Claude Chabrol is a director who has managed to become more estranged from the critics with each film he makes….

It seems to me that Chabrol has been cast aside not so much because of any failing on his own part but because of a reluctance of the critics to respond imaginatively to his films. By no account could his films be held to be high art but at the same time they are serious, skilled, and to a limited extent, successful works. Leda [A Double Tour] is Chabrol and [co-screenwriter Paul] Gegauff's (one cannot yet talk of Chabrol without implying Gegauff) most complete statement of their ideas, both of film and of meaning, that they have made. The series from Le Beau Serge to Les Cousins to Leda represents a progression in the disentanglement of Chabrol's ideas and style rather than a regression to the level of...