The Claude Chabrol Blogathon

Welcome to Ten Days’ Wonder: The Claude Chabrol Blogathon,* which I’ll be hosting from Sunday, June 21 through Tuesday, June 30. I ask the online film community to join me in honoring the artistry and proficiency of this unique and prolific filmmaker, as well as to celebrate Mr. Chabrol’s 79th birthday on June 24.

    Over the next ten days I’ll be posting thoughts, images, ramblings and reviews of his work, beginning with a bibliography of the online material that’s presently available. (Quite unexpectedly, Catherine Grant announced this blogathon on her indispensable Film Studies for Free, prompting me to believe she may have compiled a similar list. If this is the case, Catherine, please accept my humble apologies.) I will also attempt to provide a daily roundup of links to contributing blogs. To do so, I’ll need your help: please leave link(s) in the comments or send them by email. I’ll make every effort to post these links as soon as possible

~ Ten Days’ Wonder ~

Day One:

Flickhead: Reading Chabrol Online

Peter Nellhaus: Coffee Break

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: Back to Le Beau Serge

Day Two:

Flickhead: Class Status and Delusional Thinking

Jeff Duncanson: Que la bête meure

Peter Nellhaus: La Route de Corinthe

Vincent at Inisfree: Voyages avec Chabrol

Day Three:

Flickhead: Nada

Griffe: La Cérémonie de Chabrol

Ed Howard: Les Biches

Greg at Cinema Styles: Dreams… or Nightmares?

Day Four:

Flickhead: Joyeux Anniversaire Monsieur Chabrol!

Edisdead: Le Boucher de Chabrol

Ed Howard: Que la bête meure

Jeremy Nyhuis: L’enfer

Marilyn Ferdinand: Que la bête meure

Dr Orlof: Merci pour le chocolat

Day Five:

Richard T. Jameson: Claude Chabrol – The Classicist

Gareth: Claude Chabrol and Inspector Lavardin

Ed Howard: Le Boucher

Greg at Cinema Styles: Watch the Great Illusion Drown

Day Six:

Flickhead: Rien ne va plus

Temple of Schlock: Une Partie de plaisir

Ed Howard: Juste avant le nuit

Richard T. Jameson: La Femme infidèle

Edisdead: Juste avant la nuit

Day Seven:

Flickhead: Coffee break

Ed Howard: Les Noces rouges

C. Jerry Kutner: La Décade prodigieuse

Jean-Luc at Ciné-club: Le cri du Hibou

Day Eight:

Flickhead: Gallery

C. Jerry Kutner: Conversation with Chabrol

Ed Howard: Nada

Day Nine:

Flickhead: Fun facts!

Jeremy Nyhuis: La Cheval d'orgueil

Ed Howard: Une Partie de plaisir

Jeremy Richey: Les Biches

Bill R: La Fleur du mal

Day Ten:

Flickhead: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Chris Poggiali: Claude Chabrol Clippings

Ed Howard: Cop au vin

Catherine Grant: Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes femmes

Better Late Than Never:

Sean Axmaker: Claude Chabrol on DVD

Rick Olson: La Fleur du mal

*—Thanks to Peter Nellhaus for his title and format suggestions!

Chabrol Day Ten: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

I’d like to thank all of you who participated in the Chabrol blogathon (especially the tireless Ed Howard!), and leave with this connubial moment between Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet in La Femme infidèle (1969). Au revoir.

Chabrol Day Nine: Fun facts!

My introduction to the universe of Chabrol occurred in the early 1970s when I was a teenager, spending afternoons in the public library pouring over copies of Film Comment, Take One, Evergreen, and Cineaste. At first the name intrigued me — how many Chabrols do you know of? — followed by the films themselves. I loved horror, mystery and thrillers, and here was someone being hyped as the French Hitchcock.
    Leafing through an edition of John Willis’s Screen World, I was drawn to a photo of a gaunt man, scary and enraged, holding an infant over his head, poised to throw it. The caption said it was Jean Yanne in Chabrol’s Le Boucher. Right then and there, I needed to see the film, but how? Where? His films were difficult to find in my bucolic Long Island neighborhood, and I had yet to master the streets and avenues of Manhattan or discover the movie timetables of The New Yorker, Cue, The Village Voice or The Soho News. Not only did it take me over a decade to see Le Boucher, but also to realize the error in Willis’s book: the still was from La Rupture!

Paul Gégauff was a novelist and screenwriter who wrote the screenplays for Chabrol’s Les Cousins, À Double tour, Les Bonnes femmes, Les Godelureaux, L'oeil du malin, Ophélia, Les Plus belles escroqueries du monde, Le Scandale, Les Biches, Que la bête meure, Docteur Popaul, and Les Magiciens. He appeared onscreen in Chabrol’s La Ligne de démarcation, and wrote and starred in Une Partie de plaisir (‘a piece of pleasure’), based on his quasi-autobiographic novel. In it, Gégauff plays himself, co-starring with his ex-wife and daughter — none of whom were professional actors. “[Gégauff] fascinated me by pushing the limits of self-destruction,” said Chabrol, “by his taste for extraordinary paradoxes and his real elegance. But he also showed me just how far this could take him into self-destruction.” On Christmas Eve of 1983, Paul Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second wife.
    Among his pet themes were triangular relationships and the duality of nature, the merging of opposites exemplified by Les Biches (1968). In one scene in that film, Jacqueline Sassard’s character pretends to be Stéphane Audran in a mirror until realizing she’s being watched by Jean-Louis Trintignant. The scene was nearly identical to a moment in René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960), when Alain Delon mimics Maurice Ronet in a mirror. The earlier film was based on a Patricia Highsmith novel adapted by Gégauff. No fan of Clément, it’s doubtful Chabrol was aware that Gégauff had lifted from his own material.

Gégauff also inspired the character ‘Paul’ (sometimes ‘Popaul’ or ‘Paul Thomas’) who appeared in fourteen Chabrol films: Les Cousins, Ophélia, Le Scandale, Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture, Docteur Popaul, Les Noces rouges, Le Sang des autres, Une Affaire de femmes, L'enfer and La Fille coupée en deux. “Gégauff’s apparent racism and right-wing views, like his drinking and womanizing, made a tantalizing contrast with Chabrol’s own left-wing humanism, and his status as a Catholic family man,” wrote Guy Austin in Claude Chabrol (French Film Directors). “The attraction and contrast between Chabrol and Gégauff was to be represented time and again in two character types, Charles and Paul… Charles is an ironic version of the young Chabrol: innocent, reserved, repressed. Paul is Gégauff: cynical, charismatic, provocative.”

Consistent with his interest in mythology, ‘Hélène’ has been a recurring character in nine of Chabrol’s films. Inspired by Helénē of Troy — “the face that launched a thousand ships,” hence the catalyst or center of action — she’s been played most often by Stéphane Audran: L'oeil du malin, La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture, Juste Avant la nuit, Les Noces rouges, Le Sang des autres and Inspecteur Lavardin. In Greek mythology, Helénē was the daughter of Zeus and Leda; in Chabrol’s La Décade prodigieuse, Orson Welles plays the Zeus figure, while Leda is the mystery woman played by Antonella Lualdi in Chabrol’s À double tour.

Stéphane Audran, La Femme infidèle

The second Mrs. Chabrol, Stéphane Audran served as his Muse in twenty-three films: Les Cousins, Les Bonnes femmes, Les Godelureaux, L'oeil du malin, Landru, Le Tigre aime la chair fraiche, Paris vu par…, Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kha, La Ligne de démarcation, Le Scandale, Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Le Boucher, La Rupture, Juste Avant la nuit, Les Noces rouges, Folies bourgeoises, Les Liens de sang, Violette Nozière, Le Sang des autres, Poulet au vinaigre, Jours tranquilles à Clichy and Betty. Her biggest commercial and critical success to date is Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast.
    Her successor in the Chabrolian universe is Isabelle Huppert, who has starred in seven films: Violette Nozière, Une Affaire de femmes, Madame Bovary, La cérémonie, Rien ne va plus, Merci Pour le chocolat and L'ivresse du pouvoir. So respectful and trusting of the director, Huppert will reportedly do any Chabrol film without reading the script first.

Outside of a handful of films for Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy and Marcel Ophüls, cinematographer Jean Rabier worked almost exclusively with Chabrol throughout the 1960s and 70s, on forty pictures beginning with Le Beau Serge (1958), and ending with Madame Bovary (1991).

Most often as comedy relief, but also in straight dramatic parts, Chabrol has used Dominique Zardi in twenty-four films, and Henri Attal in twenty-six. They worked brilliantly together as a team, especially as the houseguests in Les Biches.

Thomas Chabrol

Claude’s son Thomas Chabrol has appeared in more than a dozen of his father’s films, making his debut at thirteen in Alice ou la dernière fugue. His jet-black eyebrows have been most visible in La Demoiselle d'honneur (as the detective), La fleur du mal (playing Nathalie Baye’s secretary), and L'ivresse du pouvoir (where he was Isabelle Huppert’s n'er-do-well nephew).

Pierre Jansen wrote the music for thirty of Chabrol’s films throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1980s, Claude’s son Matthieu Chabrol has been his primary composer with nineteen scores to his credit.

In 2002, I was approached by Pathfinder Home Entertainment to do audio commentaries on their then-forthcoming set of Chabrol DVDs. Then in its infancy, my Claude Chabrol Project provided perhaps more information on the filmmaker than anything else online save for the Internet Movie Database. With so few connections at hand (blogs and internet cinephilia had yet to blossom), I assume Pathfinder considered me a leading authority on Chabrol, to which I thought, “Ha!”
    At first I suggested that the eight films in their collection — Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Que la bête meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture, La Décade prodigieuse, Nada and Les Innocents aux mains sales — be accompanied by audio commentaries by eight different people, one for each picture, if just to break up the monotony. Having been a fan of Les Biches, I volunteered to do that one with the provision I’d need four weeks to write a script, something that would keep the viewer entertained and to prevent me from blank spaces and repeated ‘ums.’ However, Pathfinder imagined I could handle all eight commentaries myself — fifteen or sixteen hours of chat, to be recorded within three or four weeks, recording to begin immediately, airfare (New York to L.A.), food and hotel accommodations at my own expense. My reward for all of this: several copies of the boxed set.
    This is why you don’t hear my voice on any of Pathfinder’s films. I did manage to write a biography which can be found on most of the discs. But don’t bother searching for it. Pathfinder didn’t afford me the luxury of composing anything substantial or polished — what’s there is a hasty first draft, and not very good.
    The collection arrived in stores and languished on the shelves: not many people were willing to shell out seventy bucks. Pathfinder’s mad rush was unwarranted and eventually backfired. The commentaries they got were mediocre; the writers and academics from the L.A. area they called in seemed to lack any passion for Chabrol. Far worse were the film transfers: Le Boucher isn’t bad, but the others are blurry and faded, with La Décade prodigieuse an unmitigated disaster. To my eyes and ears, the films looked and sounded better on Connoisseur’s VHS series made fifteen years earlier.
    As if to atone for their misdeeds, Pathfinder’s subsequent audio commentary for Chabrol’s Une Partie de plaisir offers film critic Dan Yakir and screenwriter Ric Menello locked in a great discussion. The picture quality is substandard, but the audio track is exceptionally entertaining and informative. (Menello did an equally good job on All Day Entertainment’s Le cri du hibou DVD commentary.)

Chabrol Day Eight: Gallery

Click images to enlarge:


Bernadette Lafont in
À double tour
(1959)



Stéphane Audran and Bernadette Lafont in
Les Bonnes femmes
(1960)



Jean Seberg in
La Route de Corinthe
(1967)



Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran in
La Femme infidèle
(1969)



Claude Chabrol



Chabrol portrait by Roberto Frankenberg



Chabrol portrait by Serge Cohen



Juliette Mayniel and Gérard Blain in
Les Cousins
(1959)



Stéphane Audran, Lucile Saint-Simon, Bernadette Lafont and Clotilde Joano in a publicity still for
Les Bonnes femmes



A double tour?



Jacqueline Sassard (right) ‘enters’ Stéphane Audran in
Les Biches
(1968)



Group hug: Stéphane Audran, Dominique Zardi and Henri Attal in
Les Biches



Jacqueline Sassard sheds a crocodile tear before Henri Attal (left) and Dominique Zardi
Les Biches



Koncert Kalamity: Henri Attal, Dominique Zardi and Stéphane Audran in
Les Biches



Chabrol with Isabelle Huppert



Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran (perhaps at her most beautiful) in
Juste avant la nuit
(1971)



Screenwriter Paul Gégauff and wife Danièle playing characters not unlike themselves in Chabrol’s
Une partie de plaisir
(1975)



Benoît Magimel and Laura Smet in
La Demoiselle d'honneur
(2004)

Chabrol Day Seven: Coffee break

A lazy afternoon, coffee, a bath, two beautiful women, one rich, the other poor… one attempting to break down the other’s defenses for possession or ownership… sex in Chabrol is never easy… it often results in sacrifice — in principles, or your soul…

    This opening from Les Biches (1968) is laced with quiet, smoldering tension which later envelopes these disparate, desperate characters. The director’s pet concerns with class conflict and power plays are handled by Jacqueline Sassard, her drifting street artist carrying the enigmatic, confusing and unlikely moniker ‘Why,’ the sad little waif as Playboy model; and Stéphane Audran’s Frédérique, a moneyed, impeccably tanned ice cube who lives for fleeting pleasures, control and consumption.

    Twenty-eight at the time, Les Biches is Sassard’s last film to date. After Valerio Zurlini’s Violent Summer (1959) and a run of innocuous movies (including a pair of Steve Reeves fantasies), she appeared in Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967) before working with Chabrol. If anyone knows why she retired, or if she’s still alive, please leave a comment.

Chabrol Day Six: Rien ne va plus

With the release of La Cérémonie in 1995, Claude Chabrol caught the public and critics unawares. Although he’d had successes with both Une affaire de femmes (The Story of Women, 1988) and Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie was a return to form — in the ambiguous outskirts of the thriller genre — after a rather depressing slump in the 1980s. His forty-ninth feature, it had some fans hoping his fiftieth would be both milestone and masterpiece.

    Instead he delivered Rien ne va plus, released in America as The Swindle (1997), a wry comedy lodged in a study of con artists, and a decided departure from La Cérémonie’s chilly class struggles and manipulative mind games. But part of Chabrol’s allure has always been his gleeful resolve to derail expectation. For those who (often misguidedly) measure Chabrol to Hitchcock, however, one comparison seemed apt: if La Cérémonie was Chabrol’s Frenzy, then The Swindle was his Family Plot.

    Hitchcock feeds us information to move from point A to point B; Chabrol is drawn to the quirks of his characters, their meals and environments, with virtually no interest in Macguffins or climactic payoffs. Although this has unsettled and disappointed people for decades, the director couldn’t care less. (Although his Bovary was a rare excursion into Merchant Ivory territory.) Hence, The Swindle, a peripheral member of a con game sub-genre that would include Barbet Schroeder’s Tricheurs (1984), Stephen Frears’s The Grifters (1990) and David Mamet’s House of Games (1987) and Heist (2001), shares absolutely none of their calculated tension, nor does it explore that fastidiousness and passion that motivates obsessed, edgy people.

    So when Betty, who’s sometimes called Elizabeth (Isabelle Huppert), carries out her fleecing schemes with the older Victor, who’s sometimes called the Colonel (Michel Serrault, twenty-five years her senior), the script casually sidesteps the mechanics of the sting to gaze at a pair who could be lovers, or father and daughter. Though she occasionally calls him ‘daddy,’ we’re never quite sure who they are or what they mean to each other — which is Chabrol practicing the art of the con on us.

    As Victor eyes her, concerned and jealous (she’s gone solo to bilk an affluent courier and potential bed partner played by François Cluzet), Chabrol pans over them as they sit in an audience before a strange and tranquil performance, a staged butterfly dance, an improvisational piece of choreography that may have crossed the director’s path in nightclubs ages ago, back when patrons still remembered Loïe Fuller.

Brygida Ochaim performs the Butterfly Dance in The Swindle

    It isn’t the first time Chabrol has relied on a musical interlude to monitor reactions and idiosyncrasies, and it’s evident that, while music may calm the savage beast, it provides only temporary relief: the piano duets between a father and his would-be daughter in Merci pour le chocolat (2000); the uneasy double date taking in stripper Dolly Bell in Les Bonnes femmes (1960); the cacophonous ‘concert’ by the tenants in Les Biches (1968); the family watching Don Giovanni in La Cérémonie.

    Chabrol’s fragments of plot in The Swindle (he wrote and directed) become a veiled critique of human foibles, where love is indefinable and uncertain. Do the antiseptic hotel rooms and snowy northern exteriors reflect the celibacy of Betty and Victor’s relationship? Perhaps. But equally elusive are the genre conventions that the filmmaker could have employed without breaking a sweat. When the couple dupe a hotel guest in the opening vignette, the set up of scenes and the rhythm of the editing are masterful, pointing toward a dramatic payoff that never arrives. In its place, the showdown with the professional thief, Mr. K (Jean-François Balmer) is a nod to Kafka, the world of compulsion, self will run riot, and persecution… but is barely connected to the threads leading up to it than to Chabrol’s understated condemnation of bourgeois control. That the scene is overlong, overplayed and in need of paring reveals a lack of objectivity (and a slight clumsiness with broad comedy), over a theme that has dogged the director since Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins (1959).

    Back then Chabrol was still an active film critic and a stickler for auteur principles; and if he judged, say, Howard Hawks, on his complete body of work rather than the individual films, it may be necessary for us to place The Swindle in a small area off to the side of a larger canvas. It’s doubtful that Chabrol ever had a formal game plan for his career, or that his disparate band of pictures would ever combine to form a cohesive oeuvre. However, if we allow the deviation of character and the subversion of genre, a curious, serpentine creature arises out of these muted portraits — but very little can be gleaned from one, two or perhaps even three viewings of any single film, especially one as opaque as The Swindle.

    For over thirty years, Chabrol has cast Isabelle Huppert in more than a half dozen pictures, her pasty, freckled indifference working to camouflage some unspoken, burning desire hinted at but rarely exposed. (The actress — who can work with her choice of directors — once admitted she’d work with Chabrol regardless of what the scripts were about.) While the actress is not easily sold as a tart, her Betty is skillfully realized, snug and secure alongside Victor while still credible as a kind of trophy in the paradoxical and strained presence of Cluzet’s Maurice.

    Michel Serrault, who first worked with Chabrol in Les Fantômes du shapelier (The Hatter’s Ghost, 1982), imbues Victor with the faraway look of someone planning his next move while being haunted by specters from the past. His one solace — fatty, greasy foods — becomes a running gag for the director, whose obsession with cuisine long ago established a recurring leitmotif. When Victor receives a gratis (charity) gyro from a street vendor (played by Chabrol regular Henri Attal), it’s a slap at his pride and one of the film’s numerous jabs at ego.

    Whether The Swindle is or isn’t ‘lesser’ Chabrol is irrelevant when placed in the context of his body of work. On the heels of La Cérémonie and preceding the sleepy Au coeur du mensonge (The Color of Lies, 1999), this loose, ostensibly freewheeling caper comedy adds yet another piece to a puzzle that will likely remain unsolved. We may criticize Chabrol now for not meeting the expectations of genre and convention, but in the end he’s simply demonstrating the uncertainties of reality and the shifting sands of time. A brilliant social critic and satirist, Chabrol’s hunger for the truth remains as acute today as ever.

Chabrol Day Four: Joyeux Anniversaire Monsieur Chabrol!

Claude Chabrol: an online dossier

Chabrol Day Three: Nada

Made near the end of Claude Chabrol’s fruitful association with producer André Génovès, Nada (1974) retreats from the subtlety of their late-60’s work (Les Biches, La Femme infidèle, Le Boucher) nearly to the kitsch level of the director’s mid-60’s period. James Bond met the nouvelle vague in Chabrol’s Le Tigre Aime la Chair Fraiche (1964) and Marie-Chantal Contre le Docteur Kha (1965), but the political themes underlining Nada extend well beyond their limits. It satirizes conservative rightwing oppression and paranoia, while seasoning its anarchist characters with surreal humor.

    Nada, or The Nada Gang, is based on a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995), a one-time political activist, TV screenwriter and literary critic. He was an active member of the Serie Noire movement, imbuing his hardboiled fiction with leftwing undertones. Chabrol’s ongoing preoccupation with caste warfare complimented the plight of the terrorists in Manchette’s story, and now in the aftermath of 9-11, Nada may appear more controversial today than when it was first released.

    It traces the pecking order of the upper class, old money manipulating the nouveau riche. Driven by control issues, their vanity jeopardized by social upheaval (plebeian terrorists are holding an American diplomat hostage), each rank of wealth passes responsibility down to the next, until a life-or-death situation lands in the hands of a wholly corrupt, boorish detective. All of these characters are illustrated as earthy slobs, but Chabrol isn’t terribly charitable to the terrorists, either: they’re a hodgepodge of alcoholics, idealists, poseurs and impotent romantics.

    Their name, Nada (‘nothing’), was an obvious metaphor signaling Manchette’s disillusionment over the failure of the left to unite against rightwing oppression. One character in particular, Treuffais (Michel Duchaussoy), is a frazzled intellectual nearing breakdown. “Leftist terrorism and state terrorism,” he claims in his manifesto, “are the twin jaws of the same trap.” Cineastes have credited Chabrol for using him to poke fun at Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais in the character and the name of ‘Treuffais,’ but it’s Manchette’s invention, just as the rest of the picture is generally faithful to the book.

    Nada makes its way through garish mansions and ornate offices to fleabag hotel rooms and a ramshackle farmhouse — locations which serve as nondescript digs for transients, whether they’re social outcasts or elected officials. The amateurish and clumsy action scenes, as they are, venture toward parody. It’s been said that you can gauge Chabrol’s interest in his material through the cuisine that’s shown onscreen, but here the director’s obligatory food scene is reduced to the mention of a steak dinner and a quick glimpse of a cop gobbling up a sandwich. Most of this bunch chugs down alcohol, often straight from the bottle.

    A subversive work concocted in a fever, a story we’re told that’s “pure fiction and therefore not unimaginable,” Chabrol has assembled what can only be called an idiosyncratic cast, from Lou Castel (from Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in His Pocket), to the undervalued Euro heartthrob Fabio Testi, and Mariangela Melato (fresh from Lina Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy). With her uncharacteristically short blonde hair and piercing almond eyes, Melato appears eerily reminiscent of Chabrolian muse Stéphane Audran.


Available from Amazon

Chabrol Day Two: Class status and delusional thinking

Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel may be the cinema’s preeminent critics of bourgeois foibles, but consider this passage from Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995). Buried in the bustle of the Lelievre family’s activities, Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) asks housekeeper Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) if she can work overtime on Sunday for the daughter’s birthday party. Sophie says no, she already has plans, but she’ll do what she can before she leaves for the day. Catherine says she understands. Sunday rolls around, Sophie does what she said she’d do and Catherine hits the roof. I can’t think of an instance when either Renoir or Buñuel paid proper attention to this sort of elitist backpedaling. Perhaps they were too engaged in the highlife to notice.

In the scene below, Sophie is on the left, Catherine on the right:

Catherine: By the way, it’s Melinda’s birthday on Sunday.


Catherine: We’ll be having some guests. Can you be there?


Sophie: Well, on Sunday…


Sophie: I’m volunteering at the church.
Catherine: Really?


Sophie: The postal clerk and I are going to sort clothes.
(Catherine chuckles in disbelief)


Catherine: I understand.


Catherine (condescending): Listen, do what you can.


Catherine: I’ll try to manage myself.

~ Sunday ~


Sophie prepares food for the party


(Sophie brings food trays to the guests)
Catherine: Put them on the table.


Catherine (to her son, Gilles, played by Valentin Merlet): Dear, could you ask Sophie for some ice?


Gilles returns with the ice
Catherine: Thanks dear, where’s Sophie?


Gilles: She’s not there.


Catherine: What do you mean?


Catherine (agitated): What’s going on here?


Catherine goes to the kitchen


The food, plates and utensils are ready, but Sophie’s not there


Catherine (announces to the guests, disturbed): I can’t believe it!


Catherine: She took off!