The career of the so- called Hitchcock of France, Claude Chabrol, comes to a restless rest with his final picture, the typically oblique detective film “Inspector Bellamy.”
The Hitchcock comparison seldom really suited the cold and clinical Chabrol, who in a career spanning about 80 films in half a century resisted clever plot twists and satisfying endings in favor of rumination on strange portents and human fallibility. Chabrol’s final entry brings him together for the first time with another monument of French cinema, Gérard Depardieu, who stars as a wheezing Paris detective unable to stop working while supposedly on vacation with his wife in the South of France.
Despite being told with a straight face, the plot borders on the absurd. An insurance company executive (Jacques Gamblin) who wants to fake his own death so he can run off with his mistress while his wife profits happens to meet a hobo who is his identical twin. The homeless man agrees to go on a fateful car trip with the scam artist — because he is enticed by a promise to visit the grave of the folk singer Georges Brassens. You’d think an insurer would know that even well-charred dead bodies are readily identified by their dental work.
Chabrol’s confrontation with his own mortality is the real story. Repeated motifs about confused identity, the opaque whims of luck and digging one’s own grave emerge as Inspector Bellamy (who Chabrol has said was inspired by France’s favorite detective, Maigret) quarrels with his own past — which becomes unpleasantly present with a visit from his luckless ex-con brother (Clovis Cornillac).
“Inspector Bellamy” leaves a sense not unlike a summary of Chabrol’s entire career — of guilty stains seeping away in every direction, of motives hidden and of endless stories that frustrate full understanding. To Chabrol, no life is ever a closed case.