HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

zezidud This film is a work of such blatant charlatanry that it calls into question the meaning of the word 'auteur' as it is applied to the French new wave directors. Such is the awe with which Chabrol was and continues to be regarded (including by Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby) that he apparently felt he could get away with anything. Le Boucher is a film so utterly devoid of dramatic interest that it would be charitable to regard it as a failed experiment that attempted to push the limits of cinematic exposition to an extremity of emptiness. I might forgive Chabrol for writing and producing it if his intention was to demonstrate the boring predictability of bourgeois culture in a place like Perigord, but I'd prefer to spend an hour and a half doing my laundry.

johnnyboyz Claude Chabrol's film, The Butcher, is a brooding, menacing character study held together by two central characters occupying the space of a small, French town and getting along overly well with one another. Each of them share respective back-stories which flit between being emotionally tragic and gut-wrenchingly unfortunate; stories most certainly enough to visibly shake either member of this pairing and, you'd hope, enough to affect even that of an outsider to these two people hearing of times gone by in each of these respective people's lives. One of the two people, Jean Yanne's character named Popaul, is the town's local butcher; a man whom has fought on the front-line of war and has consequently witnessed bloody warfare. He finds solace, now, in chopping up meat and serving it to the locals whereas prim primary school teacher Hélène (Audran) has settled down as a live-in headmistress at a respected school raising and teaching the young pupils whom frequent; this, after still coming to terms with a relationship with a man which, in her eyes, should have resulted in a consequent marriage and the bringing up of children.The film is about the duality the pair of them share in this sense, their ways of finding personal parity with what it is that's happened to them in their lives in the form of respective tragedies, and how their ideas of respective 'treatment' concurrently are actually lifestyles more eerily linked to that of the ingredients of what it was that upset them in the first place. It is a darkly brilliant piece, an intimate character study about two people moving closer to the items that have effectively made them the near-enough to a psychological wreck that they are; Hélène's process of keeping a happy face and effectively nurturing young children with their education and during field days the emotional proving to oneself that she can, in fact, play the mothering role. For Popaul, his demons more broadly linked to that of a the bloody war-field upon which he served time sees him draw upon a grotesque fascination with blood; an obsession which does not allow him to keep away from the sight he hates most and consequently sees him mutate into a serial killer.No doubt lending great inspiration to the later works of about ten years or so in Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, itself a film about an innocent woman coming to bond with a serial killing male, Chabrol's piece fits nicely into that cinematic canon of around about the time when serial killers were permitted to be among us, have lives as well as jobs and were most importantly, constructed as human beings whom carried with them flaws that made them who they were rather than being rendered faceless, mindless monsters. The American study of similar subsistence begins with Hitchcock's Psycho and flows all the way through to The Boston Strangler as the best of the time exploring said ideas.The film is, of course, about this serial killer but it is not so much preoccupied with whom it is that's carrying out the killings told from the perspective of police officers as much as it is how somebody completely unbeknownst to such techniques of detecting comes to innocently bond with such a beast. It is hardly revealing that Yanne plays such a character, such a fact is core to the film's experience. The film begins with a series of cave paintings, odd works of art occupying a dark and dingy dwelling as compositions of objects periodically arrive on our screens in a fashion which makes it near impossible to make out; that sense of a distorted psychosis or of an unbalanced psyche furthermore causing an unwavered or unfocused perspective prominent. What then happens is a cut to an establishing shot of a quaint French town, somewhere cut off from most places and seemingly basking in the glory of anonymity and processes of eventlessness; but there is trouble within. Within the town, a wedding plays out; a young couple getting married with joy and happiness appearing plentiful; the wedding eventually giving way not to the story of the bride or groom and their tribulations but to the two eventual leads sharing a walk away from such items as marriage, companionship, exuberance, triumph and whatnot.Amidst the beauty lies ugliness; a young woman has already been found murdered nearby shocking everyone within the radius, the establishing of the killer's apparent lust for the death of people of the victim's age and gender not boding well when we realise the film will come to stick with young Hélène. Chabrol makes us symptomatically aware of both Hélène's vulnerability and Popaul's apparent untrustworthiness by lingering on Hélène as she walks away down a street from a perspective which is difficult to label as Popaul's, but is no-less a composition which additionally lingers by his side, inferring that it is his gaze. What follows is a quite brilliant exploration of these two coming to form a tie with one another, a platonic attraction seeing Popaul once again become infatuated with something he is supposed to feel such disdain toward, the results of which are violent outbursts, while Hélène herself cannot quite come to break down demons linked to that of refraining to engage in relations following her past tragedy. It is an unnerving but brutally effective piece, a studying of a serial killer at large whom of course we want caught, but seemingly not if it means our protagonist, whom we've come to care for dearly, must suffer further set-backs to that of the one she did before. The film is swift and decisive, an agonising character study cutting through what it is that makes its two leads tick and doing so with ruthless efficiency.

Claudio Carvalho In the village of Tremolat, Périgord, the lonely headmistress Helene Daville (Stéphane Audran) befriends the local butcher Paul Thomas (Jean Yanne), who has a trauma of war, in the wedding party of her colleague Leon Hamel (Mario Beccara). In spite of their friendship, they do not become lovers since Helene is still recovering from the disillusion of her last relationship. In Paul's birthday, Helene gives a lighter to him as a gift. During the excursion with her class to a cave in the woods, Helene finds the last victim of a serial killer that is stabbing young women in the area. She realizes that the woman is Leon's wife and she finds Paul's lighter in the crime scene but she hides the evidence from the police. When Paul visits her, she discovers that he still has the lighter and she feels relieved. However, when Paul paints the ceiling of her house, she makes a discovery that affects her sense of security.The unknown gem "Le Boucher" is a dark, intriguing and suspenseful love story by Claude Chabrol. The plot is completely unusual and very simple, it is not tagged by an specific genre and can be resumed in the storyline; however, the screenplay, direction, performances and camera work make the difference. The opening scene shows a beautiful area in the countryside of France where the plot takes place. Helene is a fascinating character with her contradictory and ambiguous behavior and relationship with Popaul. Their chemistry is also perfect. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "O Açougueiro" ("The Butcher")Note: On 06 February 2011 I saw this film again on DVD.

MisterWhiplash Claude Chabrol, the French director of many thrillers and dramas and other genres, is at his best when subtly but forcefully pulling the rug out from the viewer. This isn't your usual case of a romance story criss-crossed with a serial killer thriller. In fact, we're not made very much aware that there is a serial killer- save for a few mentions here and there- until halfway through the movie, and by the time we are it's full-throttle in a kind of expertly manipulated suspense, not in the usual sense but through an ominous musical score by Pierre Jansen and a movement of fluidity with the camera that tells the story sort of conventionally but not at the same time. It's a small, master's class in subverting the genre by making us care so much about the characters even as we know they're doomed from the happy opening.That's not to say that Chabrol has made anything that can't be enjoyed by one looking for a good entertaining thriller first and foremost. If anything the opening of the movie is what lures one in perfectly, as it's a very jovial in this wedding sequence one sees guests school-teacher Helene (Stephane Audran, Chabrol regular) and butcher Paul (Jean Yanne, perfect as the butcher), enjoying themselves and making good conversation. This stretches out into the first half of the film; a friendship develops around food that Paul brings over, and it's only when Paul thinks its time to go the 'next step' that he's told it can't be because of a past horrible relationship that Helen faced- horrible in the sense of disappointment. There's a disconnect emotionally that is left open, thus, going into the second half of the film, where finally we see what some of us would be waiting for: the serial killer plot.There's a string of murders involving women, and one of them- the bride from the opening- is a shocker not exactly for the revelation itself, per-say, but how Chabrol builds up to it. At first it's seen as the most suspenseful thing in the film so far as Helen leads her class along a mountainside and stops to have lunch. The music is playing right here, and it's really chilling for how simple it lays out the tension, like a weirdo standing across the street in a black cloak acting suspicious but, at the same time, too subtle to pin down. This adds to the sudden shock, then, after the music stops and finally the reveal happens via blood dripping on the kid's sandwich. This, however, is just one example of Chabrol's calm mastery as a director of the material.It would be one thing to go on and on about the eerie absorption of the camera-work, which goes between conventional stylization (for a French film of the period) and poetic editing and framing. Or to go on and on about the stunning work turned by Audran (going between an entire emotional palette, as it were, from happy to sobbing to frightened to pale and shot to hell) and Yanne (also great at what he's meant to be, our male protagonist and, sadly, eventual antagonist by default). But it's the emotional struggle that makes this compelling above all other good reasons to recommend.The Butcher posits a relationship that is platonic, naturalistic, and genuinely interesting; these aren't cookie-cutter characters but well-drawn and with things that make them identifiable even as they, early on, seem to go on about trivial things not related to the plot (a little like a Woody Allen movie). Then, when it switches gears bit by bit and the paranoia increases, by the time the climax comes it becomes very, ultimately, tragic. Chabrol goes to lengths to reveal, simply, the soul of a man one should not feel any sympathy for. That one close-up in the car ride to the hospital is one of the finest climaxes I might ever see in a movie from Europe, even anywhere. And damned if isn't representative of what Chabrol can do as a craftier but no less true-to-his-art member of the Cashier du cinema filmmaker club. A+