The Colour of Lies

In a sleepy town on the coast of Brittany, a young girl leaves her art teacher’s house at the end of a lesson. She is next seen when a couple of children stumble upon her body in the woods: she has been raped and strangled. Suspicion immediately falls on the teacher, René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), a formerly successful artist whose career has since stagnated. The new chief of police Lesage (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) takes a stern approach to the harrowing case, while René’s wife, Viviane (Sandrine Bonnaire), appears to be the only person convinced of his innocence. Matters are complicated further with the arrival of the famed writer Germain-Roland Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), an erratic playboy hell-bent on seducing Viviane.

In a town full of lies, it makes hard work for solving a mysterious murder. Claude Chabrol’s film artfully plays with the continuous withholding of information to keep the keys to the mystery safely hidden away. You start to wonder if Chief Lesage will hold her hands up in defeat and leave the case forever open.

The Colour of Lies, however, is far more than a murder mystery or police thriller alone. It is also a moving portrait of a couple in crisis, trying to readapt in a new environment, while failures of the past continue to blight them. The artist suffering from existential malaise and the coastal landscape of Brittany, which is as austere as it is magnificent, aligns Chabrol’s film with Bergman as much as Hitchcock.
The performances duly reflect the intensity and enigma, which pervade the film. Bonnaire, in her second outing in front of Chabrol’s camera following an award-winning turn in La Cérémonie, fulfils our expectations with a typically endearing yet bewildering performance. Tedeschi (5x2, Munich) is unsettlingly severe as the determined lead investigator, while de Caunes (of Eurotrash fame) injects an air of extravagance to the proceedings as the flamboyant writer, lapping it all up in the media spotlight. However, it is Lelouch regular Gamblin who sticks most in the mind; he imbues his character with such weight and ambiguity as he steers the film along parallel tracks of crime film and powerful human drama.