Review of The Flower of Evil

I've seen tons of Chabrol movies ,about 95% of his films and all I can see is that the proportion of duds increases in the years.Even directors deserve retirement! The bourgeoisie dolce vita has been told told and TOLD by CC!Enough!I'm fed up!It's all the more infuriating as earlier works had bite and guts going for them ("que la bete meure" "la rupture" "la femme infidèle" )when it wasn't pure genius ("le boucher").We feel now,and it's the last straw,a discreet charm of the bourgeoisie,he treats his bourgeois indulgently.The actors go from excellent(veteran Suzanne Flon ,in a part not worthy of herself) to passable (Baye is good enough in her " visiting the Poor" scenes,a pale reflection of his predecessor Claude Autant-Lara' s "Douce" (1942))to dismal (Bernard LeCoq,generally relegated to mediocre comedies,Benoit Magimel and his girlfriend -who might not or might be his cousin-) Sign of the times:the gastronomy sequence which you can find in everything CC did ,for the first time is a fiasco:the oysters ,says bourgeois Magimel,are not what they used to be.If it were only the oysters....