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The opening indicates Psycho with a zoom into a building window, the afternoon rendezvous has the straying advertising executive (Michel Bouquet) in droopy profile while in the background the bare mistress hungers for rough kink. "A sort of insane drama," the liaison ends with an upside-down close-up of his hands on her neck, "squeeze until I close my eyes." Her husband (François Périer) is the murderer's best friend as well as the architect who designed the Versailles home where he lives with his wife (Stéphane Audran), their kids hear a rat scuttling in the walls. Guilt takes mocking forms—at the studio the culprit oversees a kitschy TV ad for Culpa, "the washing powder that removes evil stains." The witness won't go to the police, the police won't pick up on any clues, the killer cries "I can't bear not being judged!" Bourgeois discretion scarcely allows for the acknowledgment of the offense, let alone absolution, a Claude Chabrol joke of sublime bleakness. (The nightmarish structure suggests Lang's The Woman in the Window, though the key kinship is with Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.) The distant view from a moving train finds the Eiffel Tower sticking out of a dusk-bluish cityscape, blanched modernist interiors are set off by a gigantic Christmas tree. The confession is heard at the overcast beach amid crashing foam, the widower has no desire for vengeance, the protagonist's desperate yearning for purgation is exacerbated in the face of bland understanding. (Running parallel to it all is the meek office accountant whose crime passionnel is swiftly penalized.) Deception of decorum, deliverance of laudanum. "Les enfants commencent à oublier." With Jean Carmet, Dominique Zardi, Henri Attal, Paul Temps, Daniel Lecourtois, Clelia Matania, and Anna Douking.
--- Fernando F. Croce |