Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher explores the possibility (or impossibility) of love in a morally fatalistic universe. Working within the conventional context of a suspense thriller, the director creates a world limited by its characters' own perceptions and a love relationship restricted by the imperfect nature of that world.

Nevertheless, Chabrol's sympathetic direction of the story permits his characters a range of emotional expression—although inarticulated and tragically unrealized—that makes their frustrated love affair strangely beautiful. The director develops this love relationship on two levels: first, through the use of genre to define the ambivalent nature of their love and, second, through an infusion of uniquely Chabrolian moral elements to investigate the impossibility of his characters' redemption through love.

Le Boucher's use of a suppressed thriller format and its repeated references to Hitchcock continue a New Wave tradition of filmic film criticism. But Chabrol's formalism is never...