Old Yorker

  • Wedding in Blood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les noces rouges

    Claude Chabrol (1973)

    Two of Wedding in Blood’s near contemporaries in the Claude Chabrol filmography – Les biches (1968) and La femme infidèle (1969) – take place in or on the outskirts of Paris.  Wedding in Blood doesn’t move as far from the metropolis as Le boucher (1970), with its Périgord village setting, but the small town where the action is based, is a hundred miles or so from the capital.  The town is unnamed presumably to make the point that this could be any French provincial town, and to signal the place’s furtive conventionality:  establishing shots show curtains twitching in house windows.  As respected citizen Pierre Maury (Michel Piccoli) leaves his house one evening and walks to his car, he exchanges pleasantries with several other residents.  That makes the sequence slightly reminiscent of Michel Simon’s first scene in Sacha Guitry’s La poison (1951), and Pierre Maury, like Simon’s Paul Braconnier, in due course kills his wife.  Any resemblance between the two films ends there, though.  Although Wedding in Blood has supposedly funny moments, it’s a crime drama rather than a black comedy.  More important, and more disappointingly, writer-director Chabrol, unlike Sacha Guitry, doesn’t make much of the local ethos – not, at least, until very late in the film.

    Pierre Maury’s wife Clotilde (Clotilde Joany) is an invalid.  The destination of his evening drive is a quiet road through woodland beyond the town where he’ll meet, as he regularly meets, his mistress Lucienne (Stéphane Audran), to have sex.  Pierre returns home to his wife, Lucienne to her teenage daughter Hélène (Eliana De Santis) and her husband, Paul Delamare (Claude Piéplu) – a député in the national parliament and the town’s deputy mayor, who’s now running for election as mayor.  Paul, unaware of his wife’s relationship with Pierre, names the latter as his prospective deputy, figuring that Pierre’s name on the mayoral ticket will attract left-of-centre votes Paul wouldn’t otherwise receive.  He is Hélène’s stepfather, having married single-parent Lucienne shortly after her illegitimate daughter was born.  Paul is impotent:  the implication is that this marriage is one of political convenience, his stepdaughter a spurious emblem of fatherhood.

    This might seem a promising basis for a critique of bourgeois thinking and imperatives, but Chabrol’s realisation of the set-up is shallow and careless.  There’s no hint of small-minded town gossip about, or disapproval of, Paul’s marriage to a woman who’d had a baby out of wedlock.  No rumours are heard about his motives in marrying her.  Although Lucienne seems meant to be an impeccable trophy wife, she’s rarely on the screen as her husband’s political consort – she’s more often having it off with Pierre.  It’s not clear if Pierre agrees to be Paul’s running mate out of self-interest, hypocrisy or just because Chabrol needs him to do so, to keep the story afloat.  Nor is there any suggestion that, by involving Pierre in his campaign, Paul might risk losing conservative voters.  He’s duly elected mayor, with Pierre his number two.

    Paul remains oblivious to the affair until he sees his wife exchange a knowing, amused look with Pierre while Paul is pitching a dodgy land deal to him.  You can accept Paul’s blindness to what’s been going on as a reflection of his political priorities, although it’s therefore harder to believe the scales would fall from his eyes at the particular point that they do.  But presenting the adulterers’ secret glances as an uncharacteristic but crucial slip on their part – as Chabrol does – makes no sense.  They’ve been brazenly careless about where they do their lovemaking.  Routinely in broad daylight, in their woodland trysting place (the wood looks out on a lake, where people boat and from where the wood’s edge, where Pierre and Lucienne are at it, is clearly visible).  On one occasion, in a local landmark – a chateau – while a guided tour is taking place there.  They sprawl on an antique bed cordoned off as a prize museum exhibit; for good measure, they open a bottle of champagne that spurts all over a valuable artwork on the bedroom wall.  This bit is in the film chiefly for the follow-up:  it’s Pierre that Paul assigns to investigate the act of cultural vandalism.  (I bet this comic irony was praised as ‘deliciously mordant’ or similar …)

    One is used to Chabrol treating his characters with a curious, amused detachment that tends to reduce the dramatic tension of his psychological crime stories.  In Wedding in Blood, there’s nothing to reduce – no tension from the word go.  The deceived spouses are utterly lacking in interest, let alone appeal.  Claude Piéplu’s Paul is never more than a self-important chauvinist:  everything he says and does is designed to show that he deserves what he gets.  Lucienne and Hélène behave towards him with barely concealed contempt most of the time.  When he’s asleep, they peep into the bedroom he doesn’t share with Lucienne, and giggle as he snores.  As Clotilde Maury (a much smaller part), Clotilde Joano is striking only in that she’s like a woebegone, enervated version of Stéphane Audran, which at least suggests that Pierre may go for a certain physical type.  To their credit, Audran and Michel Piccoli manage to give their sex scenes a semblance of passion – no small feat when Chabrol seems keen to make the lovemaking comical or even silly, because of where and how it’s taking place.  The film leaves you in no doubt that Audran and Piccoli are fine actors, but you probably already knew that – from enjoying them in better roles than they have here.

    After Paul has twigged to the affair, he gives his wife and his colleague permission to continue with it – on condition that Pierre supports the crooked land deal.  It’s at this point that Lucienne and Pierre seem to decide they must murder Paul, though it’s unclear why.   (It might be easier to believe in the strength of Pierre’s moral objections to the land deal, for example, if he’d been allowed to show any prior hint of political integrity.)  Lucienne and Pierre contrive to make Paul’s death look like an accident.  The Delamares are en route to Paris, late one night, with Lucienne at the wheel.  When she suddenly stops the car on a nearly deserted road, Pierre emerges from the darkness and bludgeons Paul to death.  Pierre and Lucienne move the corpse into the driving seat, douse the car in petrol and set it alight.  The killing is well staged, but the aftermath is a clumsy anti-climax.  This isn’t a Thérèse Raquin-like case of things starting to unravel between the lovers from the moment they’ve murderously disposed of the obstacle to their happiness together.  Once Lucienne’s daughter Hélène, much earlier in the story, has perceived that her mother is having an affair with Pierre, you know her feminine intuition won’t go to waste – even though things don’t turn out as Hélène plans.

    Hélène gets her mother to admit the affair, though Lucienne denies any involvement in her husband’s death. Soon afterwards, the town’s police prefect (Daniel Lecourtois) receives instructions from Paris – by order of the President – to treat the death as a traffic accident.  The local rumour mill has ground very slowly until now – after Clotilde’s sudden demise, the only gossip is that she may have committed suicide – but it finally gets into gear about Lucienne and Pierre’s relationship, and what this may have led to.  Hélène therefore writes to the prefect, urging that the case be reopened to clear her mother’s name.  The renewed police inquiries have the opposite effect.  In the film’s final scene, Lucienne and Pierre have confessed their crimes and are taken into custody.  They’re not only handcuffed together but holding hands – confirmation of their murderous union, which gives the film its title[1].

    How come the presidential order is summarily overruled by the local police simply to agree to Hélène’s request?  Why, when they question Lucienne, does she immediately admit to the murder as well as the adultery?  The first of these two things, at least, can’t possibly be justified with reference to the real-life 1970 case that supposedly inspired the film:  there was no political dimension, even at local level, to the murder committed by the so-called ‘amants diaboliques‘ in the town of Bourganeuf.  It’s typical of Chabrol’s approach that he implies a (very unlikely) high-level political cover-up, only then to drop it as soon as it becomes inconvenient.

    Wedding in Blood opens with quotes from Aeschylus’ The Eumenides on the screen.  Orestes to Minerva – ‘Goddess, tell me if I am innocent or guilty’; Minerva – ‘This cause is difficult.  What mortal would dare pass judgment?’  This gets the film off to a culturally classy start and suggests a morally complex tale to come.  Chabrol doesn’t even try to follow through on this and, by despising his characters, robs them of tragic potential.  The more of his work that I watch, the less I like Claude Chabrol, which sounds like bad news with bookings for two more of his films in this month’s BFI retrospective.  Here’s hoping that things can only get better with Le beau Serge and Juste avant la nuit.  Wedding in Blood is certainly the least rewarding of any Chabrol I’ve yet seen.

    10 September 2026

    [1] I’m following BFI’s lead in giving the film its English title – or one of its English titles, to be more precise.  According to IMDb, Les noces rouges was released as Wedding in Blood in the US and Red Wedding in the UK.

  • Tony

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Matt Johnson (2026)

    Until the last few seconds of the Tony trailer, I didn’t realise its title character was Anthony Bourdain.  Then again, until I saw Matt Johnson’s film, all I knew about Bourdain was that he was a celebrity American chef, author of the best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential, and committed suicide (in 2018).  Set in 1975 when he was nineteen, Tony is a rather unusual film.  Matt Johnson, who is Canadian, and his co-writers (Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller) have based their screenplay – how faithfully I can’t say – on Kitchen Confidential’s account of how Bourdain came to abandon English studies at Vassar College and enrolled instead at the Culinary Institute of America in New York City.  Although it’s no surprise the film has been labelled a coming-of-age story, that label comes with certain formula expectations, including a feelgood finale, which Tony doesn’t quite satisfy.  I guess knowing how Anthony Bourdain’s life ended shadows proceedings, but that doesn’t fully explain why this interesting screen biography leaves you dispirited.

    The film begins with Tony (Dominic Sessa) pitching a very fancy proposal to the selection committee for a Vassar writing fellowship.  This too will be a coming-of-age story, but taking the form of a ‘metaphorical conversation’ between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac, as if (Tony says) Down and Out in Paris and London were being typed, On the Road-style, onto one continuous scroll of paper.  When the committee chair informs ‘Anthony’ that he’ll hear the outcome of his application shortly, confident, not to say cocky, Tony corrects him, explaining that ‘My mother is the only person who calls me Anthony’.  His jolly, supportive father (Rich Sommer) meets Tony and drives him home to New Jersey.  The next scene is a family meal – Tony, his parents and his younger brother (Liam Fitch).  Tony tells them the fellowship is in the bag, although his mother Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk) is, as Tony predicted to his father, coolly unimpressed.  He now describes his project as a Bildungsroman, which he pronounces ‘buildings Roman’:  Gladys corrects him, adding with a scornful little smile, ‘I hope you didn’t write that on your application form’.  Later that evening, there’s a phone call for Tony.  The chair of the Vassar selectors informs him the writing fellowship has been awarded to another student.  His mother does address her elder son as Anthony – in that, at least, he was telling the Vassar committee the truth.  One of the film’s most striking features, though, is for how long and to whom Tony carries on lying about the fellowship.

    He keeps the shameful truth a secret from his family, for a start, and travels to Provincetown, Massachusetts, because he knows that Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones), also at Vassar and who Tony’s been keen on since they were in high school, will be working there during the summer – it turns out in a pizzeria, where she’s dating one of the delivery guys.  Tony drowns his sorrows in the bar of The Flagship, a fast-food – fast seafood – eatery, drunkenly hits on the bartender (Monica Raymund) and is violently ejected by Sal (Leo Woodall), who works in the kitchen.  While Tony’s out cold in the street, Sal takes his wallet, leaving Tony unable to afford even a ticket for the ferry back to New Jersey.  It’s at this point he bumps into Nancy and tells her he’s in Provincetown as part of the research he’s doing for the fellowship.  When one of Nancy’s friends, also on a summer job there, says that she knows the girl who did get the fellowship, Tony claims the committee decided to make two awards.  In desperate need of funds, he returns to The Flagship, begging the owner and head chef (Antonio Banderas) for a job.  Tony is hired to wash dishes, though he claims prior experience of restaurant work and that he can cook.  When Sal, Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and others in the kitchen laugh at this, Tony informs them he’s really a writer.  That more than keeps up the laughter.

    The pot-washer does have experience of eating good food, not least on family holidays to his father’s native France; Tony and his employer soon intuit there’s more to each other than meets the eye.  The boss – a mystery man, known to everyone only as Chef – takes a strict but essentially kindly interest in Tony.  With nowhere else to stay, Tony sleeps in a hammock on the porch outside Chef’s Cape Cod home.  Each morning, Chef wakes Tony by dousing him in seawater, to ensure that he gets to The Flagship on time.  Anyone late for work in the kitchen is liable to be fired, as Sal, whose heroin habit gets the better of him, discovers:  he seals his fate by punching Chef rather than accepting a reprimand.  Tony, who gets his chef whites as Sal’s replacement, is intrigued to watch Chef preparing food, even if it is mostly crab cakes or fish and chips.  Tony then discovers that Escoffier’s Le guide culinaire has pride of place on Chef’s bookshelves at home.  It turns out he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America before working in restaurants in Paris and other European capitals.

    Chef’s a strict disciplinarian in several ways.  This stickler for punctuality is also a practising Catholic, who won’t allow profanities in the kitchen – at least when he’s within earshot.  He sees promise in his new recruit, but Tony’s prideful untruths continue to dictate the narrative, and just about ruin everything.  Even as he and Nancy become closer, he keeps up the fellowship research story and, once she knows he’s working in a kitchen, insists The Flagship is a gourmet restaurant.  To make good on that lie, he persuades Chef to introduce a Friday special dish:  when Nancy and her friends come to the restaurant, lobster thermidor is on the menu.   Things are going well until a grease fire starts in the kitchen, which inexperienced Tony tries to extinguish with water.  Once the resulting blaze is finally under control, Tony and Nancy go back to her room.  When she undresses, he decides the time is right to reveal all about the fellowship; Nancy feels humiliated and is infuriated.  Extensive fire damage forces Chef to close the restaurant.  When he tells Tony he’d been on the point of offering him a full-time job there, Tony almost laughs in Chef’s face.  Why on earth would he, a writer, want to spend his life in a kitchen?

    On the screen at the very start is a quote from Anthony Bourdain, a retrospective self-description:  ‘I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.’  There are plenty of funny bits in the film that follows (like the Culinary Institute of America’s initials, making for a good crossed-wires moment when Chef first tells Tony of his CIA involvement).  But Tony succeeds in justifying Bourdain’s self-criticism to the extent of making it hard for the protagonist to redeem himself in the audience’s eyes.  Things go from bad to worse when Tony meets up again with Sal after the fire and suggests they break into Chef’s home while he’s away and steal cash, so that Tony can get back to New Jersey and Sal can buy drugs.  Next, they organise a clam bake on the beach:  they hand out flyers, promoting the event as a fund-raiser for The Flagship but intending to pocket the admission money.  Hundreds of people turn up, including Nancy and Chef.  It’s certainly a relief when Tony has second thoughts; the clam bake, in the event, really does raise money for restaurant repairs.  But he reconciles with Nancy and Chef, and parts company with Sal, too easily.

    Dominic Sessa, who made his debut in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023), isn’t a particularly varied or enjoyable actor to watch (or isn’t yet – he’s still only twenty-three).  But his portrait of Tony is clearly thought out and consistent.  Sessa conveys a definite, coherent personality, even if it’s not a likeable one – he’s a big part of what makes Tony distinctive and absorbing.  It’s fortunate, even so, that the main supporting cast has charm to spare.  Antonio Banderas uses his star quality and natural warmth to make Chef both charismatic and human.  Emilia Jones is emotionally fine-tuned and very likeable as Nancy.  Leo Woodall gives bad-boy Sal more facets than the script does.  Stavros Halkias is funny as his namesake in the kitchen.

    Despite a sure comic touch, Matt Johnson tends to accentuate the negative.  In terms of what happens, the film’s closing scenes are upbeat.  Chef reopens The Flagship.  Johnson follows Tony’s short-lived return to Vassar with his interview at the Culinary Institute of America.  He has a letter of recommendation from Chef (which includes his real name, José Vatel, and confirms his CIA credentials).  This time Tony doesn’t shoot his interviewers a line, and the rest is history:  closing text confirms that Bourdain graduated from the Institute in 1978 before embarking on his hugely successful career.  Yet the tone of the finale stays downbeat.  On the Vassar campus at Poughkeepsie, Nancy stands on one side of the frame, with a group of friends, and Tony on the other.  You wouldn’t guess from this never-the-twain shot that he and she became husband and wife (for twenty years before they divorced in 2005).

    Because Chef’s reference calls Tony by his kitchen nickname of Flaco (Spanish for skinny), the puzzled chair of the interview panel asks the candidate to confirm his name:  Tony‘s closing words are thus ‘Anthony Bourdain’.  In the context of the film as a whole, this inevitably reminds us of the one person who always insisted that he was Anthony rather than Tony.  The conventional wisdom is (or so a quick Google search suggests) that Bourdain’s life and career were deeply influenced by his mother.  Gladys Sacksman Bourdain, for many years a staff editor on the New York Times, died in 2020.  Maybe her passing helped Dagmara Domińczyk to feel freer playing Gladys.  At any rate, in just a few minutes on screen, Domińczyk delineates, quietly but chillingly, a merciless high achiever.  Memorably, too.  That dinner-table exchange leaves a lasting impression not just on Tony the character but also on Tony the film.

    8 September 2026

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