Les bonnes femmes
Claude Chabrol (1960)
A very odd concoction – irritating and unsatisfying but undoubtedly at its best in the closing stages, it leaves you startled. It was Chabrol’s fourth feature. I think of him as primarily a maker of murder stories with a strong psychological element – because he wrote (with Eric Rohmer) the famous study of Hitchcock in 1957 and because of the subject matter of the few films of his that I’ve seen or know the plot of – Le boucher, Juste avant la nuit, Violette Nozière. This may not be right: Chabrol, who’s now in his seventy-ninth year, is extraordinarily prolific (according to Wikipedia, he’s made fifty-two features since his debut with Le Beau Serge in 1958). But, if I’m wrong, Les bonnes femmes isn’t the film to correct my misunderstanding of where his main thematic interests lie.
The picture is about four young women who work in an electrical appliances shop in Paris. Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is desperate to get married. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) wants to be a singer and – unbeknown to her colleagues until they turn up there to a watch a show – performs in a second-rate theatre in the evening. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is after a man of some description. Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) is fascinated by a tall dark stranger on a motor cycle, whom she keeps seeing – she’s not sure if he might be following her. All four girls are beautiful; most of the men they come into contact with are ridiculous or repulsive or both. These include the elderly lecher who owns the shop (Pierre Bertin), the scrounging soi-disant poet son of the shop’s cashier, Rita’s snobby twit of a fiancé (Sacha Briquet), a smirking pain-in-the-neck playboy (Jean-Louis Maury), his paunchy senior sidekick (Albert Dinan), and the pompous star turn at the cabaret where Ginette sings. Two other men – a delivery boy (Serge Bento) and the soldier who’s Jane’s current boyfriend (Claude Berri, who went to direct the Jean de Florette films) – are more affably unprepossessing. The only male of the species worth a second look is the heavy-set motor cyclist, whose strong face is harder to read.
Most of the action of Les bonnes femmes takes place over twenty-four hours in the girls’ lives – from a late-night pick-up by the playboy and his companion to the reappearance of these two at a public swimming baths where the four girls and Rita’s fiancé Henri have gone after the show in which Ginette features. In the interim, we’ve seen them getting through the endless tedium of their working day, having their lunch, visiting the zoo. (The cramped zoo enclosures are shocking to see now and they overwhelm any connection that Chabrol may be intending to make between the caged animals and the girls being trapped in the society in which they live.) The score (by Pierre Jansen and Paul Misraki) over the opening credits is ominous and there’s a documentary feel to the look and movement of the Paris street exteriors (shot by Henri Decaë) but the film, up to and including most of the swimming baths sequence, is a social comedy – and Chabrol gives it a far from light touch. The various men, and the middle-aged woman cashier (Ava Minchi), perform their turns with comically exaggerated inflections and roguish expressions that are instantly tiresome. The four girls too, although they’re all fascinating camera subjects, act out their boredom in the shop, make excited exclamations at the zoo and so on, in a decidedly theatrical way. By the time we were at the baths, where relentless high jinks take place, I was hard put to decide who I wanted to drown first.
Then the motor cyclist (Mario David) appears on the diving board. Once in the water, he quickly disposes of the playboy who’s been pestering the girls and introduces himself, to Jacqueline, as André Lapierre. At this point the picture begins to change mood and rhythm in an increasingly disorienting way. Chabrol handles the last fifteen minutes or so – which focus almost exclusively on Jacqueline and André – expertly. When we see them dining together, it looks as if a complete shift into romantic territory has taken place but then André starts performing comical tricks, making a spectacle of himself at their table for two in a way that recalls the extrovert foolishness of the men we’ve been watching for the previous ninety minutes – except that this display has an unaccountable edge that was lacking in the others. Then the couple walk in a forest. The conversation and the visual tone darken and he starts asking her to consider what if he was drawn to her for reasons other than love. A brief moment follows when you think the sinister shadow may be lifting: she’s cold and he puts his jacket over her shoulders before they lie down to make love. In the restaurant he expressed particular admiration for Jacqueline’s neck and he now has sex with her and strangles her at the same time. (The sequence is very cleverly done: it’s hard for us to tell whether Jacqueline’s cries are in response to the sex or the violence or the fusion between them which is motivating André.) In the last scene of the film, Jane – who, from a distance, physically resembles Jacqueline – is in a dance hall, under the flicker of a revolving glitterball. She’s waiting to be asked onto the floor by a new man and she smiles when he materialises, the invitation comes and the dance begins.
The ending leaves you feeling that Chabrol has something worth saying in Les bonnes femmes but I don’t understand what it is – or why the film’s prelude of forceful humour is so extended. The BFI note includes pieces by David Thomson and Gavin Millar. Thomson thinks that Chabrol, with pre-feminist insight, is showing us that ‘women, without a god, are desperately deprived in their choices’; Millar sees him expressing ‘sorrow at seeing how their circumstances have so reduced them … The very tawdriness of [the girls’] aspirations … is a mark not of contempt but of compassion for the second-hand dreams that the world has manufactured and sold them’. I’ve two difficulties with these interpretations, even though the lines from La Fontaine which appear on the screen at the start of Les bonnes femmes might appear to endorse them. The first difficulty results from the glamour of the four actresses – and the fact that none of them is really able to fuse this with qualities of ordinariness. Lucile Saint-Simon’s blonde prettiness may be less distinctive than the looks of the others but you can still see why a pasty-faced wimp like Henri would think himself incredibly lucky to have a girl such as Rita, even if he’s from a moneyed family and she’s a shop assistant. As Jane, Bernadette Lafont, although she’s less magnetic than Clotilde Joano as Jacqueline, has an unassertive ease and pliancy which is sensually potent. Not surprisingly, the young Stéphane Audran combines an elegant swagger with suggestions of tensions in Ginette that the other three actresses don’t. And Clotilde Joano’s grave beauty is just stunning. I’d never seen her before (she died in 1974, aged only forty-two) – Kristin Scott Thomas resembles her but Joano, with her longer, less defined features, is a Modigliani in comparison. The second difficulty I have with Thomson and Millar is their implication that all four girls share a similar fate. It’s not only what happens to Jacqueline that contradicts this idea; it’s the fact that, unlike those of Rita, Jane and Ginette, Jacqueline’s desires seem to be much less vaguely defined. Her attentions are focused on a particular man – the only attractive man in sight, who kills her.
14 April 2009