I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Claude Chabrol is known affectionately as 'the French Hitchcock'. And while I can see why he is labelled as such, it isn't a terribly accurate description. His films are ostensibly thrillers but the difference between Chabrol and Hitchcock is that the former is only superficially interested in suspense. His films effectively use the thriller framework in order to explore issues of human psychology, morality and sexuality. While pivotal, the crimes depicted in his films are almost incidental, they are merely catalysts that lead to the human dramas that truly interest him. Its the psychological aftermath of crime and the complex human emotions that it unleashes that drives his films.La Femme Infidèle is no different in this regard. Its about a love triangle that ends in the murder of the secret lover. The married couple's relationship actually strengthens on account of this homicide. This atypical approach to human relationships is common in Chabrol's universe. I wouldn't necessarily say that characters in his movies act in particularly realistic ways. They always seem to be somewhat emotionally detached. In this case it is no different. The married couple seem to navigate through these moments of heightened tension with little more than a Gallic shrug. But this is the style of the director and his familiar ensemble of actors. Once again his muse Stéphane Audran is radiant as the unhappy wife; while Michel Bouquet impresses as her husband. Visually the film is typical in its low-key look, which fits the psychological mood. Its pastel colours reflect the detached feeling too.Its one of the directors best films. Everyone is on the top of their game and the deceptively simple plot line is never less than engaging. Like most other Chabrol, there is a lot going on under the surface here. It ends on a very ambiguous note. One than can be interpreted in different ways. The final camera pan is strangely compelling and mysterious. It makes you want to watch the movie again.

The two characters primarily involved in Claude Chabrol's 1969 French thriller The Unfaithful Wife have, at least at the beginning, rather an idyllic and somewhat pleasant set up in their lives. When we first encounter them, we see both the husband and titular wife with their rather extended family in a large garden on a warm, sunny and welcoming day; the tone of the exchanges polite, the activity nothing out of the ordinary nor needlessly extravagant. The opening shots of such imagery are quite crudely broken up by a blurred effect which drowns the screen of its focus, the ideal family unit itself thus becoming difficult to firmly latch one's eyes onto; the credits begin, some rather harsh and somewhat official looking credits that scroll upwards in a military manner whilst some distorting piano music plays overhead. It's a fleeting few minutes or so of idealism in-between such a sequence, the film going on to form a superior mediation on human behaviour masquerading as a causality thriller as paradise is rendered corrupt and peeking beneath the surface of the upper-classes reveals deception and titular unfaithfulness.The film is unrelentingly fascinating, a piece never for more than a few seconds ever in the slightest bit uninteresting; a grim and somewhat bleak study how love, anger and victimisation brew together to create a cocktail of violence and anguish and how that in itself can come to forge a relationship which was never initially set in stone. The film's methodical lead is Michel Bouquet's Charles Desvallees, a lawyer with his own office located in a small enough building amidst the bustling Parisian streets away from the large, more ruralised country house in which he lives with his family. The family, of which, is made up of the titular wife, a certain Hélène (Audran) who's about the same age as her husband and is the mother to young son Michel (Di Napoli). The warm and welcoming day in the garden spent with Charles' mother and Hélène's in-law turns into evening, Charles' verbal illustrating of various plans he would like to have happen the following day involving both he and Hélène out and about doing things are shot down with casual reasons which excuse Hélène from attending. As they sit and observe a television broadcast later on during the evening, the signal begins to break up and the machine ceases to function as well as it might, thus further insinuating a breaking down of communication of an operative item and echoing their marriage.At work, and aside from Charles' rich circle of friends and busy schedule, he observes through young female secretary Brigitte (Turri) the very essence of temptation. His suspicion brought about by his wife's behaviour, and Chabrol's own channelling onto the audience of signs and notions towards an upsetting of a paradise-like set up or the malfunctioning of a working order, beginning to resonate. Desperate, as thoughts; feelings and drama all at once clinically escalate, Charles darts to the nearest payphone to call a place of business Hélène said she'd be; the piano music from earlier only suggesting at something seriously wrong with what idealism we were seeing beginning to pipe up again to form the overlying soundtrack to the news she is not where she said she'd be.The painful inevitable is confirmed when a private detective Charles hires reveals to him the truth; that Hélène is, in fact, having an affair and with a writer named Victor Pégala (Ronet) based not so far away. The film allows Charles a moment you sparsely see in today's age of thrillers; a moment of contemplation that has him stand beside a river flowing through the urbanised locale in which the reveal was announced so as to merely look across to the other side of it, digesting what it is has been exposed to him. It is around about here in the film that Chabrol applies a gear change so dramatic and so effective that it propels the piece beyond its combined brooding roots of paranoia and suspicion and into an echelon of unpredictability; horror and human emotion in its some of its rawest forms. In short, the switch in tone and content works remarkably; the film coming to have Charles journey to the man and see him.The film's causality infused thrills and scares following the venturing into the territory it goes near does nothing to distract the film from its overall tract; it is a film that is able to evoke just as much an on-edge reaction from its audience following a character's glance or nervous facial reaction as it can from a minor car accident. Chabrol's capturing of some of the interplay towards the conclusion as two people are forced into hiding varying secrets from both one another and the police is fascinating, and the film does not loose sight of son Michel's role as the picturesque representative of innocence caught up amidst all this and made to suffer out of others' ill-gotten decisions. Chabrol's overall ending is decidedly bleak, but his conclusion that the two we examine whom previously appeared to fall away from each other only to reconnect when some sort of duality was established, is dangerously uplifting given the sorts of events which aided in this and the actions the lovebirds undertook; all of it combining to form a superior thriller of an immensely sophisticated ilk.

Claude Chabrol is sometimes known as 'The French Hitchcock', and while the two didn't exactly make the same type of thriller; it's easy to see where the comparisons come from, and both of these great directors are masters of their crafts! This is only the third Chabrol film I've seen, but once again I'm extremely impressed and looking forward to seeing more! Though I have limited experience of his films, Chabrol's thrillers to me are more brooding and personal than Hitchcock's; and while they lack the brazen thriller element that made most of Hitchcock's oeuvre so good to watch, it's made up for in panache and intrigue! The Unfaithful Wife puts its focus on an upper class French family in a big mansion somewhere just outside of a big city. We follow them for a short while until it becomes obvious to the husband that his wife's constant trips into town are a clue that she is having an affair. The husband then decides to hire a private detective to investigate his wife, and after having his fears concerned; the husband turns up at the lover's house with murder in mind...The film appears to be so relaxed that at times you may wonder whether you are actually watching a thriller. But that is what makes this film so effective; Chabrol often lets his film settle, but there is always tension bubbling beneath the surface and the film is always intriguing, even when there is little going on. I won't spend too long talking about the acting and production values as obviously both are thoroughly professional and give the film infinite amounts of credibility. Most of the action focuses on the couple inside their big house and this benefits the film greatly as we soon get to know the characters. The central scene is clearly the murder sequence, although again Chabrol focuses on the build up rather than the actual pay off and the murder is as cold and brutal as it was obviously intended to be. The Unfaithful Wife is clearly a lesson in how suspense cinema should be; even more subtle than Hitchcock, this film manages to be constantly fascinating in spite of the fact that not a great deal transpires over the course of the film, and once again it's another great film on Chabrol's resume!

I found the remake with Richard Gere and Diane Lane ("Unfaithful") intriguing in the way it explored the erotic pull the woman feels to her lover. It was very good at that. Most of the early scenes, especially any with Diane Lane, were very well done. Where Gere dominated a scene, on the other hand -- whether because of his acting, or flawed script or direction, I couldn't tell -- the movie felt phony and forced. Now I know why. "Unfaithful" tries to exploit Chabrol's powerful storyline, but wants to go in its own direction, too. For instance, the woman in the story is not nearly as central in Chabrol's movie. The story there is really about her husband, and his predicament at discovering that his perfect wife is having an affair. The wounded husband is much more believable here, and thus the murder scene does not feel as lurid as when Gere bludgeons Martinez in the remake. The method of striking blows to the head is the same, yet we understand the meaning of the blows perfectly in Chabrol's original, and the scene immediately previous, when the rivals meet and discuss the affair in the lover's apartment, feels very real and organic in Chabrol (though it is still surprising to find that the husband has come to confront the lover). By contrast, in the remake, Olivier Martinez plays that scene as part civilized troglodyte and part insouciant brat; Gere comes off as bordering on schizophrenia, or about to suffer a conniption -- a cuckold who's so de-eroticized that his sudden rage reads more as psychopathy. In a movie that purports to be about a crime of passion, the quality of passion feels more like a horror that has gone "off kilter" somehow. The scene is jarring, but not in ways that move the film along.Having seen both movies now, I do feel like I at least understand how the story might have seemed a good candidate for a remake. La femme Infidele is so good...It's so good I hardly thought I was watching a movie at all, but living in this story right along with the characters, albeit as troubled observer. It's a movie about the private conclusions that we come to, perhaps selfishly, that we don't share even with the people closest to us, perhaps because we are ashamed of our darkest feelings, those too taboo to admit.There is a sense that the story's protagonists do feel shame somehow (even in the embarrassingly relieved way the lover welcomes the visit from the husband) but are all too human in the end. There is a sense of desire that emanates from all the characters, who all happen to be pretending at playing one game or another while keeping secrets from one another. Even the perfect little boy is shown to be caught up in his own storms, to the extent that his role in the movie is as more than a signifier of a healthy, prosperous family's bourgeois pride. At one point he explodes at his parents, during a tense evening, yelling at them that he hates them both.This reading of the self in the throes of a very deep, selfish passion -- while at the same time trying to maintain appearances -- is masterful in Chabrol's movie, and I came away from it believing in the reality of these characters completely.I can't seem to put it into words too well, but I was very impressed with the understated way this movie examines the tensions that simmer under the surface of family relationships. This is the first movie I have seen by Chabrol and I have to say-- as someone who's seen my fair share of movies touted as "masterpieces" that turn out to be middling -- my faith in the power of film as a storytelling medium is renewed by this piece.