The Color of Lies

Throughout his half-century-plus filmmaking career, writer-director Claude Chabrol displayed a special affinity for coolly detached psychological thrillers, including this excellent 1998 film. Technically, The Color of Lies is a whodunit, centering on a police investigation revolving around the rape and murder of a young girl. But the ultimate revelation of the perpetrator is secondary to Chabrol's almost clinical social dissection of the small Breton town in which the crime occurs. Here painter René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin)—who the victim studied with—falls under suspicion and ends up suffering some degree of ostracism as a result. But this is just one part of a cinematic mosaic in which numerous characters—the painter's wife (Sandrine Bonnaire), the debonair friend she's having an affair with, the police inspector and her second-in-command, a thug implicated in smuggling medieval artifacts, an art student, and a garrulous shopkeeper and her timorous husband—are all sharply and subtly sketched. The atmospheric cinematography in a well-chosen coastal location helps Chabrol create a vivid sense of place, while the musical score by the director's son, Matthieu Chabrol, adds some macabre touches. The Color of Lies may not be the best of Chabrol's 50-plus films, but it's a very, very good one, and is nicely remastered for this Blu-ray debut, which also features audio commentary by film critics Wade Major and Andy Klein. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)