Claude Chabrol (1968)
Les biches must have seemed like a self-parody of a cryptic, arty chamber piece even in 1968. A woman called Frédérique, whose outfit and make-up suggest a lesbian impersonator, picks up a younger woman, a street artist in Paris, whose name is Why (sic), and seduces her in a hotel room. They then decamp to Frédérique’s St Tropez villa where Why becomes a kept woman; the ménage also includes a couple of eccentric gay men. Frédérique throws a party one evening; a local architect, Paul Thomas, is among the guests; and Why escapes the villa and Frédérique’s possessive attentions to spend the night with him. Once she knows that Why is attracted to Paul, Frédérique sets out to seduce him. The now jealous Why makes an unsuccessful attempt to compete for Paul’s attentions by putting on Frédérique’s clothes. At the end of the film, when the action has moved back to Paris, Why replaces Frédérique in Paul’s house by murdering her there. The film ends with Paul opening the front door, unaware of what he’ll find indoors.
In spite of the silliness of Les biches, there’s a fascination in watching the three leads – Stéphane Audran (Frédérique), Jacqueline Sassard (Why) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (Paul) – largely because the qualities of the performers ruffle the assured surface of the movie (there is no depth to it). When Paul opens his front door at the end, because he’s Jean-Louis Trintignant you want to know what happened next, even though you realise this isn’t a question of any interest to Claude Chabrol. In the script, which Chabrol co-wrote with Paul Gégauff, Paul Thomas is not a developed character: he seems meant to be an object of desire, something for use in the women’s sexual power struggle, but Trintignant is such a good actor – so naturally and fully a person – that there’s a tension between the blankness of what you’re meant to see and what you actually get. Because Trintignant’s Paul is a straightforward sensualist you can just about believe he’d see the two women as interchangeable although Stéphane Audran and Jacqueline Sassard aren’t remotely similar to the viewer. Why is meant to be in love with both Paul and Frédérique – such genuine feelings as there are supposed to be come from the younger woman – but Sassard is a weak actress (this was her last movie). She asserts Why’s feelings rather than expressing them (except in the obvious sense of getting off watching the other two make love). Stéphane Audran, by contrast, exudes sexual appetite even though Frédérique is motivated rather by a desire to control or to compete successfully. At the same time, the nearly comical elegance of Audran’s gestures and diction implies a self-absorption that transcends desire of any kind. Les biches features miscasting of an unusually sophisticated kind.
There are minor pleasures to be had in the elegance of Jean Rabier’s camerawork and lighting; and in Pierre Jansen’s score (as Why watches through the keyhole into Frédérique’s bedroom, the music’s climax sounds like a pastiche of L’après-midi d’un faune). But minor is the word: the overall effect of the film is an odd mixture of alienating and lulling. There’s no pleasure at all to be had in the strenuously unfunny gay couple (Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi): it’s a relief when Frédérique chucks them out of the villa. When she and Why first meet, the latter has drawn an image of deer on the pavement. As might be expected, the human does (biches) of the movie are more aggressive than the connotations of their animal counterparts would lead you to expect although the irony is reduced for an English-speaking audience by the phonetic similarity of ‘biche‘ and ‘bitch’.
17 March 2014
