Le Beau Serge (Die Enttäuschten)

The first wave of the New Wave, even before À bout de souffle and Les Quatre cents coups – and afterwards often undeservedly overlooked in favour of those films – the birth of the Nouvelle Vague. Together with its successor Les Cousins, Le Beau Serge forms a diptych in which Claude Chabrol ironically varies the story of the country mouse and the city mouse. A tubercular theology student returns to his rural hometown and discovers that his childhood friend and role model has become not a promising architect, but an unhappily married drunkard. The theories of Cahiers du cinéma are put into practice for the first time in mise-en-scène: thematically strongly influenced by the revered Alfred Hitchcock, whose favourite motif of (guilt) transfer is here clothed in a Christian allegory, the film already reveals a very special distance – Ciné-Chabrol. (C.H.)