On stepping off the bus from Paris, François (Jean-Claude Brialy) quickly registers that life in his native village, Sardent, has moved on. Beneath the calm surface, an explosive cocktail of gossip, boredom, and repressed sexuality has fermented. Ostensibly back to recuperate from a bout of tuberculosis, François soon embarks on an almost religious quest to save his former close friend Serge (Gérard Blain) from self-destructive despair and alcoholism, and so the film resonates with Christian overtones of suffering, redemption and salvation. But it's not long before François falls into the arms and bed of the voluptuous Marie (Bernadette Laffont), thereby fuelling the villagers' mounting hostility to what they widely perceive as intrusive meddling. "You examine us as if we were insects", Marie complains to François. Director Claude Chabrol began his career as a film critic for Les Cahiers du cinema, and observations like Marie's also operate as a running commentary on cinema itself. Le Beau Serge was instrumental in setting the agenda for what a vibrant modern cinema might be and do, and it was precisely in relation to this film that the very idea of a nouvelle vague (New Wave) in French cinema was first proposed at the end of the 50s. The passionate cinephilia that fuelled this new cinematic adventure feeds the film's innovative mix of a quasi-documentary neorealism and flights of Hitchcockian melodrama. Cinematographer Henri Decae provides stunning photography of rural France, and the film as a whole retains an extraordinary freshness: colloquial speech and local accent are juxtaposed with Emile Delpierre's score, and the carefully composed imagery is brought to life by a generation of actors whose faces have yet to acquire the iconic status they enjoy today in French cinema. --Michael Witt
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