Jaunty creep Jean-Paul Belmondo takes time off from leering at nurses at the clinic to seduce and marry mousy
heiress Mia Farrow, who, tricked out in leg brace and buck teeth, epitomizes the good doctor's fixation on the
moral beauty of fugly chicks. Enter Laura Antonelli, Farrow's va-va-voomish sis, and soon Belmondo is rethinking
his philosophy, drugging his wife nightly for torrid visits while blithely devising ways to bump off Antonelli's many suitors. Paced
like an overcranked Sennet one-reeler, this Claude Chabrol romp clashes fascinatingly with the director's graceful
mid-period tone thrillers (Le Boucher, Wedding in Blood), packaging his career-long interest in the grotesque
with the jaundiced vigor of his early days. (To say nothing of some startlingly cruel gags: Belmondo's Tunisia trip is
financed with money from a shagging contest involving girls usually gallantly referred to as butterfaces.) Yet Chabrol's
cynicism is continually self-policing -- while dispensing the required doses of Antonelli nudity and vulgar (and very
funny) Belmondo mugging, the film pinpoints male chauvinism and human treachery with a brackish eye that often
pierces through the skittery comic surface. Paul Gégauff adapted Hubert Monteilhet's novel. With Daniel Ivernel, and Daniel
Lacourtois.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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