‘Inspector Lavardin’ or — Breaking the Law… and the Wind?
I was wondering how long it would be until Claude Chabrol’s sly sense of humour would make itself apparent during his second Inspector Lavardin movie (’Inspector Lavardin’ — 1986). Turns out almost immediately because get a load of this!
It starts with a middle-class, provincial family sitting down to a dinner of sardines and eggs. One of the diners grudgingly crosses himself during grace with obviously flippant contempt for the gesture. Their meal is interrupted. The head of the house goes to the door and is informed by a concerned party that a travelling avant-garde theatre group is about to stage a shocking new play that is highly blasphemous. This incendiary work is called ‘Our Father Who Farts in Heaven’. We then cut to a beach where a naked man has been washed up onto the shore but we’re not thinking about murder but the fact that naked middle-aged men’s bums look funny.
And all this takes place in the first three minutes meaning that before the credits have even rolled we’ve been treated to criticism of religion, a devastating destruction of provincial cuisine, a lampooning of experimental culture, the insincerity of outrage, fart gags and a naked bottom.
In fact, what with its ribald humour, heavy influence of silent cinema, parping music, naked bottoms and nearly all revolving around a large country house but shot with in a typically French fashion then ‘Inspector Lavardin’ almost (and I must stress the word “almost”) feels like watching ‘Futtocks End’ (1970) directed by Eric Rohmer. But doesn’t that sound great?
Unlike in the last film, where Lavardin doesn’t pop up until halfway through, here he’s full on centre of attention from practically the get-go which means we get to spend more time in his company as he scuttles about another tiny French village, banging into the locals and calling them out for their endless hypocrisies. If you’re an asshole, of any description, then Lavardin’s going to let you bloody well know it! So, like before, this is less a murder mystery (again, the plot here hardly matters) and more Chabrol holding the transparent toilet bowl of provincial French life up to the light and watching the turds float about whilst giggling to himself as they bump into each other. This is a very funny movie.
Yet once again, as with Chabrol’s previous ‘Cop au Vin’ (1985), it also acts as a playground for the director to consistently pull off moments of technical brilliance. There’s a fantastic example that I’ll briefly, if clunkily, describe. It goes something like this –
Lavardin is inspecting a nightclub when he notices the significance of where a light source is coming from. The camera moves in to focus on this light but in doing so explicitly highlights the artificial nature of everything we’re seeing, almost breaking the film’s illusion the way Welles does in ‘F for Fake’ (1973). We then cut to Lavardin in the nightclub owner’s bedroom where the significance of artificial lighting (and artificial staging) is continued. Lavardin then watches a video of the exact same room he is sitting in, noticing that the lighting is also the same. So we are looking at a man in a room observing the exact same space on a TV that’s in both rooms. Lavardin then turns off the overhead light so that the only thing visible is the TV screen which is now nothing more than a floating, glowing square of orange light surrounded by blackness. It’s as though all the separate, layered spaces and planes are now collected and nested onto each other, almost giving the impression of being transformed into a hologram that’s now viewable from any angle.
By reducing everything into a single, two dimensional square Chabrol has done something clever in that he has created a space that we can now “enter” into, which is exactly what the camera does as it pushes closer and closer towards the TV before, miraculously, penetrating through this pixelated veil. Oh, and all this takes place under a giant, red, all-seeing anus. And it’s done with no trickery other than camera placement, movement, lighting and the confidence and bravado that this idea will work and work well. Wow!
‘Inspector Lavardin’ is an extraordinarily inventive and cheeky movie that doesn’t seem to take France, people, cinema, art or even itself seriously for a second and which makes it delightfully liberating to watch. The plot is total bobbins but everything else around it — characters, dialogue, satire, visual puns, technical élan — mean that the story is the last thing you’ll be bothering paying attention to or looking at as to providing the film’s pleasures.
Although this is one of those movies that you might find it a little difficult to sit down again afterwards. This will be because of all the many bruises on your glutes you’ll now have from Chabrol having been mischievously pinching your bottom for the last couple of hours.
