LES BONNES FEMMES (87)

Directed by: Claude Chabrol (1960)

Starring: Bernadette Lafont, Stéphane Audran, Clotilde Joano, Lucile Saint-Simon

The Pitch: In the drab and dingy Paris of the early 60s, four young girls working as shop assistants are looking for love - of one kind or another.

Theo Sez: A very volatile film, making Chabrol's control all the more exemplary : scenes turn from comic to painful in the blink of an eye, and you're never sure what to think - is it rape at the end of the long opening sequence, when Lafont is badgered into a room, protesting mightily, by the two guys who've picked her up and the door closes softly in our face, or just a kind of farce, the usual messy end - so far from romance! - to an ordinary, up-and-down evening (on a par with the earlier double-edged banter between guys and gals, or Lafont's reaction, both indignant and aroused, when the guy pats her bottom). On one level, scenes are simply savoured in themselves - a capacious, all-human-life-is-here kind of movie, acting as a snapshot of a certain time and place : a lunch-hour visit to the zoo, sex in the air amid the horseplay and clamour of a public swimming-pool, a night at the music-hall with jazz bands and torch singers - but Chabrol keeps rubbing the New Wave spontaneity against unexpected, deliberately eccentric notes, broad comedy with the lecherous boss and the timid boyfriend's parents (all the fuss about ordering the "Mystère" to impress his gourmet Dad) then a sudden swing to the macabre as Mme. Louise's "fetish" is revealed to be a handkerchief soaked in a murderer's blood. The point is to emphasise the manifold quality of Life (everything contains something else, humour and horror side-by-side) the one constant being that everyone's looking for love, but you have to accept the former in order to get the latter : waiting for the 'one true love' goes against the complexity and unpredictability of human relationships, which is why it's dangerous. The product of a sophisticated sensibility (cynicism hiding weary compassion) and a great film-maker - masterly detail at the end, e.g. in making it clear the killer will (probably) be caught without actually saying so - not to mention Lafont, slapping deodorant on her armpits after a night out and somehow making it sexy. Minor in the sense that it deals in bits and pieces rather than a powerful narrative or Big Idea, but does it matter? Look for it to go 90+ on second viewing...