La femme infidèle

The two characters primarily involved in Claude Chabrol's 1969 French thriller The Unfaithful Wife have, at least at the beginning, rather an idyllic and somewhat pleasant set up in their lives. When we first encounter them, we see both the husband and titular wife with their rather extended family in a large garden on a warm, sunny and welcoming day; the tone of the exchanges polite, the activity nothing out of the ordinary nor needlessly extravagant. The opening shots of such imagery are quite crudely broken up by a blurred effect which drowns the screen of its focus, the ideal family unit itself thus becoming difficult to firmly latch one's eyes onto; the credits begin, some rather harsh and somewhat official looking credits that scroll upwards in a military manner whilst some distorting piano music plays overhead. It's a fleeting few minutes or so of idealism in-between such a sequence, the film going on to form a superior mediation on human behaviour masquerading as a causality thriller as paradise is rendered corrupt and peeking beneath the surface of the upper-classes reveals deception and titular unfaithfulness.

The film is unrelentingly fascinating, a piece never for more than a few seconds ever in the slightest bit uninteresting; a grim and somewhat bleak study how love, anger and victimisation brew together to create a cocktail of violence and anguish and how that in itself can come to forge a relationship which was never initially set in stone. The film's methodical lead is Michel Bouquet's Charles Desvallees, a lawyer with his own office located in a small enough building amidst the bustling Parisian streets away from the large, more ruralised country house in which he lives with his family. The family, of which, is made up of the titular wife, a certain Hélène (Audran) who's about the same age as her husband and is the mother to young son Michel (Di Napoli). The warm and welcoming day in the garden spent with Charles' mother and Hélène's in-law turns into evening, Charles' verbal illustrating of various plans he would like to have happen the following day involving both he and Hélène out and about doing things are shot down with casual reasons which excuse Hélène from attending. As they sit and observe a television broadcast later on during the evening, the signal begins to break up and the machine ceases to function as well as it might, thus further insinuating a breaking down of communication of an operative item and echoing their marriage.

At work, and aside from Charles' rich circle of friends and busy schedule, he observes through young female secretary Brigitte (Turri) the very essence of temptation. His suspicion brought about by his wife's behaviour, and Chabrol's own channelling onto the audience of signs and notions towards an upsetting of a paradise-like set up or the malfunctioning of a working order, beginning to resonate. Desperate, as thoughts; feelings and drama all at once clinically escalate, Charles darts to the nearest payphone to call a place of business Hélène said she'd be; the piano music from earlier only suggesting at something seriously wrong with what idealism we were seeing beginning to pipe up again to form the overlying soundtrack to the news she is not where she said she'd be.

The painful inevitable is confirmed when a private detective Charles hires reveals to him the truth; that Hélène is, in fact, having an affair and with a writer named Victor Pégala (Ronet) based not so far away. The film allows Charles a moment you sparsely see in today's age of thrillers; a moment of contemplation that has him stand beside a river flowing through the urbanised locale in which the reveal was announced so as to merely look across to the other side of it, digesting what it is has been exposed to him. It is around about here in the film that Chabrol applies a gear change so dramatic and so effective that it propels the piece beyond its combined brooding roots of paranoia and suspicion and into an echelon of unpredictability; horror and human emotion in its some of its rawest forms. In short, the switch in tone and content works remarkably; the film coming to have Charles journey to the man and see him.

The film's causality infused thrills and scares following the venturing into the territory it goes near does nothing to distract the film from its overall tract; it is a film that is able to evoke just as much an on-edge reaction from its audience following a character's glance or nervous facial reaction as it can from a minor car accident. Chabrol's capturing of some of the interplay towards the conclusion as two people are forced into hiding varying secrets from both one another and the police is fascinating, and the film does not loose sight of son Michel's role as the picturesque representative of innocence caught up amidst all this and made to suffer out of others' ill-gotten decisions. Chabrol's overall ending is decidedly bleak, but his conclusion that the two we examine whom previously appeared to fall away from each other only to reconnect when some sort of duality was established, is dangerously uplifting given the sorts of events which aided in this and the actions the lovebirds undertook; all of it combining to form a superior thriller of an immensely sophisticated ilk.

'The Unfaithful Wife' is really about a faithful husband, who will kill to save his marriage. This kind of fidelity is a chilling exercise of power - the film's many point-of-view shots are mostly his - with adultery a rebellion, a bid for freedom that must be crushed. It's not enough that Charles uncovers his wife's lover, he must sit on the bed they make love on, drink the same drink...

Chabrol's most perfect film, where character inertia is expressed in blatant artifice, both in the home and in 'nature'; where a materialist filming of materialists conceals an austere spirituality, embodied in those Fateful policemen. Like his namesake Bovary, Charles sleeps when his exquisitely beautiful wife offers herself to him. He deserves what he gets.

What Michel Bouquet does in his role as the husband to Stephane Audran's title character can only be described as an acting tour-De-force. MAGNIFICENT!

Audran is not bad herself, but a notch less than stellar. Or maybe her performance just pales in comparison to her co-star. As does pretty much everything else in the film. From a certain point onwards, it is Bouquet who becomes the co-auteur, as for as the viewer is concerned.

The film has a very remarkable score, which Chabrol uses effectively as if both checking, and challenging the Hitchcockian legacy of pronounced scores in the thriller realm.

With unmistakable, (still his kind of) nouvelle-vague elements, the film admirably reflects director's familiarity with the classic genre and its (then) modern subversion.

With unmistakable, (still his kind of) nouvelle-vague elements, the film admirably reflects the director's familiarity with the classic genre and its (then) modern subversion. The economy and brilliance of shots is such that viewer cannot take eyes off screen, not for one sec. The last shot alone informs a good lot more than an average novella. And demands a separate essay I am not gonna write. However, it becomes quite clear early on that this auteur, unlike some others, is not at all that keen on subversion for the very sake of it.

La Femme Infidele has all the bearings of a rebellion forgone, if you please. It definitely looks like the work of an auteur, but not just a rebel kind, but a mature mind, someone well on his way to become a real master of the medium: already he affords to be audacious, or flexible, every which way to fulfill demands posed by his art. This audacious flexibility in turn provides the auteur opportunity to comment, in his fashion, if not alter the rules of the genre that he is seen, here as well, rebelling against and compromising with.

Having located the man who his wife is having an affair with through a private investigator, a well-to-do Frenchmen pays the man an amicable visit in this slow burn thriller from Claude Chabrol. While the film ends on a strong note with a nicely ambiguous final shot, an emphasis on 'slow' really is required as the entire first half-hour moves sluggishly along until the point when husband and lover finally meet. The precious few minutes that the pair share together are unquestionably the strongest in the film with lots of tension and uncertainty in the air as the husband wins the lover's confidence by pretending that he has an open marriage. This intensity peaks as he listens to the lover talk about how gentle and loving his wife is, enlightening him to a side of his wife that he clearly has not seen for a while. The immediate aftermath of their meeting together is pretty riveting too, but following that the film again loses tension and slows down in its final third, never again achieving the excellence of the husband-lover meeting scene. The film almost feels a bit long in a way, but then on the same account, not quite enough time is dedicated to fleshing out whether love, lust or otherwise existed between the two adulterers. Michel Bouquet's towering lead performance goes a long way to keep the film afloat though. Same goes for Chabrol's fluid camera movements, Pierre Jansen's atmospheric score and the rather novel premise of husband and lover meeting on amicable terms. It is such a great idea that is no surprise to learn that the film has been remade no less than three times to date.

THE UNFAITFUL WIFE (Claude Chabrol - France 1968).

Claude Chabrol's "La Femme infidèle" is an excellent thriller, or "A Psycho-sexual Study in Murder" as the film was advertised on certain posters, reflecting his cynical disgust against the petty bourgeoisie. Charles Desvallées (Michel Bouquet) becomes suspicious his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran) is having an affair. Charles hires a private detective who comes up with the name of Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet) and then goes off to confront his wife's lover.

Bouquet and Audran pitch their roles superbly and with an excellent score, Chabrol's cold, cynical dissection of marriage and murder is just as good as anything Hitchcock ever made. Yet, the film has Chabrol's own distinctly detached style, employing different point of view shots, instantly making the viewer part of the couple's troublesome marriage as we uncomfortably watch Stéphane Audran inevitably on her way to be unmasked. Chabrol stages a long scene giving more than a little nod to Hitchcock's PSYCHO. Besides Bouquet who always gives a tongue-in-cheek performance, his charming honey-bunny assistant in his office had me laughing each time she made her appearance.

Remade in 2002 with Richard Gere and Diane Lane as UNFAITHFUL.

Camera Obscura --- 8/10