LA FEMME INFIDÈLE Movie Review

The Unfaithful Wife

Charles (Michel Bouquet) and Helene (Stéphane Audran) are a civilized, cultured, well-heeled bourgeois couple whose marriage has become passionless. Helene's response to this missing part of her life has been to take a lover (Maurice Ronet);Charles' rejoinder is to kill him. La Femme Infidèle is one of Claude Chabrol's most celebrated films, and with good reason. It's an elegantly designed black comedy about the sometimes-paradoxical nature of sexual passion—a kind of refined, more overtly intellectual version of Straw Dogs—that also functions quite efficiently as a conventional thriller. As usual, Chabrol gets superb performances from his stock company; Audran is just right as the adulterous wife whose passion for her husband begins to swell again after he acts decisively, and Ronet is appropriately slick and elegantly sleazy as the other man. But the movie belongs to Michel Bouquet, as is always the case when he works with Chabrol. Bouquet's Charles is a quietly ticking time bomb whose ultimate, explosive attainment of self-esteem leads ironically and touchingly to both his downfall and his recaptured virility. This picture is a model of its genre, and one of the most pleasurable movies of Chabrol's career.

NEXT STOP … Just Before Nightfall, Le Boucher, This Man Must Die

1969 98m/C Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet, Michael Duchaussoy, Henri Marteau, Maurice Ronet, Dominique Zardi; D: Claude Chabrol; W: Claude Chabrol; C: Jean Rabier; M: Pierre Jansen. NYR