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Common wisdom has it that Claude Chabrol's been trading water since the superb La Ceremonie, and decidedly minor efforts like La Fleur du Mal, Rien ne va Plus and Merci Pour le Chocolat certainly do little to change that view, but the surprisingly excellent Au Coeur du Mensonge aka The Heart of the Lie/The Color of Lies is easily one of his very best.As usual he's not interested in the thriller mechanics of the film's murder mystery, preferring to focus on the effects on the marriage of the small-town art teacher who becomes the favourite suspect for locals and police alike. At once a subtle play on the nature of lies, floating the notion that when everybody's lying there are no more lies, and another of his portraits of small town petit bourgeois suspicion ("You never really know who you live with."), it benefits from superb performances from a surprisingly likable Sandrine Bonnaire and a convincingly tortured Jacques Gamblin as the couple in the eye of the quiet storm, as well as good supporting turns from Antoine de Caunes as a smug overachieving author and local celebrity and Bernard Verley as an easygoing but quietly perceptive local cop that are more than good enough to make you overlook a horribly flat performance by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as the detective in charge of the case. She's one of the only two real bum notes in the film. The other? Well, just for once couldn't Chabrol hire someone other than his son to write the score? Matthieu Chabrol turns out another of his identikit numbers - start off classical piano, add a bit of dissonance, then a bit of pseudo-comic artful jauntiness before collapsing back into classical piano mode - that adds nothing but tedious familiarity to the proceedings. But this is still more than good enough to overcome those obstacles.Kino's Region 1 DVD is an acceptable standards conversion from Pal that could be better, but it does at least feature the trailer, a subtitled introduction and 25-minute making of.
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