Claude Chabrol - La Femme infidèle (1969)

Charles Desvallées has good reasons to believe that his wife is cheating on him and hires a P.D. in order to prove himself right. Once he knows the lover is writer Victor Pégala, he drives to his apartment, calmly presents himself as the husband, starts a conversation and then kills him cold-bloodedly. The police trace the wife but when she discovers by accident a picture that could incriminate her husband she decides to remain silent
Cuando Charles Desvallées comienza a sospechar que su mujer está teniendo un affair con otro hombre, contrata un detective privado para que la siga y averigüe el nombre del amante. Una vez confirmada la infidelidad y descubierta la identidad de él, el celoso marido prepara su venganza.

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.
James Travers, Films de France

For the most part, the world of La Femme Infidèle is resolutely good-looking. Chabrol fills his rooms with fresh flowers and with a sense of orderly livability. But the most subtle dislocations catch you up. The camera tracks with lyrical gravity—but with a little too much lyrical gravity, like a gesture so little in excess of the occasion that it would seem nearly perfect if you hadn’t sensed that it was also slightly mad. Michel Bouquet, for example, plays Charles with great suavity and grace—except that he stares intently, and I do believe he is a trifle cross-eyed. And though he is the image of a man born to be cuckolded (like a French Herbert Marshall), he happens to have a pretty good time with his wife…

The actress is Stephane Audran, Chabrol’s own wife, and she is beautiful, though a little ironic. She controls a sense of social parody so sustained that her simple “Bonjour” becomes a major critique of French language and civilization.
Near the very end of the film, when she accidentally discovers that her husband has killed her lover, she destroys the evidence (no use; the police will come for him shortly) and then walks out to where he is working in his garden. As the camera travels with her, it watches in medium close-up while she composes the beginnings of a smile.
The making of that smile, enigmatic and discreet, must count as one of the finest small passages in the history of cinema—and in the lovely, disquieting art of Claude Chabrol.
Roger Greenspun, The New York Times, November 10, 1969

…One of the best sequences, which manages to be very funny as well as heart-stopping, is when the husband decides to introduce himself to the lover. At first he is polite and matter-of-fact. But as the unsuspecting boyfriend expounds on the extraordinary nature of the woman with whom he is infatuated, nerves snap and the murder results. We see that the husband never really knew his wife, and that’s where his anger comes from.
Another amazing section of the film concerns this urbane man’s efforts to cover up all traces of his crime - cleaning the flat, dragging the body to his car in a weighted sack and finally heaving it into a nearby lake. This has been done so often before and since in film, but seldom with a greater sense of what such an awful process must be like.
But, all the way through, what could have been just another thriller becomes much more than that. It is also a passionate love story, with its share of intense irony and a pervading sense of the quirkiness of fate.
Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, in his selection of La femme infidele as one of the 100 best films of the 20th century

Music/Música: Pierre Jansen; songs by Dominique Zardi
Cinematography/Fotografía: Jean Rabier
Editing/Montaje: Jacques Gaillard
Cast/Reparto: Stéphane Audran : Hélène Desvallées, Michel Bouquet : Charles Desvallées, Maurice Ronet : Victor Pegala, Stéphane Di Napoli : Michel Desvallées, Michel Duchaussoy : inspecteur Duval, Henri Marteau : Paul, Serge Bento : Bignon, Louise Chevalier : Marie, Louise Rioton : Mamy, Donatella Turri : Brigitte, François Moro-Giafferi : Frédéric, Lorraine Rainer : Françoise, Claude Chabrol : cameo/voice