L'homme Bourgeois

Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle, or The Unfaithful Wife, tells a bourgeois cautionary tale set in sixties France. The methodical thriller depicts the misdeeds of a husband, Charles (Michel Bouquet), after he discovers his wife, Hélène (Stéphane Audran), is having an affair. The passionless marriage between the alluring yet bored housewife and the older, jealous husband is held together only by their son, Michel (Stephane Di Napoli), whom they “could not live without”. Chabrol’s emotional language is spoken through subtleties: the spare dialogue, the icy glances, the clandestine relations.

The film is rigorously crafted, with absolutely stunning visuals. Every movement calculated, every piece of dialogue essential. Beautiful framing was its lifeblood – one particularly striking shot was that of the family eating breakfast in the garden after Hélène was ‘stood up’ by her lover. The family are symmetrical against the backdrop of the Versailles countryside, and the shot is lined with the cerulean blue of the bench along the bottom and canopy along the top. The contrast between the palpable tension and the lush colours is crucial. The shots linger, allowing the audience to sink into the emotional load the characters are bearing.

The tense exchanges, the stoic Hélène, the play of mutually assured deceit are reminiscent of Hitchcock’s lesser-known ‘relationship’ works – for all its intellect, there is the frustrating refusal to grant so much as a glimpse of the characters’ reasoning for their bad behaviour. Obsession must be answer enough. The lack of psychological comprehension could translate into narrative hysteria and a sloppy plot, but Chabrol achieves the opposite. Hélène is so stoic that it leaves the audience begging for even a minor mental breakdown, any sort of indication of how she feels and thinks.  

The defining moment of Hélène’s character is after she finds a photo in her husband’s jacket pocket. The police have been over, her husband’s acting strange and she doesn’t know why, and now she finds a picture of her secret lover whom she hasn’t seen in days. She knows what this means. In probably the central shot of the film, the camera follows her as she takes the photo outside and sets it on fire. She drops it on the ground and the camera swings round with her as she leaves it to become ash. The shot feels so modern and the act portrayed speaks volumes- not only about Hélène’s character, but also her relationship with Charles.

The discombobulated yet tense score of disjointed pianos could so easily have marred the uneasy atmosphere, but it augmented it. It gave the long scenes, such as when Charles commits a crime and must immediately deal with the consequences, an injection of energy where they could have felt drawn out for the sake of it. The film is perfectly measured, the relaxed pace never faltering. This pacing is deliberately used to allow the implications of the story to settle over the two central characters - so much of what makes this film thrilling is entwined in the interplay between them: what one knows and the other doesn’t. At the close of the film, it seems husband and wife are finally on the same page – the police have come to the Versailles château for the third time, interrupting the first moment the family are truly connected. The closing shot of Hélène and Michel from Charles’s point of view as he is being led down the long, winding drive by the officers is beautiful. We see wife and son through Charles’s eyes, his gaze never faltering as the camera zooms in on them through the trees and moves with him so that he never loses sight. This shot undeniably makes the film.

For an idea that may seem trite, the film miraculously presents a perfectly realised image that Chabrol sets and then leaves to crack under its own weight, with the violent gesture at its centre the only active rupture. It is so resolutely defiant in its coldness - it nearly freezes out the viewer entirely yet manages to leave them wanting more.