Bellamy

"Bellamy, Chabrol's film of 2009, is the filmmaker's first collaboration with Gérard Depardieu, and initially seems to be a policier curdled into a character piece to give due room and respect to this great actor. But the lesson, both of the film itself, and, inside that, of Detective Bellamy's story, is there is more than meets the eye to this world of ours, its desires, and its stories. In fact, despite being dedicated to Georges Simenon, Bella... More

"Bellamy, Chabrol's film of 2009, is the filmmaker's first collaboration with Gérard Depardieu, and initially seems to be a policier curdled into a character piece to give due room and respect to this great actor. But the lesson, both of the film itself, and, inside that, of Detective Bellamy's story, is there is more than meets the eye to this world of ours, its desires, and its stories. In fact, despite being dedicated to Georges Simenon, Bellamy's aura has less in common with the procedural detection of crime novels than it does with the cinema of Jacques Rivette and the desire to detect. Depardieu's famed inspector Bellamy takes up a case while on vacation with his wife, but takes it up like an armchair general would take up a distant, historical battle: no action, all speculation, all late evenings talking about a situation one mostly only imagines. Indeed, the ending, which supposedly reveals that Bellamy's obsession to solve the case has roots elsewhere in his family past, only points the film more askew. This is a movie where people seem to be thinking about plots, schemes, and relationships that exist outside the story. The film is assuredly a dedicated character piece, with the story seeming to be one long series of extended conversations with deliciously sketched "types," ranging from Jacques Gamblin's schemer suffering moral mania to Clovis Cornillac's hunkered down cliché of the family's black sheep, that all barely lead anywhere narratively or psychologically. Yet Bellamy continually surprises in its growing abstraction, its desire not only to fail to reveal the mystery by the end, but to only hint, and hint so softly, that all the mystery in the film hasn't even begun to be suggested. Under a guise of many things—genre, character, stardom—Chabrol is actually practicing an extreme form of experimentation, one in which everything on-screen points to something unspoken and unexplained not off-screen but out-of-the-movie." Quoting Daniel Kasman in theauteurs.com.

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