The Breach (film)

The Breach (La Rupture), also titled The Breakup, is a 1970 French–Italian–Belgian drama film written and directed by Claude Chabrol, based on the novel The Balloon Man by Charlotte Armstrong. It follows a mother's struggle for custody of her son against her husband's parents.

Plot
Hélène Régnier, confronted with her drug-addicted husband Charles injuring their son Michel in a violent outburst, resorts to physical retaliation, beating Charles to the floor with a frying pan. She escapes with Michel and relocates to a boarding house near the hospital where Michel is recuperating. Initiating divorce proceedings, Hélène seeks legal assistance from Allan Jourdan, who, despite her financial constraints, supports her case. Simultaneously, Charles' affluent and controlling parents, disapproving of his marriage, reclaim their son, aiming to obtain custody of Michel.

Ludovic Régnier, Hélène's father-in-law, engages Paul Thomas, a family acquaintance, to dig up compromising information on Hélène. Paul, with his girlfriend Sonia, moves into the boarding house, orchestrating a plot to tarnish Hélène's reputation. Despite their efforts, the scheme fails. The concluding scenes depict Hélène, under the influence of drugs administered by Paul, navigating a surreal world, while the custody case's resolution remains uncertain.

Cast

 * Stéphane Audran as Hélène Régnier
 * Jean-Pierre Cassel as Paul Thomas
 * Michel Bouquet as Ludovic Régnier
 * Michel Duchaussoy as Allan Jourdan
 * Annie Cordy as Mme. Pinelli
 * Jean-Claude Drouot as Charles Régnier
 * Jean Carmet as Henri Pinelli
 * Catherine Rouvel as Sonia
 * Claude Chabrol as passager in the tramway

Release
The Breach was released on 26 August 1970 in France, where it had a total of 927,678 admissions. On 4 October 1973, it premiered at the New York Film Festival.

Reception
Upon the film's premiere at the New York Film Festival, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote a sympathetic yet mixed review. While acknowledging that it has "many beautiful things in it", the "disadvantages and indignities are piled so thickly on the poor heroine that one knows early that the film is obliged to offer her vindication", which itself "isn't surprising or touching enough to transform the melodrama of "La Rupture" into tragedy".

In his 1985 review for the Chicago Reader, Dave Kerr's resume was thoroughly positive, calling La Ruptire one of Chabrol's key films of the 1970s and a "most audacious experiment with narrative form… which begins with clear black/white, good/evil distinctions and then gradually self-destructs, breaking down into increasingly elliptical and imponderable fragments".

In her book Claude Chabrol's Aesthetics of Opacity (2018), Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze sees Chabrol "veering away from any realist anchoring and venturing into the realm of the symbolic". With the film being strongly influenced by the fairy tale, the characters become markers of this genre, with Hélène as the "beautiful princess or good fairy", Paul Thomas as "the evil witch", the ladies at the boarding house as Parcae and Ludovic Régnier as "the incarnation of pure evil".