At first glance Henry James' "Bench Of Desolation" seems an odd choice of subject matter for a Claude Chabrol film. A rather low-keyed short story pivoting around a fastidious rare-book shop owner, "Bench Of Desolation" is a far cry from such recent Chabrol oeuvres as Wedding in Blood and Nada. Nevertheless, Bench of Desolation is the finest short film I've seen in years, and I suspect that its success, like that of Chabrol's "Hitchcockian" works, is directly related to an aesthetic tension—in this case the tension between the auteur's sensibility and the author's craft….

[Chabrol] has always been fascinated with the darker aspects of complacency (most often bourgeois complacency) and the ambivalences of apparent good versus evil; thus his sympathy with James is as natural as his intuitive empathy for Lang.

Both James and Chabrol are concerned with the idiosyncrasies of the particular, and the discrepancies in...