Le Boucher (1970)

The man is society's butcher, the repository of the violence of the world. He hated his father, he waged war for fifteen years, he is the village's butcher! The blood flow, there is so much blood, and his life blood is reliant on the flow of blood. He does not rape, he kills his friend's wife. He provided the meat for that wedding. He wants the schoolteacher, the young headmistress, chaste, somewhat aloof, a hurt spinster, who smokes men's cigarettes and smokes them in the street. She has no lover but she is not bloodless - her bloodflow is repressed, his is strained and overstressed. Her contained eroticism. She wants to share the meat she got from him, with him, she wants his blood. Ultimately it is her restraint and surface bloodlessness that draws him, that flushes him out - he corners her, and she, in protecting him, corners him, and it is this that enables him to draw his own blood rather than somebody else's. She cares, she hides the lighter. She protects him from the consequences of his own violence, that is of him but is not him. She endangers herself for him, and this enables him to draw his own blood. His is a victory, he is a hero, he fights with the world's violence, and in suicide he wins. He ends the killing, overcomes it. The pulsating light of the lift down to purgatory is crimson red.