The Breach (), 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's drug-addicted husband Charles injures their son Michel in a violent rage. She beats Charles to the floor with a frying pan, flees with Michel and moves into a boarding house next to the hospital where Michel is recovering. Hélène starts divorce proceedings with the help of lawyer Allan Jourdan, who offers to support her case although she can hardly pay him. Meanwhile, Charles' wealthy and manipulative parents, who never approved of his marriage, take their son back in, determined to secure custody of Michel. Ludovic Régnier hires Paul Thomas, a family acquaintance whose father lost his money due to Ludovic's business operations, to find damaging material on Hélène. Paul moves into the boarding house and, with the help of his girlfriend Sonia, plots to ruin Hélène's reputation. In the end, the plot fails. The final images show Hélène, induced with drugs by Paul, wandering around in a fantasised world, while the outcome of the custody case is left open.

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".

References

External links
 
 

1970 films
1970s drama films
French drama films
Italian drama films
Films directed by Claude Chabrol
Films shot in Belgium
Films shot in Paris
Films based on American novels
Films based on works by Charlotte Armstrong
1970s French-language films
1970s Italian films
1970s French films
Belgian drama films