silver nitrate notes

Les Diaboliques and the Bathtub That Does Not Drain

18 sep 2019

Clouzot made Les Diaboliques two years after The Wages of Fear, again with Armand Thirard on camera. The source was a novel by Boileau and Narcejac, the writing team who would later provide Hitchcock with the source for Vertigo. Clouzot bought the rights before Hitchcock could. Hitchcock, years later, would recall that he had been days behind on the phone call.

The film is a psychological thriller set at a small private boys' school outside Paris. The headmaster's wife and his mistress conspire to murder him. They drown him in a bathtub, transport the body to the school's swimming pool, and drop it in so that the death will appear to be an accident. The next day, the body is not in the pool. It surfaces, in various forms, through the rest of the film, until the final sequence reveals what has actually happened.

Thirard's photography for Clouzot in this film is the opposite of what he had done in The Wages of Fear. Where Fear had been bright exterior work in southern light, Les Diaboliques is interior, shadowed, and cold. The school is lit in a perpetual blue hour. The bathtub scene is shot in a small bathroom with a single overhead bulb. The swimming-pool scene is shot at night with portable lamps that produce harsh highlights on the pool's surface.

The famous final sequence, in which the murderers are confronted with the supposed corpse of the man they have killed, is lit by a single candle. Thirard had to shoot the entire sequence with one practical source, augmented only by a small fill light barely visible as a reflection in a nearby mirror. The actors (Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot) had to perform within the small area of the candle's light. The camera could not move without putting one of them in darkness. The sequence lasts several minutes. Clouzot does not cut. The audience, watching, has almost no visual information beyond two faces lit by a candle and a bathtub that begins to move behind them.

Hitchcock never forgave Clouzot for buying the rights to Vertigo's eventual source first. He also, later, said that Les Diaboliques was among his favourite films of the decade. Both statements were characteristic.

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sources
[1] Bocquet, José-Louis. Henri-Georges Clouzot cinéaste. La Sirène, 1993.
[2] Boileau, Pierre and Thomas Narcejac. Celle qui n'était plus. Denoël, 1952.
[3] Phillips, Alastair. French Cinema: A Critical Filmography. Wallflower, 2002.
[4] Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Simon & Schuster, rev. ed. 1983.