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Les Innocents aux mains sales
1975 Crime / Drama / Thriller
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Director:
Claude Chabrol
Starring: Romy Schneider, Rod Steiger, François Maistre, Paolo Giusti, François Perrot |
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Summary
Julie Wormser lives in comfort in St Tropez with her wealthy husband,
Louis, who, 18 years her senior, has been forced into early retirement
after suffering a heart attack. Julie is apparently unperturbed
by her husband’s impotence and heavy drinking until the day she meets
Jeff, a handsome young writer with whom she begins a secret love
affair. The two lovers plan to murder Louis and make his death
look like a boating accident. Unfortunately, things do not go
according to plan. Having disposed of Louis’s body, Jeff heads
off to Italy in the victim’s car, leaving Julie to face the police
alone. Commissioners Lamy and Villon appear to accept her story
that Louis fell off his boat after having suffered a fatal heart
attack, but Julie is then shocked to learn that on the day before his
death Louis withdrew all his money from his bank and put his house up
for sale. Louis’s car is then found, smashed up at the foot
of a precipice, with no sign of a body. With both Louis and Jeff
missing, and her fortune evaporated, Julie is at a loss to understand
what is happening. The game has only just begun...
Credits
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Review
Whilst not generally regarded as one of Claude Chabrol’s better works, Les innocents aux mains sales is
still definitely worth watching if only because it is one of the
director’s weirder and less predictable films. It is quite a
disturbing film, bleakly cynical in its portrayal of both marriage and
the legal system, and contains many of the ingredients that are so
essential to Chabrol’s oeuvre. Infidelity, deceit, deception,
jealousy and revenge – in fact the whole gamut of the darker aspects of
human nature that poison relationships and result in many a tragic
outcome. The darkness of the subject is emphasised by the understated cinematography – the muted palate of browns and greys and the subdued lighting are so obviously inappropriate for the sunny St Tropez location and yet so perfect for the story. The impression this gives is that whilst the central character Julie (superbly played by Romy Schneider) has immense wealth and at least the semblance of a stable marriage, the reality is that all such comforts are entirely illusory, and she knows it. In this pretty world of bourgeois complacency, what lies on the surface and what lies beneath are two entirely different things, as we find in many a Claude Chabrol film. There is also a slightly sinister blackly comedic edge to this film which only really becomes apparent after repeated viewings and with some familiarity with Chabrol’s work. Of course, there are some obvious touches of comedy – such as the police duo Lamy and Villon deducing plot developments that have just been seen by the audience; as the plot gets increasingly implausible, the funnier this becomes. What is more subtle, comedically, is the increasingly bizarre nature of the relationship that Julie has with her husband and her lover. Does she care for either them, or is she merely concerned about her wealth? Does she derive pleasure from the ill-treatment the two men give her, or is she tormented by it? Is she the victim or is she the guilty party, the prime mover, in this complex tale of deceit and revenge? We can never be sure – ambiguity and deception are so much a part of this film that we can’t even be sure whether we should believe half of what we are shown... © filmsdefrance.com 2008 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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