Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film charts a complex marriage in which a husband suspects his wife is cheating on him
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.
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