Les Innocents aux mains sales (1975) - film review

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...

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...

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