Word: audran
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director Claude Chabrol, a disciple of Hitchcock, shoots more for nuance than frisson. It is his wily variations on a hoary theme that give La Femme Infidèle its own small distinction. A wealthy Parisian insurance man (Michel Bouquet) takes casual note that his supple young wife (Stephane Audran) acts rather nervous when he interrupts her on the telephone. He engages a private detective to follow her on her shopping trips to Paris and has his worst suspicions quickly confirmed: she is having an affair. Her paramour is a writer (Maurice Ronet) who lives mostly off his "independent means...
...film is caught in a home of pervading ugliness and static emotional vacuity. Trapped in the background at a dinner table which serves only as a battleground for his parents (a grotesque self-parody these since they are played by Cahbrol himself and his beautiful actress wife Stephan Audran), he tries to escape first by minor acts of destruction and finally by placing plugs in his ears. After he does so, Chabrol repeates scenes we have witnessed earlier, only this time without sound. As expressed by a slightly closer camera, the visual ugliness which lurks beneath the monied elegance...
...painted such personalities in commedia dell' arte costumes, for the masquerade was the sign and symbol of his era. To capture its magic, the Flemish-born painter had run away to Paris at the age of 18, then studied with Stage Designer Claude Gillot and Interior Decorator Claude Audran before striking out on his own. The times cried out for a chronicler. After the aged Sun King, Louis XIV died in 1715, French society, under the leadership of the dissolute regent, the Due d'Orleans, gave itself over to a rabid pursuit of pleasure, rivaling that of Imperial...
...exposition (all the answers we've been waiting for) is relegated to an importance secondary to the meaning of the shocking last dozen shots. Realizing that Audran's secret world has brought about the destruction of his own ephemeral constructs, Chris reacts violently to destroy her, just as she (in Chabrolian fashion recalling The Third Lover) selfishly destroyed the tense harmony in which she was an outsider. Chris realizes spontaneously that Christine's unrequited love nonetheless was the center of his barren life; Audran screams about money; and Paul, innocent of crime but isolated from his familiar life-style...
...implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away...