For the first and only time with this film Chabrol collaborated with leading man Philippe Noiret, a veteran actor know for such classics as The Judge and the Assassin (1976), Coup de torchon (1981), and Zazie dans le metro (1960). One year after making this film he would embody his most internationally famous role as the benevolent projectionist Alfredo in Cinema Paradiso (1988), a high point in a career that continued until his death in 2006. Here Noiret is well cast as Christian Legagneur, a personable TV game-show personality who serves as a weekend host for journalist Roland Wolf (Robin Renucci) for a series of in-depth interviews. Wolf's dismissal of any substantive discussion turns out to be just the first of many deceptions as the plot soon involves such elements as a young missing woman, Wolf's enigmatic goddaughter Catherine (Anne Brochet), and a pivotal loaded pistol.
Masques was co-written by Chabrol with Odile Barski (their third project together after Violette in 1978 and The Blood of Others in 1984), and interestingly enough, it would be his last original narrative for several years. His following feature, The Cry of the Owl, was a 1987 adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith thriller, with his subsequent projects tackling a wide range of authors including Henry Miller, Gustave Flaubert, Georges Simenon, Ruth Rendell and Francis Szpiner, not to mention an unproduced Henri-Georges Clouzot script from 1964. The screenplay here is the director's most explicit commentary on the dark side of celebrity, which requires those in the public eye to put on a mask on such a regular basis that the nature of one's true personality becomes blurred; as such it fits in well in the succession of films like The Unsuspected (1947), A Face in the Crowd (1957), and Network (1976) with its slippery depiction of spectacle and reality uneasily coexisting in front of the public.
Despite its pedigree, Masques was a very difficult film to see outside of France until its much belated video releases in the United States and the United Kingdom. It also has yet to receive much coverage in text studies of Chabrol, though Guy Austin's 1999 book, French Film Directors: Claude Chabrol, finds other threads linking it to his more famous thrillers that came before and after: "Chabrol's work is essentially a cinema of ambivalence. His films are funny in both senses: often unexpectedly comic, they are also strange, unsettling and disturbing. Their ambivalence is most evident in the fluctuating tone, the open endings, and the lack of moral judgment that these endings imply." He also notes that its isolated house setting fits in well with the other country estates that prove to be murderous playgrounds in his other films, as "these houses function as enclosed worlds... their Gothic appearance also creates a sense of foreboding." Seen today, the film is easier to appreciate as an early entry in the seriocomic thrillers that would become Chabrol's specialty for the remainder of his career, and the final moments in which the spectator's gaze is turned in on itself remain a highlight from his work in that decade.
By Nathaniel Thompson
