Word: audran
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DURING ONE of the heavier-handed scenes in Wedding in Blood, Stephane Audran, playing the wife of a boorish and corrupt French politician, appears in her town's library to donate a volume on ethics. The librarian, impressed by the tome's weightiness and its complicated-sounding title, accepts the book and remarks, "It must be very difficult." Audran's precocious little daughter, who understands the surface of things better than any adult character, closes this little lesson on ethics by chiming in with her typically mocking tone, "Oh yes, very difficult...
...film's main characters, played to perfection by Audran and Michel Piccoli, are both middle-aged victims of unrewarding marriages. Picolli acts the part of a subordinate political figure wedded to a bed-ridden woman who is at once depressed and depressing. The sickly woman is self-conscious of the fact that she has made her husband's life dreadfully dull, but she is of neither mind nor body to change the course of things. The husband, were he to remain faithful to the invalid and to convention, would be condemned to the life of a wet-nurse...
...Audran, on the other hand, appears to have the best that bourgeois society has to offer. Her husband is a rich and important man, her home is luxurious and her daughter (by a teenage romance) is intelligent and sympathetic. Despite the rewards of her position, Audran remains an unfulfilled woman; passion is lacking from her life, and, according to the logic of the film, that is the crucial element. The blame for her suffering is placed, rightly enough, on her husband, one of those soulless all-business types who possesses little talent for either love...
Wedding's depth and ability to influence are most largely due to the remarkable characterizations given to each of the major personages in the story. Without exception the performances are first-rate, and the actors--most notably the two stars and girl who plays Audran's daughter--infuse their roles with such life that they almost bound off the screen and take on three full dimensions. Chabrol was extradinorily lucky to have access to these quality performances, because when the story begins to sag--as it does in too many places--the actors manage to carry things along until...
...devine. The most disquieting shortcoming is in the way the movie deals with the relationships between people. In a film that is so richly textured, there is a surprising lack of feeling to personal interactions. For instance, it is never really clear what stuff the passion of the Audran-Piccoli affair is made of. How much romantic love there is, how much of the relationship is just an attempt to give life to a thrwarted sexuality, is just never defined satisfactorily. Perhaps Chabrol did not think such definitions important. Perhaps all we have to know is that the lovers shared...