Les Bonnes femmes (1960) - film review

Four attractive young women who work together in a shop try to escape the monotony of their uneventful lives by partying and chasing after men.  Ginette has ambitions of starting a career as a singer, Rita is engaged to her boss, Jane allows herself to be picked up by married men, whilst Jacqueline is stalked by a mysterious motorcyclist.  None of the women seems capable of finding fulfilment in their lives, except, perhaps, Jacqueline...

Although it is now widely regarded as one of the most important and representative films of the French New Wave, Les Bonnes femmes faced a barrage of negative criticism when it was first released in 1960.  Today, the film might be classified as a social drama, and it is perhaps Claude Chabrol’s most realistic film.  At the time, however, the far from romantic depiction of young women coping with their humdrum lives resulted in a ferocious public backlash, which had a great impact on Chabrol’s subsequent career.  In the following years, Chabrol stuck to far safer subjects, making him much less daring as a director than his New Wave contemporaries, such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

Today, it is hard to appreciate the controversy that Les Bonnes femmes created on its initial release.   Some film critics describe it as a masterpiece, a hugely perceptive portrait of young women facing a barren future of marital ennui and unfulfilled work lives.  Perhaps more daring than the content is the way in which the film is shot and edited, much closer to our collective notion of French New Wave films and a total contrast to what we see in Chabrol’s future films.

Perhaps the film’s main strength is the quality of the performances from its four lead actresses, especially the eternally coquettish Bernadette Lafont, a favourite of the New Wave directors.  Chabrol’s direction is also noteworthy, showing a confidence and creativity which is lacking in his earlier films, such as Les Cousins.  The film’s Hitchcockian ending also provides a strong hint as to the direction Chabrol’s film-making career would take, presaging the atmospheric psychological thrillers for which the director is now better known.

© James Travers 2001

For more on Claude Chabrol see:
The life of Claude Chabrol
Le Beau Serge
Les Cousins
Le Boucher
Que la bête meure
La Cérémonie




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Les Bonnes femmes is a sordid story about four young female employees in an ordinary appliance shop in Paris, particularly about their affairs with occasional lovers. They attempt to balance boring daily work, with generally frustrating visits to nightclubs and restaurants. The search for a fleeting adventure with a man, or the desire of marrying one, are as deceiving as their lives in their hypocritical petit-bourgeois society of the fifties.  They seem not to be aware of the current war in Algeria, notwithstanding that one of the lovers, André, is a soldier. The motorcyclist who bears the same name as the soldier, and goes after the most fragile of the girls, happens to be a psychopath. The war is not physically there, but it is in spirit.  The male-female relationships can’t refrain from sadomasochism (for instance, the seduction and murder in the forest, the morbid adoration of the shop cashier for a executed serial murderer).  The scene at the zoo is a microcosm of the total story: not only the wild beasts, but human beings appear unbridled and locked up in cage.  Henri Decae’s photography intensifies the gloomy atmosphere.
Adam Gai (Israel)

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