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Credits
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Summary
When Charles Desvallées suspects that his wife Hélène is having an
affair with another man, he hires a private detective to follow her and find the name
of her lover. Having obtained the information he was after, the jealous husband
confronts Hélène’s secret lover and, having gained his confidence,
kills him…
Review
Few films exemplify Chabrol’s cinema better and more fully than La Femme infidèle
. The bourgeois setting, the dangerously repressed characters, the mildly disturbing
voyeuristic photography, the discordant music… all the familiar motifs which conspire
to conjure up an unsettling world of seemingly middle-class respectability in which deadly
passions are struggling to break free. This is the world of Claude Chabrol.
On the surface, La Femme infidèle is a simple tale of marital infidelity and revenge. However, look close and you will see much more than that. Hélène, like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is driven into having an affair because she can no longer endure the passionless sham that her marriage has become. Her husband is content to watch pictures of wine classes on an eight inch screen television. She needs much more than he can offer. It is only when he kills his wife’s lover that Charles shows any passion for his wife – a stupid, ill-conceived spur of the moment act of madness, so he can keep his wife for himself. Of course, when Hélène realises what her husband has done, she rediscovers her love for him and she has no further need of her surrogate lover. Of course, by that stage, the edifice of respectability has been completely destroyed and their lives will never be the same again. The beauty of this film lies in both its subtlety and its charming playfulness. The film has an almost existentialist minimalism in its plot; all of the detail – the drama, the suspense, the comedy – stems from the reactions of the characters to their predicaments. To this end, Chabrol is well served by his leading actors, Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran. The film is far lighter than some of Chabrol’s more complex thrillers, such as Le Boucher and Que la bête meure, with some pleasing comic touches (such as the tweedle dum, tweedle dee police double act), which both help to relieve the tension and emphasise the artificial nature of Charles and Hélène's cosy middle-class life. Despite its apparent simplicity, La Femme infidèle is a film of great merit, visually enticing and subtly disturbing. Beneath the polished veneer of staid middle-class respectability their lurk dark and dangerous passions… Adrian Lyne directed an American remake of the film, Unfaithful (2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane. © James Travers 2001
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