(Prix Jean Vigo 1959)

Of the famous group of young film critics of Les Cahiers du Cinéma who would themselves turn filmmakers, Claude Chabrol was the first to direct his own feature-length film. His absorbing debut is a powerful examination of male friendship and its consequences, with Jean-Claude Brialy as a tubercular student who returns from Paris to his childhood home to convalesce, and finds his once-brilliant friend Serge (Gérard Blain) has become a bitter alcoholic after the death of his child, and trapped in a marriage with a wife he no longer cares for.

A bleak yet beautifully observed picture of provincial life and the tensions inherent in returning home after a prolonged absence, Le Beau Serge is generally regarded as the film that launched the Nouvelle Vague.<