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Before becoming "the monster in the skirt" of Thirties France, Violette Nozière (Isabelle Huppert) is a mirror image between photographs of Lillian Gish and Bette Davis, she sees the reflection and kisses it lavishly. The sneering putain in furs and slanted hat at the café has little time for preppies talking Hitler and Mussolini, "such bores with their politics!" Back in the cramped, pious family apartment, she removes lipstick and stockings to return a chaste student, a trolley ride separates the two worlds. Her stepfather (Jean Carmet) slumps next to a First Communion portrait, her mother (Stéphane Audran) executes a vigorous soapy scrubbing upon finding her wearing a gold ring. From there to the heroine sipping a glass of milk as her poisoned folks writhe on the living-room floor, double vie and case study. Adolescent ennui, maternal forgiveness. "I like grandeur." Such a wily creature that she convinces her parents that her syphilis must be hereditary, yet so famished for dreams that she melts for a seedy lover (Jean-François Garreaud). The unsettled Rosebud (cf. Polanski's Repulsion) has the girl bouncing on daddy's lap and then getting slapped for peeping into the bedroom, Claude Chabrol tucks it away as a gauzy remembrance in the middle of the tribunal. (As the tough cellmate, Bernadette Lafont is more interested in her bread and soup than her motives.) Stone-throwing accusers outside the courtroom, but also pamphlet-passing acolytes who voice the auteur's theme: "It's the family that's on trial." Marnie plus Éluard's "serpent of blood ties," Marie Antoinette's chair appears as a joke from Lubitsch (Bluebeard's Eighth Wife), the bailiff won't let the prisoner sit on it. The punishment is not the guillotine but a life of middle-class respectability, and later there's Huppert and Chabrol in Madame Bovary. With Lisa Langlois, Jean Dalmain, Guy Hoffmann, Greg Germain, and Fabrice Luchini.
--- Fernando F. Croce |