Le Beau Serge

Claude Chabrol came into a small inheritance through his wife and spent it on a feature, shot on location in Sardent, the village in the Creuse where he had been sent as a child during the war. Released at the beginning of 1959, it is generally counted the first film of the French New Wave — ahead of The 400 Blows by a few months — and it won the Prix Jean Vigo.

François, a student recovering from a lung condition, comes back to the village after twelve years. Serge, once the most promising person there, is now drinking heavily, married to a woman he blames for the child they lost, and hostile to any suggestion that he might be helped. Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy, who would both become fixtures of the movement, play them; Bernadette Lafont is Marie. Henri Decaë shot it in real houses and real bars in winter.

What makes it a New Wave film is not the style, which is fairly classical, but the economics and the location work — a director with no studio, no permissions and no stars, filming a place he actually knew. Chabrol went on to make more than fifty films, most of them about the French provincial bourgeoisie behaving badly. This is where the interest in that subject begins, and the moral ambiguity of the ending is entirely characteristic of what followed.