18 NOVEMBER 1972, Page 38

Cinema

Echoes of the present

Christopher Hudson

When a technically skilled director gets ideas above his station, the results vary from the embarrassing to the disastrous. Claude Chabrol's La Rupture (` X ' ParisPullman) for most of its length deploys the same skills as Le Boucher, a highly successful thriller in which the underlying complexities of motive and character are disclosed to us by the unfolding of the narrative. In his most recent film Ten Days Wonder these complexities are seen as an intellectual game and the narrative is distorted accordingly. La Rupture, completed in the intervening period, shows signs of the same distortion for the sake of pressing home a moral about our world.

Stephane Audran, who, together with Genevieve Page, Audrey Hepburn and Susannah York, is one of those actresses whose controlled elegance of movement and expression is impossible to fault without ever being breathtakingly right, plays a young wife and mother, Helene, driven to distraction by her in-laws. Nothing new in this, except for the inlaws' single-minded ferocity. They drag home their weak, drug-addicted son, and do everything in their considerable power to get legal custody of their grandchild, Helene's young son, who lies injured in hospital. They employ a private detective and eventually allow him to set a trap for the girl so that a case can be fabricated against her.

At this point Chabrol trumps his ace, realism, with a miserable suit of fantasies. The frame-up, preposterously, consists of the corruption of an idiot child by a proxy Helene, the detective's girlfriend, who strips naked in front of a blue film. When this fails the detective slips LSD into Helene's orange juice, which permits Chabrol to film her in a very pretty dream sequence with a balloon-seller. She returns from this episode to see her husband brutally stabbed before her eyes for no apparent reason. Chabrol has said that La Rupture is a black portrayal of what the world will be in ten years' time, but these grotesqueries hardly add up to cosmic pessimism. He is a superlative director of actors — the film is worth seeing for the performances of Jean-Pierre Cassel as the detective and Michel Bouquet as the father-in-law as well as Mme Audran — but be warned.

The best thing about The Triple Echo (' A ' Universal) is that two film stars, Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, agreed to perform for an unknown production team simply because they liked the H. E. Bates story. The worst thing about it is that it could have slotted very easily into the recent television series Country Matters without discernible loss to our artistic heritage. Glenda Jackson plays a farmer's widow who has an affair with a young soldier, the soldier deserts to go and live with her and she makes him wear women's clothes to avoid recognition. Oliver Reed is the sergeant who finds him •out the hard way.

What is it about such a film which makes it deserve no higher rating than unexceptionable? It is well directed. It has some nice colour photography of the Wiltshire countryside. It is well acted, especially, in the early scenes, by Glenda Jackson who indicates the mellowing of suspicion into friendship and then deep affection with every sidelong glance and smile. But it is totally enclosed in its own world — the world of the H. E. Bates stories in which the darling buds of May never open and blossom upon postwar England. And like anything so watertight as to be impervious to the way we live now it becomes a period piece, which we can handle and admire and forget in a moment.

Night Hair Child ('X' New Victoria) is a romp with Britt Ekland and a twelve-yearold boy whom she fails to seduce and finally destroys. You smile; I had to sit through it.