Chabrol directed more than 15 films during an incredible creative peak between the years of 1968 and 1978. There are virtually no duds among the films he created during those years, and numerous classics, including Le Boucher, Une Femme Infidele, La Rupture, Que la Bete Meure, and Juste Avant La Nuit. Watch any film Chabrol made during this period and you will be thoroughly entertained, intrigued and challenged. Chabrol continued to make excellent films until his death in 2010 but these ten years were an inspired and fertile period.
Chabrol at his best would use the suspense or thriller genre to expose the hypocrisy and moral rot of the French bourgeoisie. Blood Relatives (Les Liens de Sang - 1978) takes Chabrol outside of his native France with a mystery set in Montreal. A young woman named Patricia bursts into the police station at night covered in blood and tells the officers that she barely escaped from an assailant but her cousin, Muriel, was sexually assaulted and murdered. Police Inspector Carella (Donald Sutherland) begins to investigate her story by rounding up and interviewing known sex criminals before Patricia changes her story and accuses her brother, Andrew, of the murder. Inspector Carella rightly believes that Patricia is hiding something and begins to dig deeper into Muriel’s past by searching for her missing diary. Here the film moves from police procedural into a disturbing tale of incest, pedophilia, jealousy and murder.
This is an extremely dark film populated at all turns by deception, pedophiles and incestuous affairs. With the exception of Inspector Carella, everyone seems to be hiding something or guilty of a crime. Even suspects cleared of the murder are guilty of being pedophiles. Donald Pleasence turns in a nice performance as a vile pedophile who must prove he did not murder Muriel. David Hemmings also makes an appearance as Muriel’s boss. Although he is at least twice Muriel’s age and married he is using his position as her boss to try to seduce the young girl. Muriel herself also has dark secrets hidden away out of guilt and shame.
Filming in a different location may have been an intriguing challenge for Chabrol but his forte was portraying and critiquing French society. It is impossible for him to have the same depth of knowledge about life in Montreal and the film suffers from this change of location. There is a somewhat generic feel to the dialogue and the characters compared to the films Chabrol made in France. The mystery is intriguing and the actors are all top notch but there is a certain perception and insight missing from the proceedings. Chabrol’s best films are at the same time universal in their themes and specific to their location. The incidents and characters are intrinsically French while the themes carry a worldwide understanding and relevance. Blood Relatives feels like it could have been made anywhere, its characters from any country. Chabrol does not capture the flavor of Montreal in location or character like he is able to do in his French films.
It is interesting to note that Blood Relatives has some strong similarities to the cult TV show Twin Peaks. As surprising as it sounds, either David Lynch or Mark Frost may have been influenced by Blood Relatives. The first time this thought struck me was during the funeral scene. As they are lowering Muriel into the ground, her cousin Andrew breaks down in tears and jumps on her casket just as Leland Palmer does at Laura’s funeral in Twin Peaks. After this scene the numerous similarities became more obvious. Both stories revolve around a detective (or FBI agent) trying to solve the murder of a teenage girl. The mystery hinges on finding the dead girl’s diary, and the diary holds dark secrets concerning incest and sexual affairs with older men. The works have similar themes about hidden secrets, incest, pedophilia and the potential darkness that dwells beneath the placid surface of bourgeoisie life. While Lynch and Frost turned out a completely original TV series it is hard not to wonder if the seeds of their work were planted by Chabrol.
While Blood Relatives is not one of Chabrol’s masterpieces, it is an engaging and intriguing film. It is a dark film with a good mystery, strong acting and solid directing. Chabrol is one of cinema’s masters and even a lesser film in his hands is better than a great film in the hands of someone else.
Blood Relatives is only available on an R2 PAL DVD released by Carlton Home Video in 2000. I don’t know if this disc is OOP but luckily for us in North America it can be found for download in avi format.
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