The father lifts his son's broken body and wails to the sunless Brittany sky. The cry congeals into a vow that propels an impeccable thriller, This Man Must Die.
Like an objets trouves sculptor, Director Claude Chabrol (La Femme Infidele) likes to give commonplaces a classic aspect. Is coincidence a cliche? Very well, then, the father, Charles Thenier (Michel Duchaussoy), learns the identity of the hit-and-run murderer by a convenient accident. Are villains too often betes noiresl The driver is a child-beating, wife-torturing, mistress-abusing salaud. Does the pursuer fall in love with his quarry—as Belmondo did with Deneuve in Mississippi Mermaid! The villain's mistress (Caroline Cellier) is a lodestar of beauty and melancholia. Naturally, Charles is smitten.
Mississippi Mermaid, and dozens of other French mysteries, were abject hommages to American directors of the recent past. This Man Must Die pays an older debt. As Charles seeks his son's killer, his self-examinations are not reminiscent of a contemporary detective but of Ulysses on some unchartable mental voyage. Indeed, Chabrol makes poetic use of the wine-dark sea and refers constantly to the ancient legends of death and vengeance.
Still, This Man Must Die is no academic fame-dropping mystery, all allusion and no frisson. From the opening footage to the ambiguous fadeout, the viewer is kept one crescendo behind, one clue away. Central to the story is the father's diary, in which he notes his lethal intentions. When the killer is ruthlessly expunged, the mystery has only begun.
The police obtain the diary, which condemns its author. Or is the diary a plant? Has the father chosen to look so openly compromised that he must be innocent? The villain's teen-aged son has been receiving surreptitious history lessons from Charles. Has he fanned Oedipal notions in the youth's brain? Is a murderer the man who creates the idea or the instrument by which it is performed? Is Charles both or neither?
Such riddles are the texture and the text of This Man Must Die, and they persist after the film. The actors who pose them are perfection. Each performs as if he were in full possession of a secret, but only one person has the solution—Chabrol—and he is not giving it away. Perhaps, he implies, there is more than one. Perhaps moral laws are subject to appeal. Perhaps, as Mallarme observed, "All thought emits a throw of the dice." Most film makers vainly attempt to have it both ways; Chabrol succeeds. This Man Must Die is as full of intelligence as a seminar and as suspenseful as a series of passes at Monte Carlo.
· Stefan Kanfer