THE STORY OF WOMEN Movie Review

Une Affaire de Femmes

One of the last women to be guillotined in France was Marie Latour, whose hand-to-mouth existence was supplemented with a little extra cash when she began performing illegal abortions in occupied France during World War II. Her story is the centerpiece of Claude Chabrol's dark and disturbing The Story of Women, which gives us a Marie (Isabelle Huppert) who is neither hero nor villain, but does what she does out of her will to survive. She goes about her work with the same grim, matter-of-factness that characterizes the sex she shares with her lover (she can no longer muster any interest in making love to her husband), and it's only a matter of time before the French police—puppets of the Gestapo—arrest, “try,” and execute her with that same emotionless determination; everyone here is simply a worker doing a job. With his gray, bleak, cold-as-ice vision of a world that has learned to function without the concept of moral responsibility, Chabrol asks not only if we are any more entitled to pass judgment on this woman than the Nazis were, but begs a larger question; at what point do survival and collaboration become indistinguishable? This rich, multi-leveled portrait of infectious, festering hypocrisy wouldn't have nearly the same impact without the calm, rigorous, terrifyingly glacial performance of the remarkable Isabelle Huppert.

NEXT STOP … Violette, Le Boucher, The Sorrow and the Pity, Shadow of a Doubt

1988 110m/C FR Isabelle Huppert, Francois Cluzet, Marie Trintignant, Nils Tavernier, Louis Ducreux; D: Claude Chabrol; W: Claude Chabrol, Colo Tavernier O'Hagan; C: Jean Rabier; M: Matthieu Chabrol. Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘89: Best Foreign Film; New York Film Critics Awards ‘89: Best Foreign Film; Venice Film Festival ‘88: Best Actress (Huppert). VHS NYF