Les Biches (1968) - film review

Frédérique, a wealthy heiress, befriends a young woman, a street artist named Why, and invites her to stay at her villa in the South of France.  There, at a dinner party, Why meets a young architect, Paul, whom she is easily seduced by.  Jealous, Frédérique in turn seduces Paul, but the two fall in love.  Realising that she too is in love with Paul, Why clings to them both, hurt but unable to leave them….

Les Biches is one of Claude Chabrol’s most intense and aesthetically pleasing films, a riveting melange of traditional love triangle and subtly dark thriller.   Fans of Chabrol’s work will notice strong similarities with his earlier film, Les Cousins, which mirrors this film in a number of imporant ways.

As in all of Chabrol’s films, nothing is quite what it initially seems.  Beneath what appears to be a conventional bourgeois drama, dark undercurrents can be discerned.  Three solitary characters are drawn together by forces they cannot control, the tension gradually building to a crescendo as the sexual tensions between them direct them towards the film’s shocking conclusion. 

This is first and foremost a film about seduction.   The opening sequence, with the mesmerising panoramic views of Paris, drenched in golden sunlight, seduces the audience, and in the first scene, a beautiful woman seduces an impoverished street artist.  From then on, these two characters indulge in a game of seduction which starts innocently enough but which quickly acquires a dangerous momentum of its own. 

All the time, we, the audience, are seduced by the beautiful cinematography, the captivating, sensual performances, most notably from the Sphinx-like Stéphane Audran, and Chabrol’s masterful direction.  This is a deliciously seductive work, but one which is also profoundly disturbing.

© James Travers 2002

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Everything is clean in Les Biches, even the stabbing at the end, so that a morbid spectator cannot rejoice, if he so wishes, in the perversity of the heroines.  Nice landscapes, enviable houses, elegant wardrobe, two court jesters are not enough. The one gem is Jacqueline Sassard’s face melting with a door, behind which the woman and the man she desires make love. One false pearl: the unbelievable hieratic playing that won Stephane Audran the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Festival Berlin in 1968. The tensions between the lower and upper classes crop up in the details, for instance in the first scene, when the young Why paints on the floor near the shoes of the passers-by, or the treatment given to the servants and the reactions of them. The price of the final substitution is crime and madness.
Adam Gai (Israel)

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