Word: schoolmistress
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...evening in 1900, the wife of one of the area's white settlers answers a knock at her farmhouse door. Out of the darkness rushes the hired man, an aboriginal, flailing about with an ax. Moments later the farmer's wife, her two daughters and a schoolmistress-boarder lie hacked to death...
...murderer is a butcher (Jean Yanne) recently returned to his home town of Tremolat in the province of Périgord after more than a decade in the army. He begins a casual flirtation with a schoolmistress (Stephane Audran), a woman of distinctly cosmopolitan charms who invites his friendship but spurns his affection. An unhappy love affair has left scars, and she is unwilling to risk another commitment...
...butcher apparently accepts with equanimity the delicate emotional balance imposed by his new friend. But then the murders begin. The victims, always women, are found stabbed to death in the surrounding countryside. The schoolmistress herself discovers one of the bodies on an outing with her class. Lying against a nearby stone is a cigarette lighter like the one which she had given the butcher. She slips it into her pocket. Later a police inspector tells her that the woman had been killed only moments before the teacher found the body. Clearly the butcher meant the woman's death...
...does Chabrol fall victim to melodrama in his direction. He gets impact from understatement and from two superb, low-key performances by Yanne and Audran (who is Mrs. Chabrol in private life). In Chabrol's treatment, the schoolmistress not only triggers the killer's dormant psychopathy but becomes a partner in his crime. Perversely, as he becomes more dangerous, she is all the more drawn to him. Finally, knife in hand, the crazed killer confronts her late at night in her apartment. It is only then, in a violent, weird, but somehow touching denouement, that the two finally...
Mile. Helene (Stephane Audran) is the attractive schoolmistress in the placid provincial town. She befriends the local butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne) at a wedding feast and later presents him with a cigarette lighter. But their tranquil country life is disrupted by a taste of urban terror: a girl's body is found horribly mutilated. Soon another grisly murder is committed; this time Helene discovers the body while on a picnic with her students. Next to the body is a lighter that appears to be Popaul's. Helene finds herself I caught in a maelstrom of dark violence...