In 1931 Fritz Lang had the nerve to envision the perspective of a serial child murderer in his breakthrough film, “M”. Since then, cinema has been fascinated with serial killers, and most of these films, unlike Lang’s film, treat these murders as psychotic monsters. In 1970, French director Claude Chabrol went one step further, visualizing an empathetic view of a serial killer with his thriller, “The Butcher”.
Popaul (Jean Yanne) is the son of a village butcher, who has just returned from a 15-year stint in the army, to take over his father’s butcher shop. He is a hardened army veteran who witnessed many atrocities while serving in Vietnam and Algeria. We later learn that he grew up in an unloving home and was sensitive to the suffering of the animals killed for food by his father. On his return to the village he encounters the pretty school headmistress Helene (Stephane Audran). They are both attracted to each other, and their first acquaintance at a wedding allowed me to believe that it was the beginning of a romantic tryst. Helene, for her part, had her heart broken in the past. She is perfectly content in not allowing Popaul to get to close for fear of getting hurt. At the same time young women are savagely being murdered in and around the village. Is it a coincidence that the murders started around the time that Popaul has returned to the village?
Chabrol was a great Hitchcock enthusiast and there are similarities within the character of Papaul to Norman Bates (The killer in Pyscho) and Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant’s character in Suspicion). Here Chabrol out-does Hitchcock in combining the romantic with the psychotic. There is a slow eloquent pace to the movie as most of the film revolves around Papaul’s courting of Helene. There are long tracking shots that worked in sucking me into the small French village atmosphere. During many of these shots Helene plays it cool with Papaul who is almost shy in his attempts at getting close to her. They are both quite likeable in these early scenes.
I felt a similarity to Hitchcock’s, “The Birds”, with that movie’s early romantic setting. In both films there is a seemingly innocent and budding romance developing while still retaining an ominous tone that prepares us for the horrifying twist to come. When a victim’s blood appears for the first time in the movie it is subtle and shocking at the same time. Chabrol makes a point of showing the horrific nature of the crimes being committed through the unexpectedness of their sudden appearance.
This is a movie about the humanity found within the criminally insane. There are constant references to the slaughtering of animals, the horrors of war, and abuse of children, that together bring a sort of understanding as to how a mind can go terribly wrong. Love is combined with tortured hate to portray a complicated picture. Keeping emotional turmoil bottled up can result in terrible consequences and that is one of the main themes to the movie.
As Helene, Audran gives a reserved performance that seems to mimic the cold blond female protagonists from Hitchcock’s many films. In Chabrol’s movie there is a very direct explanation to her cold behavior. She was very much in love with someone in her past, and this person’s desertion resulted in her being emotionally devastated. Her attraction to Popaul scares her and confuses her at the same time. In the movie’s finale, her inner emotions finally break through. As Papaul, Yanne has the difficult task of portraying a man with inner demons that he struggles to control. His subtle performance works to convey this struggle. The two main actor’s abilities to convey these issues while showing a believable tale of falling in love is the facet of the movie that makes it’s more sinister elements work.
“The Butcher”, is not your typical thriller about a serial killer. It is a psychological tale of the human condition told through the eyes of psychologically damaged people. This is what makes the movie more chilling then thrilling.
1001 Movies before you die 