Les bonnes femmes

A friend of mine - a film scholar - once said that this film shouldn't work but it does. He was absolutely right. I cannot think of one good reason why this film should be as good as it is. The tone is observational, like many films of the "New Wave," but it lacks the frenetic energy of Godard, or the jaded lyricism of Truffaut. The tone of the film changes drastically at several points, and in any other film this would become a big turn off. But a strand of sincere honesty about the characters and their emotions holds the film together, stronger than any formality.

Let the film take you where it wants you to go, and the experience is wonderful.

Claude Chabrol made a film before Les bonnes femmes, Les Cousins, which is what made him known as part of the French New Wave (he preceded Truffaut and Godard by a year). But viewing Les bonnes femmes before seeing Les Cousins, I almost feel like this is a director's first film, for a director like Chabrol, as it shows a lot of his concerns as a filmmaker: an observational stance with women, their sexuality and their distance from the opposite sex, the mundane in a bourgeois life, and the Hitchcock angle of danger and the unknown. It's also in line with the other Nouvelle Vague films in the sense that the filmmaker has broken out of any ties to a studio or sets, and everything is out in the streets or on location in places like nightclubs and music halls and swimming pools, and usually with hand-held cameras and (seeming) improvisation with the actors. This is a gritty, on-the-streets Chabrol one isn't used to from seeing films like This Man Must Die and The Butcher.

And yet I don't know if I can say it's as great as the big early films of the period like The 400 Blows and Breathless. Chabrol's film does carry, I'm sure, some personal weight. And he's interested in these girls, their casual life and goings-on, and how so easily one of them can be lured by a mysterious man in a mustache who follows them around in a motorcycle. But it's such a loosely structured film- barely a plot, even less, if you can imagine, than Breathless- that it takes a moment for us to realize something is going on. Which perhaps is part of Chabrol's angle here: like Fellini's film I Vitelloni, we're just watching these four girls in their everyday occurrences, going to a zoo, going to a nightclub and hooking up with two (obnoxious) strangers, going to a music gall where one of the girls is secretly singing and doesn't want to go on for fear of embarrassment of the others seeing her, and just walking around. Or, as well, the complacency of working at a TV store where no one comes in.

We are drawn in to these girls and who they are, however limited they're really shown as full characters (more-so Chabrol is interested, I think, in these girls as 'types' possibly, or in looking at them in a semi-documentary perspective). And metaphor is used from time to time; I'm sure the visit to the zoo, and Chabrol's carefully timed and composed reaction shots of the animals in the cages, is deliberate as to the girls' own self-prison of 20-something frivolity. And there's also the matter, again, of the motorcycle guy, who somehow charms this girl. Actually not somehow, as in this sort of Nouvelle Vague film-world it's precisely the kind of guy a girl would fall for, even one seemingly so uptight as the one he goes after. Seeing how this plays out between them can go one of two ways, and how Chabrol shows it in the last fifteen minutes is totally masterful. There's a sense of the inevitable, but he keeps us uncertain as an audience, which is good. I'm glad I couldn't quite see where the ending would go, though when it came it made sense and was satisfying (it even raised up the worth of the film overall a full notch).

But a masterpiece? Probably not. It's like a breezy fling through a Parisian quarter, on the dark streets and cool nights with beautiful girls and not-so-beautiful but flirty men, and it has some wonderful moments. It just doesn't add up completely into something that makes you want to shake your friend up and say "You MUST watch this!" like 400 Blows, or even The Butcher.

The film's English title "The Good Time Girls" capture the essence of the film--four different women, working in a shop, moonlighting as they are not rich, and hoping to find a decent spouse. The shop itself presents the lecherous owner (who "keeps his distance") and an elderly cashier who hides her interest in BDSM (her fetish is a cloth dipped in the blood of a BDSM convict who was guillotined, with an insinuated relationship with a customer who asks her for money and gets it!), a beautiful Stephane Audran (moonlighting as a singer), and the attractive Clotilde Joano. And there is a murder, which hangs in the air without the outcome discussed further--one of the weak points of the over-rated film.

i liked this film. it has an ambigious quality about it, almost paradoxical. it has a feel of a documentary and is observational in nature, yet there is a obvious message or view taken by chabrol and the women in this film. they're doomed objects of desire for men. the women have this elusive quality about them, they're beautiful and somewhat misguided about the men in thier lives. they seem unattainable, yet vulnerable to a ominous unspoken danger that awaits them that is denoted by the music. there's this creepy yet mysterious sounding music that runs through the film when the female characters roam through the streets. and for some reason, all the men in this movie are misogynist jerks! they disrespect these women and believe they're entitled to them. yet, these women flirt with them and passively resist them for most of the film. chabrol lovingly shoots these women and has affection for them, but also sadness at their romantic naivety about the men in their lives that will bring them doom.

The 'overacting of the boss' mentioned in the previous comment is totally intentional! Chabrol is playing around with genres here, exaggerating for effect. He straddles the fence between comedy and tragedy for the entire film, veering this way and that whenever it serves his purpose: to paint an allegory of absurd modern existence through the soul of modern young females. The surreal modern music at the beginning clues you in, and the awesome final scene with the empty, tragic eyes of the girl finding her only happiness when a man asks her to dance brings it all together beautifully. Man! what a great film! I didn't want to leave the theater after watching it twice in a row, but I was too tired. As disappointing as Chabrol's films have been to me over the years, this one was a jackhammer of a surprise. The Hitchcock elements are there but they don't dominate and straitjacket everything else. On a level with "Breathless," "Shoot the Piano Player," yet completely unlike either of them, this film defines the "New Wave" aesthetic, which to this day, some forty years later provides a standard for Tarantino types to strive for. Films like these can only be directed by masters who have the nerve and audacity to bend genres to their whim and speak their ultimate truth through the nature of the medium itself.