The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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La femme infidèle / The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
DVD5 | ISO | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 01:37:47 | 4,44 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama, Thriller | Italy, France
DVD5 | ISO | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 01:37:47 | 4,44 Gb
Audio: French AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Drama, Thriller | Italy, France
Stéphane Audran plays the title character, Hélène Desvallées, the bored wife of insurance executive Charles Desvallées… (Michel Bouquet). Charles suspects Hélène of playing the field, so he has a private detective locate his wife's lover, author Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet). Confronting Victor, Charles tries to adopt an air of indifference, but the conversation ends with the husband bludgeoning the author to death and then calmly disposing of the evidence. When Hélène is questioned about Victor's murder, she discovers on her own that her husband is guilty. Instead of turning him in, Hélène is so thrilled that Charles cares so deeply about her that she is more in love with him than ever before. The Unfaithful Wife was directed by Claude Chabrol, the then real-life husband of leading lady Stéphane Audran.
IMDB
Michel Bouquet and Stephane Audran give superb performances in Claude Chabrol's LA FEMME INFIDELE, a gripping and stylishly made suspense tale.
Charles Desvallees (Michel Bouquet), a wealthy, mild-mannered insurance broker suspects that his wife Helene (Stephane Audran) is cheating on him. The detective reports that Helene spends her afternoons in the apartment of a divorced writer named Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet). Charles visits Victor and sees Helene's cigarette lighter, and so questions him. As Victor starts to brag about their affair, Charles picks up a statuette and hits him over the head with it, killing him. He then calmly cleans up the blood, puts Victor's corpse into a sack and dumps it into a pond, then returns home to his son's birthday party. Helene is mystified by her lover's disappearance, but when the police interrogate her, she lies about their relationship. Subsequently, Helene finds a picture of Victor in Charles's coat pocket that would incriminate him in Victor's murder, but instead of informing the police, she burns it. Ironically, Helene develops a newfound love and respect for Charles, although neither of them lets the other know what they've done.
The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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LE FEMME INFIDELE is arguably the best of Chabrol's superb, Hitchcockian studies of guilt, love, and murder among the French elite. His masterful, elegantly detached direction and trenchant psychological insight create moments of almost unbearable tension and suspense, aided by Jean Rabier's subtly sinister camera movements. Michel Bouquet and Stephane Audran (who was Chabrol's real-life wife at the time), give perhaps the finest performances of their careers. The two stars perfectly capture the deluded sensibility of their privileged characters in a satirical way without resorting to ridicule. Chabrol has stated that he makes films about the bourgeoisie because "I am one myself–I know them and I hate them, especially their extraordinary egoism." In Charles and Helene's complacent world of decorum and insincere emotions, nothing must be allowed to intrude to upset the balance and niceties of daily life, even murder. The film was remade in 2002 by Adriane Lyne as FAITHLESS, starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere and Olivier Martinez.Michael Scheinfeld, TV Guide
The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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.
The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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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 Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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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 Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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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.
The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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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, Films de France
The Unfaithful Wife (1969)
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