Review of Rien Ne Va Plus

Introduction

The French take their movies very seriously. Most of the buzzwords you`d come across on a Media Studies degree (stuff like cineaste, auteur and mise-en-scene) are terms coined by influential French movie critics of the 1950s and 1960s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema. Hell, they rate Jerry Lewis as a serious comic genius while his countrymen think of him as an aging charity telethon host. They invented the term auteur for Alfred Hitchcock rather than any French director.

Claude Chabrol is, like fellow nouvelle vague (new wave) director Francois Truffaut, a former Cahiers du Cinema critic turned movie-maker. The same time that British cinema was declining in the face of television and American cinema was upping budgets to compete with the same foe, French cinema was enjoying a renaissance. Chabrol, Truffaut, Roger Vadim, Jean-Luc Godard and a group of other young directors were finding a ready market for their movies in the closing years of the 1950s, movies which challenged conventions of moviemaking as well as the French culture they were the product of.

Many of the young gun directors were former critics contributing to Cahiers du Cinema, and all were steeped in the new film theory. Chabrol had written an influential text on the work of Alfred Hitchcock in 1957 aged 27. His move behind the movie camera gave him the opportunity to echo the same delight in the subversive as the Master. His films are blackly satirical, observations of the weakness and stupidity of people.

Rien Ne Va Plus was Chabrol`s 50th movie. It is a thriller-comedy (there are moments of brutality that stop the movie being a comedy-thriller) about con artists Betty (Isabelle Huppert) and Victor (Michel Serrault) whose cons go awry when they choose a fresh mark whose money happens to belong to the Mob.

It`s an entertaining enough thriller. Huppert is the femme fatale who lures businessmen up to their rooms, slips them a mickey and then cleans them out while they`re crashed out fully-clad on the bed. Serrault is her father-figure associate (their relationship is typically ambiguous). In the hands of an American director, the story would probably be more broadly comic, like Heartbreakers (2001) or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), but Chabrol`s story is subtler. When the Mob catch up with them, however, there is an underlying menace that changes the mood of the movie. Some violence earns the picture a 15 rating.

Video

The movie is presented in anamorphic widescreen 16:9. The image is excellent quality, the movie only being nine years old. There are no digital or film artefacts to spoil the viewing experience.

Audio

The soundtrack is in the original French, reproduced as Dolby Digital 2.0

Features

Selected scenes (out of context from the movie) can be viewed with an audio commentary by Claude Chabrol. The commentary is in French, with English player-generated (and mandatory) subtitles the same as the main feature.

Conclusion

The title Rien Ne Va Plus comes from the roulette tables when the croupier stops any further betting on the table ahead of spinning the wheel. The movie is a sly Hustle-type caper about two con-artists relieving randy businessmen of their credit cards and travellers` cheques. Then Betty snares the big one - a chump carrying 5Million Swiss francs. Unfortunately, the francs belong to the Mob, and Betty and Victor may have bitten off more than they could chew. Full of twists and turns, it`s an entertaining movie but isn`t light enough for my tastes.