‘Le beau Serge’ (1958) is Claude Chabrol‘s first film, considered by many film historians to be the first film of the French New Wave. There are enough arguments in favor of this categorization. Chabrol was the first of the directors of the group associated with ‘Cahiers du cinéma’ to sit behind the camera in the winter of 1957 and 1958 to make a feature film. He is the screenwriter, producer and director and films on location in Sardent, the place where he spent part of his childhood, including the war years, using the houses, streets and surrounding nature as a setting and as actors in secondary roles and as extras the inhabitants of the village. The music of the film (composed by Émile Delpierre) and the cinematography (signed by Henri Decaë) stylistically anticipate the innovations of the New Wave. On the other side, the story in the film is told linearly, and the plot has a moralistic line that belongs more to classic French cinema than to the New Wave. The heroes of ‘Le Beau Serge’ are rather reminiscent of the ‘angry young men’ movies that were dominating American and British cinema in the mid-50s. Chabrol returned, moreover, to this debut of his with a documentary signed by Francis Girod in 2003, which unfortunately I have not seen yet.
François returns to his native village, which he left more than a decade ago, to recover from a lung disease. He had traveled to the big world, to Paris and Switzerland, and the village seems frozen in time as mentalities, with aging people and morals falling apart. Even the village priest has resigned and no longer believes in the mission of bringing his believers to the right path. Serge, his best friend, falls into alcoholism and is unhappy in his marriage with Yvonne. Paul aims to save him, and through him, perhaps, to revive the whole village. In parallel, he has a love affair with Marie, the beautiful and capricious sister of Yvonne, who is probably looking for a way to escape from the status environment in which he lives and from the tyranny of his father, who is also addicted to alcohol. We shall meet the character, reaching the Big City, in future New Wave films. Is recovery possible?
The story seems moralistic but, viewed a little in perspective, I think that when Claude Chabrol wrote it, the intention was to say something more general about France after the war, about its people – especially the young – who were fighting to do something else than the previous generations, in order to change for the better a society frozen in concepts and rituals without a horizon. The expressive power of the two actors who play the lead roles (Jean-Claude Brialy – François and Gérard Blain – Serge) supports the central thread of the story. The film had a duration of almost two and a half hours in its initial form. Chabrol cut about 50 minutes of it to bring it to the standard format of a cinematographic representation at that time. He later regretted this decision, especially since the sequences left out mostly presented documentary aspects about the life of the French village in the years after the war. I haven’t seen the initial version and I don’t know if it still exists somewhere. I regret. I think that if the full version had been released, both ‘Le Beau Serge’, and, perhaps, other films of the New Wave and of Chabrol would have looked different.