Le Boucher

On a summer school trip, teacher Hélène makes a gruesome discovery: she finds a woman's body on the side of the road and right next to it the lighter she recently gave to Popaul Thomas, a butcher she met at a colleague's wedding. She panics: Is the likeable butcher the cruel murderer of women who has been wanted for some time...? "Claude Chabrol uses the criminal case to create a harrowing parable about the power of evil and the fragility of human order. The perfect balance of form and content makes the film a highlight of post-war French cinema. - Worth seeing." (Encyclopedia of International Film) "The radical emotional analysis, which Chabrol resumed with renewed vigor in ‘The Unfaithful Wife’ and ‘The Beast Must Die’, intensifies in ‘Butcher’ into an exemplary critique of the bourgeois milieu and its fatal antagonisms. Individual happiness succumbs to the weaknesses and constraints of a moral convention that tends towards destruction and the culture of death in everything. The hopelessness into which Chabrol always manoeuvres his characters in precise, cool, dramatically concrete images of contemplation and disturbance is, of course, not a private tragedy, but the result of a calculated radicalization that is a reality in everyday life." (Film tip in DIE ZEIT)