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"À l'éternel féminin!" Paris at night, gazelles letting themselves be picked up by hyenas, just a spot of fun after work. Shopgirls studied in a laboratory environment, four of them plus a fifth for the stinger. The cheeky one (Bernadette Lafont) strides into traffic at the Champs Elysées and juggles a pair of louts, all she needs to face the day after is some cologne. The secretive one (Stéphane Audran) doubles as an Italian chanteuse at the music hall, the POV shots during her performance are rhymed with those during the nightclub striptease. The conformist one (Lucile Saint-Simon) is eager to marry a bourgeois ninny and disappear in the background, the Zeppo of the group. The last one (Clotilde Joano) is timid, "ambitieuse," settling for nothing less than the romantic ideal and paying dearly for it. "Do men expect as much of us?" "Don't talk about them." Claude Chabrol's early masterpiece, raucous, delicate, deeply unsettling, deeply moving. The visit to the zoo cuts from the roaring tiger to the grinning motorcyclist (Mario David) and dissolves to a panning view of the inside of the appliance store. The boss (Pierre Bertin) is an operatic lecher, the cashier (Ave Ninchi) keeps a fétiche revealed only on special occasions, a handkerchief once dipped in the blood of a guillotined murderer. The would-be libertine sucking in his gut at the swimming pool and the coquette suddenly seized by melancholy fear, Chabrol is ruthless and sensitive, often at the same time. Predator and prey "looking for each other," worked out in the woods with barbed reference to Partie de campagne. Not Rilke's "widening circles" but strangulating ones, cars in the opening credits and dancers near the end, the mirrored ball above it all. Tarantino's Death Proof is a full analysis. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. With Claude Berri, Jean-Louis Maury, Albert Dinan, and Sacha Briquet. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |