Violette Nozière (1978) - film review

Paris, 1933.  The daughter of a respectable lower middleclass couple, Violette Nozière leads a disreputable double life.  Far from being the innocent 18-year-old her parents mistake her for, she spends her nights with dissolute young men in the less salubrious areas of the city.   One day, Violette meets her ideal man, Jean Dabin, but he is a scoundrel who soon begins to extort money from her.  When her parents discover that she is stealing from them, Violette finds the tension in their cramped apartment unbearable and she is driven to murder both her parents...

The true story of Violette Nozière provided director Claude Chabrol with ample material for him to explore his pet themes of bourgeois repression and the psychology of a murderer.  This is one of Chabrol’s darker films and also one of his most complex, employing a disorientating use of flashbacks to emphasise the dual nature and possible mental instability of the heroine.  The picture that Chabrol paints is an ambiguous one – is Violette Nozière a calculating hedonist lacking in scruples, or a victim of bourgeois double standards, exploited and abused by all who know her?

Isabelle Huppert won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her portrayal of Violette Nozière, and deservedly so.  This is the first of many collaborations between Huppert and Chabrol, an association of two immense talents that would yield many memorable films over the decades that followed.   In one of the defining performances of her career, Huppert succeeds in conveying the moral and psychological ambiguity of her character – the narcissistic egoism of the spoiled child, the vulnerability of the woman in love, and the calculating evil of a resolved killer.  It is testament to Huppert’s skill as an actress that she portrays such a complex character so convincingly, and in a way that evokes a sympathetic reaction from the audience.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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