Francois is a theology student suffering from tuberculosis who has returned to his native village from Paris. After arriving, he is distressed to learn that his childhood friend Serge, once a promising architect, is now the town drunk. Francois also learns that Serge is the father of a mongoloid son and currently estranged from his newly pregnant wife. When Francois attempts to help Serge reclaim his life, he only succeeds in complicating the situation.

For his first film, director Claude Chabrol returned to the village of Sardent in Central France, a place where he had spend his childhood. Financed by inheritance money from Chabrol's first wife and shot over a period of nine weeks, Le Beau Serge (1959) originally ran two hours and thirty-five minutes and conveyed a much richer depiction of daily life in Sardent. Due to time constraints, Chabrol was forced to edit out a great deal of this quasi-documentary footage, but the final cut still bears favorable comparison to the work of Italian neorealists like Roberto Rossellini who also shot on location, favored natural lighting, preferred working-class protagonists, and used the medium for social criticism.

Although Le Beau Serge is generally considered the first official film of the Nouvelle Vague, that claim is debatable. After all, Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us went into production first and Agnes Varda's La Pointe Courte preceded the whole movement by three years! The important thing is that Le Beau Serge was the first to make an impact on an international scale though it would soon be overshadowed by the success of Breathless, The 400 Blows, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. The two leads of Le Beau Serge - Gerald Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy - would also appear in Chabrol's next feature, Les Cousins, a study in morality about a jaded university student and his naive cousin.

Director/Producer: Claude Chabrol
Screenplay: Claude Chabrol
Cinematography: Henri Decae
Editor: Jacques Gaillard
Music: Emile Delpierre
Cast: Gerald Blain (Serge), Jean-Claude Brialy (Francois), Bernadette Lafont (Marie), Edmond Beauchamp (Glomaud).
In French with English subtitles
BW-97m.

by Jeff Stafford