Claude Chabrol (1969)

Stéphane Audran is a beautiful woman and a fine actress but the bored hauteur which seems essential to her works best when she can play off it:  when she’s vulnerable and scared in Le Boucher or unassailably charming and sociable, whatever happens, in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.  In this film, Audran turns out not to be much different from what she appears to be.  The unfaithful wife of the title, Hélène Desvallées, is a brittle, rather cold mother, and a largely thwarted hedonist.  There’s no tension in the portrait (I kept thinking of the different layers Jeanne Moreau would have brought to a role like this).  Audran’s performance, in combination with Claude Chabrol’s coolly condescending view of the characters, means that La femme infidèle only really comes to life in the confrontation between Hélène’s insurance broker husband Charles (Michel Bouquet) and Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet), the writer with whom she is having an affair – a confrontation which leads to the one murdering the other.

When Charles, who has hired a private detective to spy on Hélène, visits Victor in his Neuilly apartment, the lover is taken by surprise.  There’s an odd femininity to Maurice Ronet’s face when he opens the door (is it eye make-up?) but the shift of power during the conversation between the two men is grimly funny, and Ronet and Michel Bouquet play the scene with great wit.  Charles begins by pretending that he and Hélène have an open marriage, that he knows all about Victor and that the latter’s affair with Hélène is the latest of many, all of them short-lived.  Victor relaxes a little and becomes more expansive.  Although Charles is increasingly uncomfortable hearing what Victor has to say, he asks for a tour of the apartment.  The husband finds the details of Victor’s liaison with his wife more and more intolerable – particularly a cigarette lighter which he recognises (it was a wedding anniversary gift to Hélène) on the table beside an unmade bed.  We sense that the cautious, self-regarding Charles went to see Victor wanting to find out more and to decide his next move.  Instead, he snaps and hits Victor over the head with an ornamental bust (of a woman) and the blow is a fatal one.   This is a taut, compelling sequence but it would be even stronger if the film hadn’t already seemed to be Charles’s story – if this fussy little cuckold, with his silly walk, had moved more gradually into the foreground.  Bouquet is good at suggesting the husband’s suspicion from the start – a suspicion masked by a pompous affability (and complicated by a streak of neediness) – but Charles is so much the established focus of attention that his turning into a killer doesn’t come as a bolt from the blue.

When Charles first leaves Victor’s apartment after the murder, he’s extremely furtive and looks up nervously at a window cleaner on a ladder outside the block opposite.   When he returns a few minutes later and takes the same exit route, dragging to his car the corpse, which he’s wrapped in a white bed sheet, it never seems to worry him that his slow progress and eyecatching cargo might be observed.  He takes care to remove from the scene of the crime any trace of his presence (although he forgets to wipe his fingerprints from the inside of the cigarette lighter) yet he leaves his jacket lying around in his bedroom at home with the private detective’s photograph of Victor, and the Neuilly address written on the back, in the pocket – ready for Hélène to discover at the climax of the film. (It’s surprising that a man as boringly orderly as Charles would leave his jacket lying around, let alone with incriminating evidence inside it.)     Because Chabrol is aiming to create more than a piece of suspense his admirers don’t seem to mind such  weaknesses in the plot details but they detract from La femme infidèle as a crime story and consequently reduce its range of interest.

Ginette Vincendeau’s introduction at BFI was repetitive but clear – except for what she said about the ‘transfer of guilt’ in La femme infidèle (how does both husband and wife feeling guilty, each for a different reason, amount to a transfer?) and when she said she wouldn’t mention which Hitchcock films Chabrol most obviously drew on here, before adding, ‘but you’ll find shades of Notorious, Psycho and Suspicion in particular’.   (Did she mean these were not the main Hitchcock references?)  The nods to Psycho are there at least in the killer’s cleaning up after the murder and getting rid of the corpse in a marshy expanse of water.  These are absorbing to watch but Chabrol doesn’t have Hitchcock’s gift, or appetite, for placing an image in an entertaining context that makes the image more extraordinary.  The Hitchcockian highlights in Chabrol are meticulously but self-consciously composed.  They have an academic feel and tend to stick out as highlights:  the blood dripping from the edge of a hilltop onto a schoolgirl eating her packed lunch in Le Boucher; in this film, the disappearance of the swaddled corpse into the swamp (which, from Charles’s point of view, happens agonisingly slowly).  Another instructive sequence is the one in which Charles, with the body in the boot of his car, has a minor collision with a lorry, gets an earful from the lorry driver, and is very soon at the centre of a crowd – including a policeman – that’s gathered to see what the commotion is about.  The force of the collision has damaged the car boot so that it’s jammed shut.  There’s a lengthy shot of the boot, surrounded by people but implacably concealing its contents.  The moment has suspense but it would have more if there were anything engaging about Charles – if we were rooting for him in some way (the way that you might sympathise with Norman Bates cleaning the shower cubicle if, the first time you saw Psycho, you hadn’t yet realised that Norman, not his mother, had murdered Marion Crane).

A pair of policemen investigating the disappearance of Victor start calling at the Desvallées’ Versailles residence (a huge house in enormous grounds).  Michel Duchaussoy gives a well-judged performance as Duval, the detective who does the talking, but his silent sidekick Gobet (Guy Marly) is really irritating.  He keeps stroking his nose in such a deliberate way that the shadow movement doesn’t work in the way you feel it should – as something done unobtrusively but which plays on the nerves of Charles and Hélène.  Duval and Gobet eventually arrest Charles; his wife and young son watch the trio disappearing into the distance. The few reviews of the film that I’ve read suggest that his criminal act changes Hélène’s view of her husband – that he becomes a real man in her eyes because he was willing to kill out of love for her.   Since Stéphane Audran isn’t prepared to go beyond an enigmatic smile after she discovers the photograph of Victor in Charles’s jacket and resumes an inscrutable expression for the moment of his departure, I’m surprised anyone can infer such a definite conclusion.

It’s striking that Chabrol is both compared with Hitchcock and regarded as an incisive social commentator – a label rarely applied, as far as I know, to Hitchcock.  I don’t know whether Chabrol is critiquing middle-class values in La femme infidèle but the decorous lovelessness of the Desvallées household seems too stylishly exaggerated to be typical of anything, and it’s presented so clinically that there doesn’t seem to be much at stake in its unravelling.  Michel (Stéphane de Napoli), the already unhappy and whingeing only child of the marriage, is no more likeable than his parents.  The music by Pierre Jansen, its jangling discordance establishing the substrate of the outwardly civilised marriage, is unpleasantly obvious.  (The film was remade in Hollywood in 2002 as Unfaithful, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere and Olivier Martinez.)

8 November 2009