Compagnie Française de Distribution Cinématographique
Release date
22 January 1969 (1969-01-22) (France)
Running time
98 minutes
Language
French
The Unfaithful Wife (French: La Femme infidèle) is a 1969 French–Italian crimedrama film written and directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Stéphane Audran and Michel Bouquet.[1] The story follows a businessman who discovers his wife has been unfaithful.
Plot
Insurance broker Charles Desvallées lives in a beautiful house in the countryside near Paris with his wife Hélène and their young son. Hélène often goes to Paris, allegedly for shopping, beauty treatments and cinema sessions. By accident Charles discovers she was not at the hairdresser as she had claimed. He gradually grows more suspicious about the way she employs her time and asks a private investigator to follow her. The investigator reports that his wife regularly sees a writer called Victor Pégala at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
On a day his wife is busy hosting a birthday party for their son, Charles pays Pégala a visit. At first he tells the confused writer jovially that he and his wife have an open marriage and sits and talks pleasantly with him. He asks for a tour of the small flat. On seeing the bed his demeanour changes. He spots a giant cigarette lighter at the bedside, which had been a third anniversary present to his wife from him. He suddenly grabs a stone bust and kills Pégala with two violent blows to the head. Charles then meticulously cleans up and removes all fingerprints. He takes away Pégala's body in his car and disposes of it in a pond.
The following days, Hélène appears to feel unwell. Two detectives turn up to interrogate her about Pégala, who has been reported missing by his ex-wife. Hélène's name has been found in his address book, but she pretends that he had been only a distant acquaintance. In the evening, the detectives return and interrogate both Hélène and Charles, who denies having even heard of the man before.
Later, Hélène finds a photograph of Pégala in her husband's jacket pocket with his name and address on the back. After burning it, she joins her family in the garden, looking tenderly at Charles. When the two detectives show up again, Charles tells Hélène that he loves her and goes to speak to the men. In the last shot, presumably seen from Charles's point of view, the camera moves back from Hélène and their son while zooming in on them, implying that Charles is taken away from them.
Although commercially unsuccessful in France with only 682,295 admissions,[2]The Unfaithful Wife was quickly picked up by US distributor Allied Artists and premiered in New York on 9 November 1969.[3]Roger Greenspun of The New York Times called it a "calmly and thoughtfully perverse" film born from a "unique cinematic imagination",[4] and Vincent Canby included it in his "Ten Best" list.[3]
In later years, the critics' opinion was equally positive. Paul Taylor of Time Out magazine titled it "one of Chabrol's mid-period masterpieces, a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder."[5]Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian that "Chabrol displays an irrestistible logic and an ironic humour", and "what could have been just another thriller becomes... also a passionate love story, with its share of intense irony and a pervading sense of the quirkiness of fate."[6]TV Guide called it "arguably the best of Chabrol's superb, Hitchcockian studies of guilt, love, and murder among the French elite", adding that "Michel Bouquet and Stéphane Audran […] give perhaps the finest performances of their careers."[7]
Influences
Reviewers have repeatedly pointed out the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's films on The Unfaithful Wife, in particular Vertigo[8][9] and Psycho.[10] The last shot of Hélène and their son makes use of the dolly zoom technique first used in Vertigo,[8][9] while the cleaning of the murder site and the disposal of Pégala's body in the pond have been compared to similar scenes (the cleaning of the bathroom and the sinking of the victim's car) in Psycho.[10] Still, Chabrol denied the notion that his film was in any way "Hitchcockian".[11]
