Les Bonnes femmes (1960)
Directed by Claude Chabrol

Film Review

It was Alfred Hitchcock who said you should 'film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.'  French film director Claude Chabrol took this advice literally in his fourth feature Les Bonnes femmes, and this is one of the reasons why it ended up with an 18 certificate and provoked a barrage of negative criticism. The film, later to be re-evaluated so that it now rates as one of the most signficant achievements of the French New Wave, was a massive flop and nearly brought Chabrol's filmmaking career to an abrupt end.  After this, the director's most scathing and most perceptive piece of social commentary, Chabrol would be driven towards safer subjects and ended up directing mediocre potboilers to keep his career going.  Things could have worked out very differently if critics and audiences had been more willing to accept the grim truths that Chabrol flung into their faces in his most controversial, and arguably greatest, film.

Following the bold stylisation of Chabrol's first thriller, À double tour (1959), and polished melodrama Les Cousins (1959), Les Bonnes femmes is strikingly realist in its approach, a near-return to the stark naturalism of the director's first film, Le Beau Serge (1958).  As he had previously done on films for Jean-Pierre Melville and François Truffaut, cinematographer Henri Decaë draws a haunting mystique from the Parisian landscape, the night shots having a particular raw beauty that encapsulates the poetry and modernity of the Nouvelle Vague. There isn't much in the way of a plot, just slices of Parisian life involving four modern working class girls all seeking escape from the grinding mundanity of their lives.  It feels more like a documentary than a conventional comedy-drama, with many scenes appearing improvised, à la Godard, and the spectator is never quite sure whether the film is intended to be a raucous comedy, a straight drama, a dark thriller or a serious sociological essay (in fact, it's all four of these).

Les Bonnes femmes does have feminist overtones but it is not an overtly feminist film.  The four female protagonists are not so much fully developed characters as archetypes representing four different aspects of the ordinary 'modern woman'.  One (Jane, played by a frighteningly uninhibited Bernadette Lafont) is only out for a good time, always ready to trade a one night stand for a sufficiently debauched night out on the town.  She is the polar opposite of her shy friend Jacqueline, who harbours the most ludicrously romantic notions of love and remains pure, waiting for her knight in shining armour to put in his appearance.  How cruel, and how fitting, that her beau idéal should turn out to be her executioner.  Ginette (played by the director's future wife, Stéphane Audran) apparently has no need of men; all she wants is to make a name for herself as a singer but she lacks the confidence to progress beyond the down-market music hall where she presently performs, incognito.  Rita is the most conventional of the four - she just wants to get married and start a family.  A realist, she has more chance of fulfilling her aspirations than the other three, but already it is apparent that her marriage is unlikely to a happy one - her fiancé is a dull bourgeois conformist, obsessively concerned with appearances.  Each of the women serves as a tragic statement of the limited opportunities for personal fulfilment that were available to their sex in the early 1960s.

These representatives of womanhood may be archetypes but Chabrol clearly sympathises with their predicament and coerces us into doing the same.  This cannot be said of any of the male characters, who portray all that is abject and loathsome in the average man.  From the two carousing boors that sweep Jane off her feet, to the women's lecherous hypocritical employer and Rita's insipid future husband, there is not one owner of the Y chromosome who does not arouse feelings of disgust and contempt.  Worse, the mysterious stalker whom Jacqueline mistakes for her long-awaited Prince Charming turns out to be, as we suspected all along, a psychopathic killer.  The idealised man that the women dream of patently does not exist in Chabrol's bitterly cynical world.  Women yearn for love and happiness, but the reality is they are destined to be disillusioned or fall prey to the vile primitive lusts of beings that appear to be several millennia behind them in the evolutionary process.  (There's some truth in W.S. Gilbert's observation that man, at best, is only a monkey shaved.)

This division of the species into the civilised dreamer on the one hand and the innate savage on the other - a crude but fairly apt metaphor for the difference between the sexes - is underlined by the film's most memorable sequence, in which the female protagonists amuse themselves with a trip to the zoo. As the women joke, shriek and pull funny faces the zoo's function appears oddly reversed - the humans become the exhibits, unwittingly entertaining the imprisoned animals and preventing them from dying of boredom.  The zoo visit gives the women a false sense of security, and they feel safe as they come within touching distance of strange and ferocious beasts, kept from harm by metal cages and glass. They fail to sense the danger that is lurking in their midst, the silent killer who is stalking his prey.  Were it not for the unsubtle Hitchcockian cues, we might also fail to notice the danger and mistake the murderer for just another innocent face in the crowd.

Had this been a conventional Hollywood melodrama, Les Bonnes femmes would have ended with the romantically inclined Jacqueline walking off into the sunset with her ideal partner.  Of the four women, she is the one who is most deserving of a happy ending, but Chabrol instead decides to make her a martyr.  Coming as it does, after one of the most romantic sequences of any of Chabrol's films, Jacqueline's murder has a startling brutality. This outcome was signposted right from the start of the film, it becomes a near-certainty when Jacqueline finally meets André, but still it hits us with a wallop of undiluted horror.  On the turn of a sixpence, a cheesy Mills & Boon-style romance morphs into something truly horrible as the naked savage is revealed to us.  Those familiar with Chabrol's oeuvre will be well acquainted with the perversity of his characters, so it may well be that this was the outcome Jacqueline had expected and wished for all along.  Just a few scenes back, one of her colleagues, an older woman, revealed that her most prized possession was a handkerchief that she had soaked in the blood of a guillotined killer.  Death has a special kind of allure and maybe this is what Jacqueline was really pining for, the ultimate in romantic release.

Immediately after this shocking denouement, Les Bonnes femmes concludes with an enigmatic coda which introduces yet another woman in a crowded dance hall.  As she is joined on the dance floor by a stranger, whose face is kept from us, she turns to the camera with a look that expresses both triumph and resignation.  Has she found the happiness she has long been searching for, or is she about to submit to whatever grim fate that lies in store for her - an unfulfilled marriage, a broken heart or a gruesome slaughter in a deserted car park?  The only thing we can be certain of is that whatever dreams she harbours are about to be smashed to pieces as her future is revealed to her.  Such is the fate of all women, or so Claude Chabrol would have us believe in this wriest of black comedies.

Film Synopsis

Four attractive young women who work together in an electrical appliance shop do all they can to escape from the tedious monotony of their uneventful lives.  Jane, the most out-going of the four, allows herself to be picked up by married men in search of a good time in the less salubrious nightspots of the capital.  Ginette has ambitions of starting a career as a singer, but is so ashamed of performing at a low-class music hall that she does so under an assumed name.  Rita is engaged to a dull man who is more concerned with appearances that her happiness.  Meanwhile, Jacqueline, the shiest and most romantically inclined of the four friends, is stalked by a motorcyclist who is infatuated with her.  Of the four, the only one who appears to be capable of finding fulfilment in her life is Jacqueline, but fate has a cruel twist in store for her...