Jusqu’au bout de la Nouvelle Vague: Claude Chabrol’s (and Paul Gégauff’s) Une partie de plaisir

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyses Claude Chabrol’s 1975 Une partie de plaisir, and aims to show that many of its features seem to implicitly belie the premises tacitly underlying the Nouvelle Vague movement, thereby ideally marking its end. It does so by particularly focusing on the peculiar circumstances behind the production of that film (starring Paul Gégauff, who also wrote the script, in a largely autobiographical role along with his real-life former wife), as well as on the elements that Chabrol borrowed from the films of his masters, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. Ultimately, the author argues that Philippe, the hero of this film, overtly enacts the male chauvinism that covertly informs a significant part of the Nouvelle Vague, and overcomes it by destroying himself. His unsuccessful pursuit of the bourgeois patriarchal dream of a perfect balance between marriage and adultery can be regarded as matching the Nouvelle Vague’s short-lived utopia of reproducing Hollywood’s balance between the rule and its exception, namely between the law and its transgression (this is what ultimately the ‘politique des auteurs’ was about), by staying faithful to Hollywood’s classicism while recurring to fully modern cinematic means.