Le Boucher: Amazon.ca: St�phane Audran, Jean Yanne, Antonio Passalia, Pascal Ferone, Mario Beccara, William Gu�rault, Roger Rudel, Jean Rabier, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Gaillard, Andr� G�nov�s: DVD

Product Description

From Amazon.com

This 1969 masterpiece by Claude Chabrol is a high point of the French New Wave director's mid-career, as well as that of actress Stephane Audran, Chabrol's then-wife. Audran plays a lonely schoolteacher who develops an inexplicable draw toward an ex-army butcher (Jean Yanne) who may or may not be a serial killer plaguing a small town. Drawing on Hitchcockian themes of exchanged guilt and shared secrets, Chabrol constructs an extraordinary relationship between the two characters that marries unspoken self-awareness with constant suspense over the unresolved nature of their bond. The film becomes so responsive to their tiny, meaningful gestures, their pregnant silences, and the comic-tragic synchronicity of their insulated world that the mere blinking of an elevator light speaks volumes about the hell of privileged knowledge. Le Boucher returned Chabrol to the backdrop of the French provinces, which he had visited before in his debut, Le Beau Serge, and later in La Ceremonie. --Tom Keogh

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

8 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

4.4 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most helpful customer reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars DVD info, May 23 2003

By

Gary W. McClintock (Clive, IA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Le Boucher (DVD)

According to the packaging this DVD is meant to be letter-boxed (enhanced for 16X9 televisions). Yes and no. On my up-scale DVD player the DVD projects in full-screen mode. Like most DVD players in the U.S. there is no X-Y feature to correct this. My odd ball brand region-free DVD player does, however, play the DVD in letterbox (though it needed quite a lot of correcting using the X-Y feature). Go figure. Since the film is a wide aspect ratio (the packaging doesn't state the ratio but I'm guessing somewhere around 2.7:1) it is very important that it be viewed letterbox. The DVD has an audio commentary delivered by a couple film school teachers who spend a little too much time entertaining each other, though I've heard much worse commentaries on much more expensive DVDs. The only other special feature is a trailer. Obviously I'm rating the DVD high on the basis of the film alone. Le Boucher is a great film. Chabrol's films frequently have a plot arch that is virtually flat. Everybody compares Chabrol to Hitchcock, and there are certainly plenty of visual references to Hitchcock, but Hitchcock would never tell stories this way, without melodrama, about people this irredeemably emotionally blunted. (IMDB has some reviews of this film that miss the point that the teach Helene is every bit as evil as the butcher.) Not every Chabrol film works for me every viewing but I've never been able to turn away when watching this film.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A poor version of a great movie, Aug 1 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Le Boucher (DVD)

As an earlier reviewer has observed this film needs to be seen letterboxed. Despite saying 'letterboxed' on the DVD box, this version (from Patherfinder Home Entertainment) could not be viewed by my standard DVD player in letterbox form.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

4.0 out of 5 stars Not quite meaty enough, July 28 2011

By

David M. Goldberg (Toronto, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Le Boucher (DVD)

Of 7 reviews attributed to purchasers of this DVD version of Le Boucher, only 3 qualify, the other 4 being reviews of a VHS tape. Two of the former complain of problems caused by the letterbox format and the 3rd makes no mention of this difficulty. My disc is the Pathfinder product that I simply inserted into my Blu-Ray player with no problem whatsoever. The picture filled my entire screen without any intervention on my part. What I did find irritating is that I could not play the rather trivial extras that comprise text biographies on Chabrol, Audran and Yanne. These are more than two pages long, but pressing CONTINUE on Page 2 consistently returned me back to the first page. As for the film itself, it hardly qualifies as a thriller in my lexicon. Its joys are provided by the lovely scenery of its setting, the Dordogne, and the affectionate picture of French provincial life as well as the characters who inhabit that tranquil milieu. It is absorbing in its slow and subtle exploration of the intensifying relationship between the butcher and the schoolteacher. The director probes the personality and psychology of his characters with great insight, but he lacks plausibility in having his main witness decline any co-operation with the police, at a crucial point in the middle and once again at the end. The art work that serves as the background for the opening credits is quite lovely, and paradoxically provides one of the rare moments of suspense in the film that, throughout, is beautifully shot, with an abundance of well-constructed frames. Indeed, the movie is almost too visually attractive to be a genuine thriller, and the plot is too simple to offer the intellectual excitement that we get in the films of Melville and Clouzot. The skilful sound track that is sparingly used, more than the words or the images, helps to create occasional moments of genuine suspense. As a thriller it is a failure, but call it an idyllic melodrama and it comes close to a minor masterpiece.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 8 customer reviews on Amazon.ca

Want to see more reviews on this item?

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 17 reviews 4.3 out of 5 stars

Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars ...a passionate story in the backdrop of murder...
Le Boucher is a passionate story about the French countryside butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne) falling in love with the town's head teacher, Helene (Stéphane Audran), which is... Read more

Published on May 22 2004 by Kim Anehall

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ancient and the New
Superb. Excellent. And every other superlative you can think of.
Funny how when you see a bad or flawed movie you are full of words but in the presaence of a masterpiece you... Read more

Published on Jun 30 2002 by Doug Anderson