Film review – A Double Tour (Web of Passion)

A Double Tour (Web of Passion)

A few years ago, I made a mini-project of tracking down and watching all the films adapted from novels by one of my pet favourite writers, Stanley Ellin – who I think has never really been given due justice by adaptations (maybe Nothing But the Best, from a short story, is closest).  This is a straggler from that effort – a 1959 adaptation of Ellin’s pulpy/soapy The Key to Nicholas Street by Claude Chabrol, in his first essay in what would become his preferred genre – bourgeois hypocrisy explored through Hitchcockian crime, though this takes the un-Hitch subgenre of murder mystery and transplants the tale to a monied French milieu.

It opens with a Rope-like prowl through the Japanese-style home of artist Leda (Antonella Lualdi), with broken dolls and a female corpse almost ignored – like several other sequences, it uses a prowling camera in the way later auteurs like Brian DePalma (or even Michael Snow) were wont to pick out bits and pieces of décor with the most vital element (a corpse) almost incidental.  It takes half the film to confirm that Leda is the body, and we get an intricate structure – a Sunday morning is shown from several overlapping points of view, sometimes looping back to fill in the gaps.  The Web of Passion title works since the house is full of lecherous blokes and pouting women, with a tangle of liaisons and unfulfilled lusts – the besuited, music buff teen son Richard (André Jocelyn) peeps through a keyhole at sexy maid Julie (Bernadette Lafont), who annoys the gardner but delights the milkman by parading at the window in her underwear.  Thérèse Marcoux (Madeleine Robinson) is seething because her wimp husband Henri (Jacques Dacqmine) keeps nipping over to be with his mistress, Leda, especially while she’s at mass – she’s also not happy that her daughter Elisabeth (Jeanne Valérie) is seeing Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a layabout lout who has a bit of a Stanley Kowalski thing going and may be responsible for setting Henri up with Leda – he also keeps showing up and demanding food, ordering Julie around and pulling pranks like unravelling Thérèse’s knitting.

There’s kind of a misogynist edge in the way everyone lays into Thérèse – who they all see as some sort of smothering mother, and essentially worthless because she’s the least fanciable woman in the cast (like balding feeb Henri is a great catch).  The nastiest sequence comes when Henri delivers a demeaning, vicious indictment of a woman he’s about to abandon for a young hottie – letting loose his worst at a point when it would be to his advantage to be more conciliatory.  ‘You’re nothing to me.  You make me want to vomit.  You’re hateful, ugly, stupid, uncultured, hypocritical, mean … old!  So old!’ It’s shocking to witness.  But somehow I was more on the frigid bitch queen’s side because of the way Laszlo thinks it’s fucking hilarious to undo her knitting – again, I wonder whether Chabrol intended us to see him as despicable, or whether we’re supposed to find him an admirable free spirit even when he’s pestering the servants.  Several relationships are hard to buy – why is Leda stuck on Henri? – to the point when we kind of suspect there’s a revelation due, which never comes along because Leda is too dead to explain what’s really going on … even when we get the final flashback of her murder (spoiler – it’s who I guessed it was) her motivation isn’t drawn out even as Chabrol has a sense of how complicated the culprit’s reasons for killing her are (not so much family love as a wish to keep the façade of home together, with a side order of sexual frustration).

Belmondo, in his breakout role, appropriately unbalances the film by being an almost demonic git – doing a Boudu/Teorema act disrupting the household by targeting all the members in turn.  An oddity which might be explained now: in A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Belmondo’s character Michel Poiccard used ‘Laszlo Kovacs’ as an alias – which film buffs tended to think referred to the cinematographer (who wasn’t known in 1960) but possibly came to the actor’s mind since it was his previous role.  Alternately, A Double Tour is a prequel to A Bout de Souffle – and Poiccard really is Laszlo, going on to be an even bigger disruptive git; creating a Tom Conway/Dr Judd situation.  It has a lovely, sunny, semi-sinister look.