The Colour of Lies

Struggling painter René (Jacques Gamblin) and his wife Viviane (Sandrine Bonnaire), a nurse, lead uneventful lives in a small town in Brittany when the sense of peace is shattered by two events: the murder of a young girl, Eloïse, right after her weekly drawing lesson with René, and the arrival of their neighbour, celebrity writer and inveterate womaniser Germain-Roland Desmot (Antoine de Caunes). As is often the case in Chabrol’s films, the thriller genre becomes an alibi for him to investigate the complexity and opacity of human interactions.

In a rare attempt at a love story, The Colour of Lies is more of an anatomy of a marriage than of a murder and, in that, it bears a strong resemblance to The Unfaithful Wife (1969). As a powerful meditation on art and the unreliability of representation, Chabrol’s film is also a subtle tribute to one of his favourite painters, René Magritte: nothing is quite what it seems in that trompe l’œil of a film focusing on the ‘lies’ spun by both humans and images.