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Writer-director Claude Chabrol’s eerie 1969 masterpiece of frozen emotions and unspoken truths is now rereleased, alongside a Chabrol season at London’s BFI Southbank. This is the suspense thriller remade by Adrian Lyne in 2002 as Unfaithful with Richard Gere and Diane Lane and (partly) remade again this year as Minotaur, a bitter and brilliant theme-variation by the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. As for the original, watched again now, it does not in fact look like a classic noir thriller in the style of Chabrol’s hero Hitchcock, which is how it is often described, but more like something by Buñuel: an elaborate absurdist joke at the expense of the French bourgeoisie, a ballet of repression and fear.
The unfaithful woman of the title is the glacially beautiful but glassy-eyed Hélène, played by Chabrol’s then wife Stéphane Audran. She is cheating on Charles, played by Michel Bouquet, her prosperous husband and the father of their adored 10-year-old son. Charles has begun to suspect something is going on during his wife’s frequent trips to Paris, where she supposedly has appointments with the beautician, goes shopping or visits the cinema, but in fact has sex with the divorced writer Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet) at his dishevelled bachelor flat. Charles phones the beauty parlour where she is supposed to be getting a treatment; she isn’t there. We see how this only confirms suspicions which have clearly accumulated in his mind like silt over months or even years.
So Charles engages a private detective who finds the man’s address and Charles goes there, smilingly assuring the astonished Victor that his wife gave him the details and that he has always been fully au courant with this situation. All he wants is a civilised chat. Victor relaxes. But what exactly did Charles want to do at this meeting? Perhaps he really did only intend to luxuriate masochistically in the details, which Victor will incautiously reveal. This would also appear to be why Charles organises a party at a nightclub with friends, where he can inspect his wife’s behaviour with other men.
The film’s entire opening section, avowedly depicting nothing but the couple’s apparent domestic happiness, is drenched with strangeness, partly due to the atonal dissonance of the musical score but also to the expression on Charles’s face. Bouquet gives us an odd, bland smile, a smile of waxy artificiality, as if his features had been arranged like that after his death. This is the opaque smirk behind which Charles hides his terrible new certainty. It is partly a grotesquely forced simulacrum of a loving husband’s smile, and partly, perhaps, a continuous, converted grimace of disgust which he has, for his own benefit, tried to modify into a gesture of ironic amusement. This is the mocking face that he shows himself in the mirror.
Does Hélène know that he knows? Perhaps what she knows is that she doesn’t care what he knows. Yet Chabrol allows us once to penetrate her mask of elegant detachment. After sex one afternoon, Hélène and Victor find themselves talking about their respective children and we see her realisation that Charles could not live without his son and she couldn’t live without the boy either. That is what divorce would mean. The end of this illicit relationship has ironically begun right then and there.
Hélène’s first conversation with two cops investigating a certain matter – one rather smoothly groomed officer and the other cadaverous and openly malevolent – is a masterpiece of tension. Hélène’s behaviour could hardly be more guilty. She is quietly horrified that her personal details in Victor’s address book at his flat have led the police to her. It is as if they are investigating her infidelity. But certain other suspicions might now be starting to stir in her … especially since the police clearly suspect something serious and keep returning. Without a word being said, the marriage of Hélène and Charles begins to reconfigure itself: a kind of evil miracle of complicity and silent forgiveness. It is a film of icy fascination.
English (US) ·