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Histoire d'une liaison, invaluable just for the image of the inflamed Stéphane Audran sticking her tongue in Michel Piccoli's ear as the two hide in the bushes. The vision of middle-aged bourgies bubbling with animal ardor is very funny and affecting, Claude Chabrol examines it thoroughly as the warm human center of a lattice of dispassionate marital and political relationships, with a fine strain of geometry. The introductory view is punctuated with a close-up of a slender neck, the same one unforgettably squeezed in Les Bonnes Femmes: The wan swan (Clotilde Joano) is married to Piccoli's leftist deputy, she tells him of the cold chicken in the oven before he dashes off for a forest rendezvous with Audran, the camera follows her home where her husband, the town's top Gaullist (Claude Piéplu), awaits his chicken dinner. The lovers meet at a school play, romp on royal beds at the museum, then afterward are amused to hear such "vandalism" attributed to horny teenagers. The heroine's daughter (Eliana De Santis) yearns to see a dead body and gets her wish when Joano expires from a mysterious medicinal overdose, meanwhile the Mayor learns of the affair and, "not accommodating but understanding," is ready to negotiate his cuckoldry for corrupt land deals. The couple's retaliation is summed up as the burning automobile on the side of the road is rhymed with the burning of an illicit letter in the middle of the police search. Orestes and Minerva in provincial France, "transfactual ethics" unread at the local library, "très difficile." The investigation terminated by the President himself is reopened by the schoolgirl's insistence on clearing her mother's name, just the capper for Chabrol's impeccable James M. Cain satire. "Je ne regrette rien, mon amour." The final image is Hitchcock's in The 39 Steps. With François Robert, Daniel Lecourtois, Pippo Merisi, and Ermanno Casanova.
--- Fernando F. Croce |