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The marvelously suggestive title is derived perhaps from Malraux, and applies to Claude Chabrol as it might to Hitchcock and Lang. Double Indemnity in Staint-Tropez with the trophy wife (Romy Schneider) introduced à la Bardot, a tanned tush tapped by the hunky neighbor's kite. A cocktail and a shag on the living-room rug for the hack writer next door (Paolo Giusti), soon they're scheming to bump off her feeble-hearted, impotent hubby (Rod Steiger). She dutifully bludgeons the figure under the bedsheets, then finds herself alone facing the investigation when the lover takes off and bank accounts are mysteriously drained. Bodies disappear, empty cars plunge off cliffs: "A victim that doesn't exist, a fortune that doesn't exist, a suspect that no longer exists," summarizes the jaunty counselor (Jean Rochefort). The resurrection in the shadows is the beginning of "a new and complete relationship," thus the switcheroo of remarriage. Spouses fantasize about murdering each other all the time, or so figures the cuckold who longs to start over, "I'm actually trying to forgive you!" While a pair of snooping inspectors (François Maistre, Pierre Santini) leisurely ponder the case over cognac and jambon-beurre, the marital-therapy comedy of La Femme Infidèle takes its course. Behind the chic chill lies La Passion de Romy Schneider: Playing an actress playing an actress as well as the landscape's solitary woman, she glides from languid vixen to humiliated dupe to penitent sinner, her gorgeousness a cross to bear and a weapon to wield. "The games that people play... can kill them." Suspended by "the puzzle of justice," the heroine's deliverance is ultimately spiritual—the lighthouse beckoning her into the night could stand for illumination or death, or, knowing Chabrol, a combination of the two. With François Perrot, Hans Christian Blech, Henri Attal, and Dominique Zardi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |