Le Boucher

Our DVD Price: £13.99 RRP: £15.99 Save £2.00 (12%)   Availability This product should be despatched within 4 days.  This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times   Earn 65 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Film Description

Possibly Chabrol's best known and most critically acclaimed film, it is consistently taut with engrossing twists in the director's own script. A tense and enthralling thriller set against the wonderfully observed background of provincial French life.

Film Information

Technical Details

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by Ezekiel Lee on 5th May 2006

This 1970 Claude Chabrol effort is quietly delightful and very sensitive if not intimate. I've only seen one other film of his -"L'Enfer" and if these two are anything to go by, this director to me dwells a lot on implied terror and personal relationships. It reminds me distinctly of Hitchcock in that sense because there is no blatant throat-slashing nor heart-stopping action but more of conceptual suspense. Like in "Rope", we wonder throughout the film if the corpse was even in the case while all the elaborate conversation surrounds it. The movie also reminds me of the original "The Haunting" in terms of texture and camerawork -it's always quiet and sometimes even sleepy but yet somehow chilling.

As its title suggests, the film is about a butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne) who works in a small French town by the countryside. At a wedding, he meets Helene (Stéphane Audran) the local primary school headmistress. The pair become fast friends and their relationship begins to gather pace but always we see an air of uneasiness about them still. Casting further doubt on their progress are a series of murders taking place in the village with no identifiable suspects. Helene gets suspicious about Popaul but we are unsure of whether or not Popaul is indeed the wanted culprit.

As with all psychological thrillers, the ending may not always be satisfying to the average thriller fan who expects some shocking twist or some profound message from it. To risk comparing Chabrol to Hitchcock again, I must say that there is no humour nor lightness to the film other that the sublime rural imagery. It is very much a film about two people, their interaction and the events surrounding them which might or might not change their relationship. The suspense lies not so much in what happens but rather how it happens. I also quite enjoyed the strange music that play through the film and found it very affirmative to the ambience of the whole story.

All in all, I'd recommend this little flick to viewers who would enjoy psychological thrillers made in the same vein as "The Lady Vanishes", "The Haunting", "Les Diaboliques" and "Rosemary's Baby".

View more reviews by Ezekiel Lee

Review by Paul Scott on 26th August 2004

Lovingly photographed evocation of rural France in which Chabrol need only call attention to a single object – a silver cigarette lighter – to create suspense; allowing Stephane Audran's consummate portrayal of the elegant headmistress to reveal the film’s wider psychology.

View more reviews by Paul Scott

Review by Scouse Frog on 16th November 2005

A magnificent film, full of the colours and rural life of the Dordogne. Above all, I loved the spiralling structure of the film: Ordinary life continues while an investigation takes place in the back ground and circles, closer and closer and closer.

View more reviews by Scouse Frog

Browse all Film Reviews

Article - "Claude Chabrol - Profile of a Craftsman" by Richard Armstrong
Thursday 17th May 2007

Along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol’s name is famously associated with the pathbreaking criticism of Cahiers du Ciné ma and the rise of the French new wave. But whilst Truffaut and Godard saw themselves as auteur and innovator, to ...  View article in full

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

freebies from papers by chris barltrop

great films for free from national newspapers

Create your own Film List!

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

La Regle du Jeu

by Jean Renoir

Breathless (Godard, 1959)

by Jean-Luc Godard

Night And Fog

by Alain Resnais

Le Cercle Rouge

by Jean-Pierre Melville

Hiroshima Mon Amour

by Alain Resnais

Other films by...

More films directed by Claude Chabrol

The Claude Chabrol Collection (Volume 2)

La Femme Infidele

Les Biches

Claude Chabrol Box Set

Que La Bete Meure

View more >

More films starring Stéphane Audran

Babettes Feast

by Gabriel Axel

La Femme Infidele

by Claude Chabrol

Les Biches

by Claude Chabrol

Les Noces Rouge

by Claude Chabrol

Juste Avant La Nuit

by Claude Chabrol

View more >

More films starring Jean Yanne

Indochine

by Regis Wargnier

Weekend

by Jean-Luc Godard

See How They Fall

by Jacques Audiard

Madame Bovary

by Claude Chabrol

Que La Bete Meure

by Claude Chabrol

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail