Le Beau Serge was Chabrol's first film, and its immense success on the French Catholic circuit pioneered the New Wave commercially….

The characters generally have more force and dignity than in Chabrol's later films—even though the village flirt says to Francois, 'You have a way of looking at us as if we were all insects'. In the scenes at the village hop one becomes aware of Chabrol picking out little details in a way that is grotesque rather than faithful to the atmosphere the characters would feel, and hints at the laborious eccentricity of the later films, from which I always get the impression of Chabrol hopping about the world like a hungry crow, snapping up fat, squiggly worms in his quick, horny beak, and dangling them in front of the audience, crowing, 'There's human nature for you'. However, here he approaches his personages with the...