A very European tale of an upper-class Frenchfamily in comfortable circumstances. They get along well, love each other, and have a beautiful child. The only problem is that the wife (Audran) is bedding some other guy several afternoons a week, the husband (Bouqet) finds out about it and visits the lover, who greets Bouqet with a bemused rictus. Bouqet has an awkward exchange with him, bops him over the head with bust of Nefretiti, and disposes of the corpse in an algae-covered pond. Audran knows nothing of this, only that her afternoon lover has done a disappearing act. During two visits from suspicious but very polite police inspectors, husband and wife both deny having known the deceased. Audran later discovers that Bouquet has been lying -- she finds her boy friend's photo and address in the pocket of one of her husband's jackets. Since she loves her husband, she destroys the evidence of his crime. A third visit from the police ends ambiguously.Now, the French have a sense of how to do things avec élégance and indeed I doubt that this movie would have been made in Hollywood or even in France during the era of nouvelle vague. It's too deliberate, too slow, too artfully done. And we don't see anybody's brains spilled out all over the landscape. Director Chabrol has done a fine job but you need an episodic memory of more than five seconds to appreciate it.The performances too are vaguely European. Everything is smooth except during rare arguments, and I love to see the French lose their patience with one another. Audran is an attractive lady, indignant with the carefully poised questions of the police. Bouquet is equally controlled, with the central point of his upper lip dipping somehow into his lower lip, something like a Peruvian tapir or like my gastroenterologist, Dr. Pyloris.Someone criticized the scene in which the kid drinks a glass of champagne but when it comes to alcohol France is part of the Mediterranean tradition. Younger children may be given "red water" -- water mixed with wine. It's all highly ritualized and there's little drunkenness. The musical score is sparse but perfectly apt. The photography captures on film a rather nice city and an even nicer country estate where a man can spend time casually trimming his plants. The British translation eledes some of the more colorful expressions. A good job.

The two characters primarily involved in Claude Chabrol's 1969 French thriller The Unfaithful Wife have, at least at the beginning, rather an idyllic and somewhat pleasant set up in their lives. When we first encounter them, we see both the husband and titular wife with their rather extended family in a large garden on a warm, sunny and welcoming day; the tone of the exchanges polite, the activity nothing out of the ordinary nor needlessly extravagant. The opening shots of such imagery are quite crudely broken up by a blurred effect which drowns the screen of its focus, the ideal family unit itself thus becoming difficult to firmly latch one's eyes onto; the credits begin, some rather harsh and somewhat official looking credits that scroll upwards in a military manner whilst some distorting piano music plays overhead. It's a fleeting few minutes or so of idealism in-between such a sequence, the film going on to form a superior mediation on human behaviour masquerading as a causality thriller as paradise is rendered corrupt and peeking beneath the surface of the upper-classes reveals deception and titular unfaithfulness.The film is unrelentingly fascinating, a piece never for more than a few seconds ever in the slightest bit uninteresting; a grim and somewhat bleak study how love, anger and victimisation brew together to create a cocktail of violence and anguish and how that in itself can come to forge a relationship which was never initially set in stone. The film's methodical lead is Michel Bouquet's Charles Desvallees, a lawyer with his own office located in a small enough building amidst the bustling Parisian streets away from the large, more ruralised country house in which he lives with his family. The family, of which, is made up of the titular wife, a certain Hélène (Audran) who's about the same age as her husband and is the mother to young son Michel (Di Napoli). The warm and welcoming day in the garden spent with Charles' mother and Hélène's in-law turns into evening, Charles' verbal illustrating of various plans he would like to have happen the following day involving both he and Hélène out and about doing things are shot down with casual reasons which excuse Hélène from attending. As they sit and observe a television broadcast later on during the evening, the signal begins to break up and the machine ceases to function as well as it might, thus further insinuating a breaking down of communication of an operative item and echoing their marriage.At work, and aside from Charles' rich circle of friends and busy schedule, he observes through young female secretary Brigitte (Turri) the very essence of temptation. His suspicion brought about by his wife's behaviour, and Chabrol's own channelling onto the audience of signs and notions towards an upsetting of a paradise-like set up or the malfunctioning of a working order, beginning to resonate. Desperate, as thoughts; feelings and drama all at once clinically escalate, Charles darts to the nearest payphone to call a place of business Hélène said she'd be; the piano music from earlier only suggesting at something seriously wrong with what idealism we were seeing beginning to pipe up again to form the overlying soundtrack to the news she is not where she said she'd be.The painful inevitable is confirmed when a private detective Charles hires reveals to him the truth; that Hélène is, in fact, having an affair and with a writer named Victor Pégala (Ronet) based not so far away. The film allows Charles a moment you sparsely see in today's age of thrillers; a moment of contemplation that has him stand beside a river flowing through the urbanised locale in which the reveal was announced so as to merely look across to the other side of it, digesting what it is has been exposed to him. It is around about here in the film that Chabrol applies a gear change so dramatic and so effective that it propels the piece beyond its combined brooding roots of paranoia and suspicion and into an echelon of unpredictability; horror and human emotion in its some of its rawest forms. In short, the switch in tone and content works remarkably; the film coming to have Charles journey to the man and see him.The film's causality infused thrills and scares following the venturing into the territory it goes near does nothing to distract the film from its overall tract; it is a film that is able to evoke just as much an on-edge reaction from its audience following a character's glance or nervous facial reaction as it can from a minor car accident. Chabrol's capturing of some of the interplay towards the conclusion as two people are forced into hiding varying secrets from both one another and the police is fascinating, and the film does not loose sight of son Michel's role as the picturesque representative of innocence caught up amidst all this and made to suffer out of others' ill-gotten decisions. Chabrol's overall ending is decidedly bleak, but his conclusion that the two we examine whom previously appeared to fall away from each other only to reconnect when some sort of duality was established, is dangerously uplifting given the sorts of events which aided in this and the actions the lovebirds undertook; all of it combining to form a superior thriller of an immensely sophisticated ilk.

Claude Chabrol is sometimes known as 'The French Hitchcock', and while the two didn't exactly make the same type of thriller; it's easy to see where the comparisons come from, and both of these great directors are masters of their crafts! This is only the third Chabrol film I've seen, but once again I'm extremely impressed and looking forward to seeing more! Though I have limited experience of his films, Chabrol's thrillers to me are more brooding and personal than Hitchcock's; and while they lack the brazen thriller element that made most of Hitchcock's oeuvre so good to watch, it's made up for in panache and intrigue! The Unfaithful Wife puts its focus on an upper class French family in a big mansion somewhere just outside of a big city. We follow them for a short while until it becomes obvious to the husband that his wife's constant trips into town are a clue that she is having an affair. The husband then decides to hire a private detective to investigate his wife, and after having his fears concerned; the husband turns up at the lover's house with murder in mind...The film appears to be so relaxed that at times you may wonder whether you are actually watching a thriller. But that is what makes this film so effective; Chabrol often lets his film settle, but there is always tension bubbling beneath the surface and the film is always intriguing, even when there is little going on. I won't spend too long talking about the acting and production values as obviously both are thoroughly professional and give the film infinite amounts of credibility. Most of the action focuses on the couple inside their big house and this benefits the film greatly as we soon get to know the characters. The central scene is clearly the murder sequence, although again Chabrol focuses on the build up rather than the actual pay off and the murder is as cold and brutal as it was obviously intended to be. The Unfaithful Wife is clearly a lesson in how suspense cinema should be; even more subtle than Hitchcock, this film manages to be constantly fascinating in spite of the fact that not a great deal transpires over the course of the film, and once again it's another great film on Chabrol's resume!

"La Femme Infidele", which was released in 1968, followed quickly on the heels of "Les Biches", (which, in a perhaps playfully arrogant way, is shown as playing in a cinema during the course of the film), and continued a glorious return to form for Chabrol after a too-long fallow period.It was the first of a series of what could be regarded 'studies in adultery' starring his wife (and muse), Stephane Audran. In this one a loving husband suspects his wife of being unfaithful and, having had his suspicions confirmed by a private detective, determines to confront her lover.Although he's often described as the French Hitchcock, Chabrol, while he has consistently proved that he has mastered the basic techniques of the suspense film genre, invariably has been at least as equally interested in the study,- indeed dissection, - of the mores and behaviour of the French bourgeoisie. While this categorisation might suggest a tendency towards dry academic study, he has shown in his best features a masterful ability to employ a variety of techniques to present his case in a telling manner. In this instance he employs, variously, a combination of subtle character study,suspense film, Pinteresque drama, and some black comedy.He is greatly assisted here by a clutch of exceptional performances: Audran and Maurice Ronet as the lovers, and, best of all, Michel Bouquet as the suspicious but loving husband. (As an aside, and I'm not sure whether she served any function in the film other than mere decoration, but the husband's mini-skirted secretary appeared to me to have wandered onto the film from an adjacent French farce. But then,perhaps,it was just a case of Chabrol conforming to the norms of the day.)Among the superbly-crafted high-points were the confrontation between lover and husband; the various domestic conversations between husband and wife where the nature of their relationship is carefully and beautifully delineated; the various conversations with the investigating policemen; and a masterly final scene (where even the briefest explanatory description would be too cruel for those who've yet to see the film).Overall, however, what ultimately elevates the film to greatness is the way in which Chabrol presents his subjects as determined to maintain the domestic equilibrium, irrespective of, and almost oblivious to, temporary 'crises' and 'inconveniences'. And in the way in which, he, as director/puppetmaster, while at times apparently mocking, simultaneously persuades us to sympathise with his subjectsQuite possibly his finest film: but certainly quintessential Chabrol.