The final breakdown of the worlds comes in a violently sensual display of color. Audran, coming out into the open, crosses the barriers Chris has established between his lives, destroying forever his success as a hidden prime mover. The lush blues we identify with Christine and, we realize in retrospect, with the dead Paola, are disrupted by Audran's red dress, then by the blackness of the stocking with which Christine and the other girls are strangled. The violence of the deed is muted by the awesome lushness of the images, textures of decor which make murder a forbidden ritual of the insane. Paul's awakening to the knowledge that he is innocent of murder, and his brilliantly-edited compressed journey through the two houses, shows Chabrol repeating in quick succession the camera movements and color patterns (yellow-browns and wine colors) which have dominated the film; it is as if we are living it again in one and one-half minutes, all its energy compressed into that time, building to the inevitable release of seeing from Paul's point-of-view Audran's red dress against Marnie-green wallpaper. The clash of red and green is foreign to the film's established color scheme, and its psychological impact is cathartic.

The revelations of the last scene display a highly sophisticated use of narrative exposition. On a content level, the truths of The Champagne Murders derive from scrupulous honesty--a retrospective look at the film resulting not so much in our remembering hints dropped conspicuously in early scenes as places where Chabrol didn't cheat. When Jacqueline the secretary types up the letter of transfor turning Paul's name over to Christine, she is shown in screen-left fore-ground in focus, with Paul and Christine out of focus in the background. Our eyes watch Paul and Christine because we think that they are more important; when we realize later that Jacqueline's seeing the deed provided the motivation for the final killing, we also remember that Chabrol did show her reactions in close-up--that our watching screen-right instead was not a product of directorial manipulation. In the Hamburg bar, a pan down to black nylons on the neck of a champagne bottle first resembles an adequate scene transition--the camera moving to a place from which to cut away--later takes on the meaning of honest foreshadowing.

But exposition (all the answers we've been waiting for) is relegated to an importance secondary to the meaning of the shocking last dozen shots. Realizing that Audran's secret world has brought about the destruction of his own ephemeral constructs, Chris reacts violently to destroy her, just as she (in Chabrolian fashion recalling The Third Lover) selfishly destroyed the tense harmony in which she was an outsider. Chris realizes spontaneously that Christine's unrequited love nonetheless was the center of his barren life; Audran screams about money; and Paul, innocent of crime but isolated from his familiar life-style for the first time, struggles half in confusion and half to prevent Chris from murdering Audran on the spot.

The implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away from the luxury of watching action in sharp focus detail. The effect is one of ultimate suspension, in every sense of the word, and the greatness of the ending is a consequence of the perfect optical realization of attitude and theme.

Finally, a camera style of slow and balanced moving shots is, successfully executed, one of the great joys of narrative film. When Chris goes to Paul to reassure him in a scene discussed earlier, Chabrol cuts together shots already in motion, joining a shot moving left in a circular are, a crane down from high angle, a forward track moving left, one moving right, and a pull back to wide-angle. The effect is again one of montage--the creation of masterful rhythm from smaller individual rhythms -- and again the illusion gives way to the truth of the image on the film. An eye-opening shot of Paul lowering blinds in his living room gives us in one static set-up three different perspectives, three different lighting conditions: truly an amazing revelation.

The simple moral of all this, and one Chabrol would probably agree with in his humble fashion, is that plot and script content, always captivating, seductively able to sustain our need for entertainment, is limitless in its capacity for excellence yet always a subordinate. The discipline we must cultivate is that of understanding statements of edited images. As in all high art, great film teaches. Even on the lowest level of its excellence, The Champagne Murders teaches us to see better