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The précis is in the opening credits, a family portrait goes blurry before snapping back into focus. The glazed surfaces of the blueblood chateau provide the setting, husband (Michel Bouquet) and wife (Stéphane Audran) go through their civilized motions, a pastoral picnic here and a modish nightclub there. Claude Chabrol's immaculate tracking shots suggest the fastidious polishing of diamonds, the deadpan push-pull of the boudoir (she dolls herself up and waits in bed, he turns out the lights and goes to sleep) sums up the relationship. Suspicion cracks harmony, her afternoons with the divorced writer (Maurice Ronet) make for quite the fly in the ointment. (It's not a matter of infidelity, the husband explains, she's had affairs before but this one's been going on for much too long.) Refined bourgeois that he is, Bouquet introduces himself at the lover's apartment to discuss the matter and finds his armor of amused indifference ("We don't interfere in each other's private lives") lethally rattled by a glimpse of his rumpled bed. Murder is the ultimate marital therapy in Chabrol's dapper and affecting comedy of alienated manners. The suspense arises less from the bundled-up corpse sinking into a mossy-green lagoon than from a moribund couple's reawakened fear and desire. Nothing is as beguiling as the emotional turmoil peeking from behind Audran's façade, her sadness for a lost paramour giving way to the illicit satisfaction of knowing that her husband is willing to kill for her. Mallarmé's marriage (Hérodiade), Lubitsch's (Angel), Sacha Guitry's ("An idea wife remains faithful but tries to be just as charming as if she weren't"). Compassion for the mannequins—distant as spouses, intimate as accomplices—enriches the filmmaker's acid, his pull-back-zoom-forward camera finally entraps but also eulogizes. Cinematography by Jean Rabier. With Michel Duchaussoy, Louise Chevalier, Louise Rioton, and Stéphane Di Napoli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |