WEDDING IN BLOOD Movie Review

Middle-aged, adulterous lovers Pierre (Michel Piccoli) and Lucienne (Stéphane Audran) have unleashed a frenzied erotic passion in each other that goes well beyond anything they've ever experienced in their marriages. They can't keep their hands off each other, nor can they resist new forms of sexual expression—like hiding out in a museum after closing time in order to have sex in one of the antique period bedrooms. Their lust is all-encompassing enough to drive them well past any hint of rationality, leading them inevitably to a plan to murder their respective spouses. Wedding in Blood is a relatively minor film by Claude Chabrol, but it contains major pleasures—primarily the over-the-top performances of Audran and Piccoli. They're like two kids in a candy store when they're in foreplay mode; the pleasure they feel from being so sexually charged has, ironically, a kind of sweet innocence about it that makes the two would-be killers endearing. Chabrol's script is based on an actual case, but it's really that frantic, stylized groping and groaning that gives the movie a heightened and funny sense of authenticity; it's like a parody of two straitlaced, civilized, middle-class bourgeois who are suddenly shocked but delighted to discover that they're animals, too. The lush cinematography is by Jean Rabier.

NEXT STOP … La Femme Infidèle, La Cérémonie, Double Indemnity

1974 (PG) 98m/C FR IT Claude Pieplu, Stephane Audran, Michel Piccoli; D: Claude Chabrol; W: Claude Chabrol; C: Jean Rabier. VHS COL