The Color of Lies

In a small Breton town a ten-year-old girl is found murdered. The last person to see her alive is her art teacher René, a painter who lives by teaching because he is ill. The inspector running the investigation begins questioning him at once. In the town everyone knows everyone and everyone gathers at the Bar des Amis. As the suspicion spreads, René grows isolated both outside and at home, while his wife Viviane draws closer to a writer newly arrived in town. Claude Chabrol's film is not a detective story but a portrait of the provinces. The narrative is interested not in who the killer is but in how suspicion undoes a person. Chabrol's familiar subject is here as well: the surface courtesy of a petit-bourgeois circle and the cruelty beneath it. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Viviane, Jacques Gamblin plays René, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays the inspector. Who it's for: Viewers who like Claude Chabrol, French crime films, and provincial drama. Who it's not for: The pace is slow and the plot is secondary. The solution to the murder is also deliberately unsatisfying.