Les Bonnes Femmes

Bernadette Lafont  Obituary by Ronald Bergan from The Guardian 

I don't usually get into posting obituary notices, something of a morbid habit, and certainly a reminder of our own impending demise, but this is one of my all time favorite actresses.

I never thought of her as one of the first New Wave actresses, just generally thinking of Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, and perhaps Bardot in ...And God Created Woman, but she was a driving force behind Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1972), where one of the key scenes was seeing Bernadette Lafont drown her sorrows by repeatedly listening to Edith Piaf sing her 1948 recording “Les Amants de Paris” seen here: (YouTube - La maman et la putain on YouTube 3:05), which remains one of the essential works of cinema.

My favorite Chabrol film remains Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), a completely unpretentious film about bored Parisian working class girls who spend all day waiting to clock out of their dreary jobs so they can go out at night.  While utterly realistic, it remains as captivating today as when it was made, largely due to the naturalistic performance of Bernadette Lafont.

I still think of  her as that young and vibrant force driving French films, not quite the screen presence as Anna Karina, but she was probably the working class version, which is why I always felt I could relate to her.  There was no distance separating her from the audience, as she felt like one of us, which is something you just don't experience anymore. 

LES BONNES FEMMES       A 
France  Italy  (100 mi)  1960  d:  Claude Chabrol

Before Chabrol started mocking the complacency of the bourgeoisie with artificially stylized whodunits, he made at least two stabs at a social realist film, BEAU SERGE (1958), a naturalistic rural drama, and this deceptively complex work that on the surface appears to be a free wheeling, light-hearted drama about the social patterns of young Parisian girls, shot in a near documentary style following events as they occur over the course of several days.  Balancing their time at work in an appliance store with no customers to speak of, where the highlight of the day is a hopeful visit from a delivery man, the film examines the lives of four young girls who work there, each more bored than the next where their low-end wages offer little hope for a better future.  While they tease one another at work all day and continue socializing at night, it is clear they exhibit an artificial cheerfulness to hide their otherwise empty lives, very much in the manner of John Cassavetes, particularly in FACES (1968).  In fact outside of Cassavetes, this is one of the best films to capture the emotional authenticity of young women and the difficulty they face enduring men who are exaggerated caricatures of themselves, all promising to be more than they are.  While the men are uncomfortably obnoxious, this is all part of the mating ritual where the social art of persuasion is a double-edged sword, where if you allow yourself to get lured in, you may suffer the consequences.  On the other hand, if you take no chances at all, you’re back where you started from, which is a neverending routine of endless monotony.  Chabrol, with help from cinematographer Henri Decaë, does an excellent job finding the rhythms of the streets of Paris which exude a wonderful sense of energy and hopeful possibilities while the oddly dissonant score by Pierre Jansen and Paul Misraki may give some the creeps. 

Bernadette Lafont plays Jane, perhaps the most liberated and sexually audacious of the group, who through acts of exuberant spontaneity hopes to find happiness, while Stéphane Audran, soon to be the director’s wife, working in dozens of films together for some twenty years, plays her roommate Ginette, living a secret life as a singer in a variety revue.  Lucile Saint-Simon plays Rita, an attractive blond who is incessantly schooled by her fiancé how to please his snooty, overbearing parents, demanding that she change to become the girl of his dreams, while newcomer Clothilde Joano plays Jacqueline, a recent hire late on her first day on the job, a shy, quiet girl lost in her thoughts about a young motorcyclist (Mario David) who shows up regularly without so much as a word, staring at her through the storefront window, following her on his bike, always keeping his eye on her.  From an early sequence where a couple of the girls are followed by two guys in a white Cadillac, the audience has an idea what’s in store for them and can see these men are little more than goons, but the girls have a zest for living that typifies the sudden influx of boldly energized New Wave films.  What follows is a wild strip club sequence with a bon vivant Bridgitte Bardot look-alike that gets the guys pinching and grabbing, followed by an extended party sequence that plays out like New Years, where it’s all Jane can do to fend them off, which she does brilliantly until a night of champagne finally wears down her defenses.  Jane can be seen in the same clothes spraying perfume under her arms the next morning as she joins her roommate for another day at work, interrupted by a frantic run to the zoo at lunchtime where they interact with the caged monkeys, rare birds, and a stalking leopard before returning back to work where Jane ends up asleep.  One by one each of the girls is called into the boss’s office to be fondled and pinched, a day where time literally stops, counting the minutes until the work day is done. 

Interesting that the guys surrounding these girls are typically crude, boorish and ill-mannered, more interested in dominating any female desire to express themselves, like hunters caging wild animals or rare birds (“They don’t look rare to me.”), while the girls themselves couldn’t be more vividly gorgeous and appealing in their feminine charm, spending their days in dead end jobs filled with hopes and dreams that someday it might all be different.  There’s a strange swimming pool sequence where the original louts that picked up Jane decide to bully the girls, thinking it’s fun to throw them in the water and continually dunk them, like rude water polo, until they are rescued by the motorcycle guy who runs off the imbeciles.  In perhaps the strangest scene in the film, the motorcyclist takes Jacqueline for a ride into the country, where they walk deeper and deeper into the woods.  It is clear Jacqueline has never been happier, that she is finally, at this moment, herself, in a scene highly reminiscent of similar scenes with the happy and dreamy-eyed Giulietta Masina on her wedding day in Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), a walk in the woods sequence borrowed again by Fassbinder in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) featuring Barbara Sukowa as Mieze in the beautifully choreographed Part XII “The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent.”  These are scenes of utter heartbreak and despair, shown without a hint of excess, probably the turning point in each film.  The ramifications are beyond description, the audience is in a state of disbelief, as this was thought to be a dizzyingly absurd New Wave comedy of sorts, was it not?  The final sequence is just as exasperating, as the tone has completely shifted to a stunned audience that can’t quite comprehend what just happened.  This brilliant change of gears offers a completely new appraisal of the film, adding a profound layer of depth to these girl’s lives, where Chabrol expresses a surprising level of sympathy for their stark vulnerability in such a harsh world that barely notices they exist.

The Color of Lies (Au coeur du mensonge)

THE COLOR OF LIES (Au coeur du mensonge)         A                    

France  (113 mi)  1999  d:  Claude Chabrol

This is the kind of deeply complex character study that is nearly absent from films today, though superficially it might recall those Sunday night television episodes of Columbo or Murder She Wrote, as this is ostensively a small town murder mystery.  But Chabrol’s artistry turns this into a chilling atmospheric descent into dark interiors, idyllically set by the sea in a small Breton fishing village of St. Malo on the north coast of France where there’s little sunlight, as every scene is bathed in the cool dampness of a frigid Atlantic air, where waves can be heard crashing overnight, literally explosions confronting a collective mindset of the town’s guilty consciences.  A superb sociological mystery that is as much an exposé of the sleepy local community, a place where everyone knows everybody else, where the film examines the quiet reverberations of a young 10-year old schoolgirl’s raped and murdered body discovered in the nearby woods.  The prime suspect, due to the fact he was likely the last person to see her alive, is her emotionally fragile art teacher, René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), himself a failed and frustrated artist following an accident that has left him with a limp.  His devoted wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire) refuses to believe he had anything to do with a grotesque murder, but many of the locals withdraw their kids from René’s art classes. The film recalls Chabrol’s earlier films COP AU VIN (1985) and INSPECTEUR LAVARDIN (1986), as both feature an irrepressible detective sniffing around small town homicides, though here Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, with her high pitched voice and constant cigarette in her hand, plays the recently hired chief inspector Frédérique Lesage, much to the regret of veteran inspector Loudun (Bernard Verley), who was next in line for the position until they turned to an outsider, claiming the town leaders didn't want to pay him a higher pension since he plans to retire in a year.  

The film is replete with this kind of local charm, adding humor and color to the otherwise somber interior reflections of the anxiously insecure René, who remains interesting largely because of his artistic temperament, as he’s always intensely passionate about his painting, but his continual frustration with his work and his own troubled life leaves him in a perpetual gloomy state, seemingly a broken man who remains overly dour and morose.  Vivianne, on the other hand, remains vivaciously alive and couldn’t be more cheerful and upbeat, but she has a restless spirit as well, becoming increasingly introspective as the film progresses.  Enter Desmot (Antoine de Caunes), something of a local media celebrity, a charming but overly pretentious cad, a man with an inflated view of himself, but a successful writer and TV commentator.  Vivianne is challenged by thoughts of an affair with Desmot, as he continually flatters her with an easy going charm, exactly the opposite of her self-loathing husband, where getting information out of him is like pulling teeth.  Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is Chabrol’s choice to turn this into a psychological study camouflaged as a murder mystery, where the police investigation takes a back seat to René’s self absorbed trauma, focusing instead on his reactions to the murder, his public ostracism, and his artistic failures.  His deteriorating state of mind is matched by the police frustrations with their own inability to identify a suspect.  Perhaps most interesting is the changing relationship between René and his wife, which on the surface remains supportive, but her subconscious yearnings lead her to Desmot, who makes an impulsive suggestion that Vivianne wear the color blue, a color that quickly pervades the entire film, as the town is suddenly immersed in a dark bluish tinge, especially the natural seaside landscape whose special vibrancy continually eludes René.          

Neither Vivianne nor the audience know if René is actually guilty, but Chabrol delights in laying a minefield of clues, every one of which alerts the audience to the mysterious realm between suggestion and reality, often indistinguishable, begging the question of what we ever really know about anyone, including those we love and think we know the best, as our perceptions are riddled with superficial implications, such as someone appears to be acting a certain way, or they seem to be telling the truth.  What do we ever really know?  And in René’s case, what happens when our self confidence and faith in reality is literally shattered?  This shifting psychological pattern where everyone is suspect, where guilt inhabits all the principal characters through rumors, accusations, and malicious gossip spread throughout the town (mostly by Bulle Ogier), only adds to the mounting tension, where uncertainty pervades the landscape, like the impenetrable fog that eventually engulfs the community and figures into so much of what eventually happens.  While René is choking and literally suffocating on his own uncleansed soul, continually wracking his brain with a kind of self-induced guilt, yet he’s also the only one who seems to care about telling the truth, a fact that should not be overlooked.  Nonetheless, in a carefully constructed dinner scene where Desmot is invited to the seaside cottage of René and Vivianne, René plies him with wine, a man he detests, getting him good and drunk, but rather than making a fool of himself, as he hoped, Desmot continues to spout his obnoxiously vain and unflappable sense of  superiority, ego and self-importance, usually centered around making callous and belittling judgments of others, including René, who is always perceived as weak, something that infuriorates him.  What happens that night in the fog, as René takes him home in a midnight boat trip, adds to the enveloping mystery, as the presence of inspector Lesage the next morning informs us that another murder has been committed, finally becoming the police procedural that we always thought it would be.  As a host of characters are paraded before the inspector, each one defending themselves by casting guilt on others, we soon realize that everyone’s lives have been defined by a constant state of dishonesty, creating an inner tension that can only be relieved by a truth that may never come.  Ultimately, the fog breaks and people have to live with themselves, but it’s Bonnaire’s strength and undying love for her husband that stands out, becoming novelesque in scope and unique in unraveling the multiple layers of protective lies, perhaps in the long run, a necessary social evil.  The film goes out on a poetic grace note, a recognition of how much ambiguity plays a part in our lives, where perhaps the overriding power of love is faith in its existence. 

La Cérémonie

LA CÉRÉMONIE                   A     
France  Germany  (112 mi)  1995  d:  Claude Chabrol 

LA CÉRÉMONIE (1995) is among Chabrol’s most critically acclaimed films and greeted with such unbridled enthusiasm that Les Cahiers du Cinéma suggested Chabrol may be France’s greatest filmmaker, an extremely ironic observation coming on the heels of Chabrol, at least in America, being the most neglected filmmaker of the French New Wave, where Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, and Truffaut have all been anointed to the head of the class at some point in their careers, but never Chabrol.  This assessment is largely based on a lack of innovation in the world or cinema, where Chabrol, often seen in the Hitchcock thriller mold, may be viewed as the most commercial of the bunch.  Perhaps as significant, while they all wrote regularly for the film magazine, Chabrol less memorably, as his critical comments were less strident and opinionated, never going as far out on a limb as the others.  Chabrol, along with Godard, who has seemingly retreated into the video milieu, have been the most prolific directors, where this is the 46th film of 54 features.  Adapted from British suspense writer Ruth Rendel’s 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone, one of the fascinating elements is the title change, which suggests the celebration of a wedding or an awards banquet, but instead it refers to a French nickname for the guillotine, their historical version of the electric chair, as it is the ritual device used to execute prisoners.  And true to its title, this is a sharply written comic satire on class divisions and the principles of social order, a domestic thriller standing somewhere between comedy and horror, where it’s impossible not to recall Jean Genet’s One Act play The Maids, loosely based upon the infamous Papin sisters, though both Genet and Chabrol depart from historical realism, where Chabrol resorts to a meticulous recreation of the banal habits and routines of everyday bourgeois life, shown in minimalist detail.  

The unique power of this film is the fascinating relationship that develops between two of the finest and most eccentric actresses in French history, the pairing of Isabelle Huppert, nothing short of sensational as Jeanne, a volatile and acid-tongued postal clerk, and the equally enthralling Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, the reserved and tight-lipped maid of the upscale Lelièvre family living in an immense chateau in Brittany where Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), a former model turned trophy wife, gives the orders.  She dotes on her authoritative, Mozart loving husband (Jean-Pierre Cassel), owner of the family business, while running her own art gallery.  The spoiled children are twenty-year old Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and teenage Gilles (Valentin Merlet), all basically wrapped up in their own lives, a typically aloof and condescending bourgeois household.  When the kids try to get closer to Sophie, claiming their mom treats her like a robot ordering her around, she quickly rebuffs them, showing no social interest, retreating to her room where she prefers watching mindless television shows.  Nonetheless, Sophie keeps the house spotless, which puts Catherine at ease, but the rest of the family remain skeptical at her utter indifference, showing no outside interests or social skills.  She does hear about Jeanne from the outraged father who believes she is opening their mail and resealing it before delivery, an act that just galls him, as he refuses to allow anyone else to undermine his authority. Sophie fulfills her chores perfectly, but grows ghastly pale when she receives written shopping instructions, deathly afraid the family will find out her closest held secret, the fact that she is illiterate.  When she runs across Jeanne for the first time in the supermarket, her verbal reticence is matched by Jeanne’s nonstop chatter, where she is quickly baled out of the jam while Jeanne gives her all kinds of shopping tips.  The two lower class women become instant friends, growing even closer when both share dark secrets, as Jeanne may have accidentally killed her own baby, while Sophie implies she might have murdered her own father in an arson incident.  In both cases there as insufficient evidence to prosecute. 

Once they become friends, they’re inseparable, like long lost sisters, where Jeanne spews cruel gossip with regularity, showing nothing but contempt and disdain for the upper classes, literally mocking Catherine for asking Sophie to work on an off day for a birthday party for Melinda, expecting the hired help to be available at a moment’s notice, even though Sophie informed her ahead of time that she was doing volunteer work at the church with Jeanne.  Sophie helps set up the appetizers before leaving for church, to Catherine’s dismay, finding her attitude troubling.  At the church, women pick through the donated clothes, separating the usable from the worn out, where Jeanne can’t believe what junk rich people donate, using the church as a garbage disposal, as most of what they find is unusable.  Their rude mockery grows so excessive and out of control that eventually the priest has to ask them to leave, as they’re humiliating the donors.  To Sophie and Jeanne, they’re just being honest, saying what must be said, where Sophie’s friendship seems to empower Jeanne to be even more wild and outspoken, which in turn opens up Sophie as well, where isolated, they feel powerless and alone, but together they’re an unstoppable force, perfectly expressed when they’re watching television together like sorority sisters, arms around each other, where ironically they’re watching Michel Piccoli and Stéphane Audran in Chabrol’s earlier film WEDDING IN BLOOD (1973).  The Lelièvre family finds Sophie’s behavior so alarming they give her a week’s notice, which only further infuriorates Jeanne who bristles with anger, sick of the rich always having their way, always telling others what to do.  When they return to the estate to pick up Sophie’s things, the Lelièvre’s are sitting calmly on the sofa recording a televised production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, where a notorious liar and seducer of women is sent to Hell and damnation.  Actually the Mozart opera of choice where the lower class servants sarcastically make fun of the idyll rich is The Marriage of Figaro, literally leading them around like puppets on a string.  Nonetheless, Chabrol uses this setting to bring it all to a head, leaving nothing to the imagination, where this strange pair of women exacts justice, a strange word that has a different connotation in the larger cosmos, as the universe exacts its own, seen at work over the end credits, where the ultimate finale doesn’t occur until the final credit has run.            

There is a creepy and seductive nature to this strange pair of women, with erotic lesbian undertones to their developing intimacy, where Jeanne gleefully offers plentiful kisses all over Sophie’s cheeks, where implied sex is intertwined with their growing anarchistic liberation, where they defy all moral boundaries.  While it begins innocently enough giggling and tickling one another on the bed, it’s telling that it takes both of them together to rise to the level of class revolt, becoming a lethal pair, while individually they are harmless, as neither would have the strength to carry out their fateful rebellion.  After the deed is done, Jeanne proudly comments to Sophie, “On a bien fait (We have done well),” as if they’ve finally risen to the occasion and stood up to the higher classes, like some kind of Mother Courage Marxist spectacle.  Their friendship, however, is toxic, like a time bomb waiting to go off, where the results can only be disastrous.  Together they represent an ultimate horror, driven by Jeanne’s calamitous sense of danger, unease and restlessness, becoming a collective madness. 

It was chilling to see this film about this classic murderous pair on the day following the Boston terrorist fiasco, where the Tsarnaev brothers, 26-year old Tamerlan and his 19-year old brother Dzhokhar, seem more like Jeanne and Sophie and the Columbine killers than al Qaida.  A pair of brothers is a classic dyad scenario, like Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb, and the Washington D.C. snipers, a twisted relationship that plays out very differently than a lone gunman.  Mass killers are mostly *not* loners or outcasts, and the Columbine killers were neither.  Killer dyads are more consistent with a dominant, charismatic leader and a submissive follower, where the leader is often a sadistic psychopath.  Dyads usually contain contrasting personalities, as often there is a significant age difference, where a psychopathic killer generally does not hook up with another psychopath, nor do depressive pairs work well together.  Columbine was a perfect illustration of a classic dyad, where a psychopath like Eric Harris craved excitement and had difficulty sustaining it, but needed Dylan Klebold following his every move with adulation.  Who knew this film would recall the Columbine massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings?