The Kimstim Collection: Inspecteur Lavardin

Masterful director Claude Chabrol conducts another foray into the murder mystery in his second film starring Jean Poiret as Inspecteur Lavardin. Called in to investigate the murder of a small-town big-shot, Lavardin is in for a few surprises, the first of which being the widow of the victim, who is an old flame he has never quite gotten over. Helene (Bernadette Lafont), her gay brother Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy in a brilliantly campy turn), and her free-spirited daughter Veronique (Hermine Clair) are only a few of the characters, suspicious and otherwise, who populate this small French hamlet. In a genuinely humorous turn, Chabrol uses his finely-wrought, eccentric characters to parody the foibles of the bourgeois. The denouement, ending on a note of moral ambiguity, seems to suggest a disparity between the ethics the upper class espouses and the ones they live by.