masterful technique and the excellence of the performances, Wedding contains its share of flaws, important flaws that impede the film's success. In terms of the story-line, in terms of figuring out movies that translate easily into real-life experience, too many details are too hard to devine. The most disquieting shortcoming is in the way the movie deals with the relationships between people. In a film that is so richly textured, there is a surprising lack of feeling to personal interactions. For instance, it is never really clear what stuff the passion of the Audran-Piccoli affair is made of. How much romantic love there is, how much of the relationship is just an attempt to give life to a thrwarted sexuality, is just never defined satisfactorily. Perhaps Chabrol did not think such definitions important. Perhaps all we have to know is that the lovers shared a common bond of wanting to escape from their desperate situations.

The ending of the movie is also a little odd. After being arrested for the murders of their spouses, a police officer asks the two lovers why they just didn't run away. They answer, "Where else could we go?" The conversation could go on from there, they could have run away instead of turning to murder as their private solution, but none of that happens. And why not?

This brings us back to that old puzzler, the "very difficult" problem of ethics. In the end that is what Wedding in Blood is all about. Audran and Piccolo are not just common lovers, they are the bourgeois world's version of Everywoman and Everyman. They are the passionate living in a passionless world. They want to be alive, to be rewarded, to be fulfilled--they want to be everything the great mass of desperates are not. Very difficult indeed. Certainly a problem that you can't run away from.