La femme infidele (Claude Chabrol, 1969)

 

Claude Chabrol's La femme infidele is one of the director's most exactingly sparse and ambiguous works, such that the ending may seem rather startlingly premature - it's no surprise that Hollywood was drawn to expand on the structure (in the 2002 Unfaithful). Helene and Charles (Stephane Audran and Michel Bouquet), living in a big house in Versailles with their young son, have a perfect marriage by most conventional measures, but Charles' first doubt about his wife's fidelity is triggered just moments into the film, rapidly supplemented by others, and then by the findings of a private detective. He makes contact with her lover Victor (Maurice Ronet), convivially introducing himself and dropping hints of an open arrangement within which everything's fine; the sense is that Charles possibly wishes this to be true, that he knows himself to be a kind of beneficiary from the time Helene spends with Victor, but things go wrong, Victor ends up dead, and events follow their doomed course. The film's eerie final image suggests an iconic image of wife and family both preserved and imperiled, unchanging and yet on the verge of being lost, summing up how Charles' drastic act of preservation has become the opposite, shattering a functional closed system, letting in an all-consuming destabilization. In a sense his action fits the label (and no doubt would be defended in court as) a crime of passion, but passion is one quality the film conspicuously lacks; even the aspects of spontaneity in the relationship appear calculated and measured out (but then, for that matter, Helene and Victor's affair seems almost as regimented). Chabrol provides a strange counterpoint in the form of Charles' office assistant Brigit, grotesquely caricatured as an airhead in short skirts, sexually tested and found wanting by a colleague, perhaps representing sexuality at its most conventionally available and free of mystery, and therefore almost inevitably meaningless.