La Rupture movie storyline. Helene Regnier’s husband Charles, who is mentally ill, injures their son Michel in a rage. Charles moves back in with his wealthy and manipulative parents, who blame Helene for their son’s condition and vow to win custody of Michel. While the boy is in hospital, Helene rents a room in a boarding house nearby. The Regniers hire Paul Thomas, a family acquaintance who needs money, to find dirt on Helene before the court hearing on custody. Paul moves into the boarding house and, with the help of his girlfriend Sonia, who rarely wears clothes, plots to ruin Helene’s reputation and then her very life.
La Rupture (English: “The Breach”) is a 1970 film written and directed by Claude Chabrol, based on the novel The Balloon Man by Charlotte Armstrong. The film was also known as The Breakup at times in its release in the United States. The film had a total of 927,678 admissions in France.
Film Review for La Rupture
One of Claude Chabrol’s key films of the 1970s. He seamlessly transposed the England of Charlotte Armstrong’s pulp fiction novel, The Balloon Man, to France. It’s a characteristically Chabrol attack on the bourgeois family scene in this painful tale of a young mother fighting for her child and her sanity. It falls in temperament somewhere between the heat of Le Boucher and the coldness of Ten Days’ Wonder. The shock values are furnished through the abusive sex and pernicious use of drugs, along with the outlandish family violence and malevolence.
The film is weird from its onset, as it opens with a domestic dispute in which a loutish druggie husband, Charles (Drouot), is bopped on the noggin with a frying pan by his innocent wife Helene (Audran-real-wife of Chabrol) in self defense. His ruthless rich father Ludovic (Bouquet) hires a sleazy family friend Paul Thomas (Cassel) to get some dirt on her for blackmail, but he fails to find any transgressions despite the fact the wife was a stripper before marriage.
While under the influence of LSD the schizoid hubby throws the child across the room, resulting in severe head injuries that hospitalize the child. The lower-class Helene moves to a seedy boarding house near the hospital and files for divorce. In an effort to make her go batty, Charles drugs her. He also ups the ante and tries to kill her.
Meanwhile the father-in-law and the blackmailer further scheme to discredit her reputation, as they concoct a bizarre plot to take custody of her child by reporting damaging falsehoods about her. They also stalk and harass her, and Thomas manages to manipulate her friends so that they turn against her. It leads to a very clever shocking climax, as the battle is seen as one of class warfare.
It’s a crazy melodrama thriller that has to be seen twice to be believed, but once its denouement sinks in it magically reveals the triumph of innocence over experience. It poignantly shows that sometimes marrying into wealth and position isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Directed by: Claude Chabrol Visits: 178
Starring: Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Michel Bouquet, Annie Cordy, Jean-Claude Drouot, Jean Carmet, Catherine Rouvel, Claude Chabrol, Pierre Gualdi, Louise Chevalier
Screenplay by: Claude Chabrol
Production Design by: Françoise Hardy, Guy Littaye
Cinematography by: Jean Rabier
Film Editing by: Jacques Gaillard
Set Decoration by: Françoise Hardy
Music by: Pierre Jansen
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Gaumont Film Company, New Line Cinema
Release Date: August 26, 1970