Claude Chabrol’s Structural Innovations

Posted on 01 April 2008 by Gary Karbon

Claude Chabrol is one of my five favorite French directors. (The other four are Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Francois Ozon.)

With a career spanning over 40 years, Chabrol gave us many fascinating films; some with thought-provoking innovations that reshaped my understanding of the 3-Act Structure.

Here I'd like to mention two of them that I especially like: the emergent antagonist, and multiple culprits.

1) By "emergent antagonist" I refer to a major non-Protagonist character who is absent until almost the mid-point. But once he or she is introduced, the rest of the film pivots on this character's actions.

This is contrary to everything I've been taught in the screenwriting classes I took and the screenwriting books I've read in the past. All important characters are supposed to be introduced within the first 15 minutes of a film and developed steadily for the rest of story. But Chabrol does not mind introducing some of his most important characters a full hour into the story.

Take Detective Goemond in Nada (1974), for example, played by Michel Aumont. Until almost mid-point of the film Goemond is absent. But after the first half, he emerges as the chief semi-Antagonist (not a bad guy but not a sympathetic character either) driving the main plot line for the rest of the film.

Again, take the Paul Thomas character in La Rupture (1970) played by Jean-Pierre Cassel. Thomas is a depraved character, a hired hand, ready to the dirty bidding of his master. But we do not see him until we are almost an hour into the story. And once he steps into the camera's view, he is in almost every frame until the end.

Such late introduction of the antagonistic characters throws the story into a spin that we are not used to in the classic Hollywood productions.

2) "Multiple culprits" is what Chabrol uses in his great crime thriller The Color of Lies (1999) (Au coeur du mensonge).

Watch this film to realize how much we are conditioned by Hollywood's often repeated "serial killer" formula. I have watched so many American films built on that premise that I didn't realize the extent to which I'm accustomed to looking for a single killer that commits all the murders in a crime thriller.

Chabrol's freedom in breaking away from that rigid formula all of a sudden opens wide the doors of imagination and all kinds of different possibilities.

Through such freedom, art again becomes a true reflection of the richness of life; of the way things happen "out there" in infinitely complex permutations. It suddenly gets "real" and we feel refreshed and alive.

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