La Femme secrète (1986)
Directed by Sébastien Grall

Film Review

Having worked as an assistant on Yves Boisset's bleak political thriller Le Juge Fayard dit Le Shériff (1977) and Laurent Heynemann's uncompromising exposé of the Algerian War La Question (1977), Sébastien Grall made his directing debut with this fairly mundane but watchable thriller. Grall made two further films for cinema after this, the best being his revealing wartime drama Les Milles (1995), before devoting the remainder of his career to television.

La Femme secrète is fairly typical of the kind of crime drama that was being made in France in the 1980s and looks more like a made-for-television movie than a film for the cinema. Despite an implausible plot and uneven, rambling narrative, the film succeeds in holding the spectator's attention, mainly because of its bizarre collection of supporting characters.  These include a vitriolic artist (another full-bodied performance from the great Philippe Noiret), a sadistic financier (one-time Truffaut collaborator Jean-Louis Richard) and a pallid stamp-collector who moonlights as an accomplice in a daring fraud (François Berléand at his creepiest). Both Berléand and Noiret would feature in Les Milles. By contrast, the lead characters (played by Jacques Bonnaffé and Clémentine Célarié) are comparatively bland and less than engaging.  Grall's direction would have been adequate had this been a TV movie but for a cinematic feature it feels somewhat lacking.

Film Synopsis

Learning of his wife death's, Antoine Béraud abandons his work on an experimental submarine in the North Sea and returns to his home in Paris.  He learns that his wife's body was found in the Seine, pumped with barbiturates.  Unable to accept that his wife could kill herself, Antoine decides to carry out his own investigation.  He quickly discovers that his wife has been leading a double life, having a lesbian love affair and attempting to defraud a bank of millions of francs...