STORY OF WOMEN
With Isabelle Huppert, Francois Cluzet, Marie Trintignant, and Nils Tavernier.
Chabrol based his film on a book about an actual woman, Marie-Louise Giraud, who was executed in France in 1943 for performing several dozen abortions. The title of his film, and of the book, is Une affaire de femmes. “Story of women” is a serious mistranslation; a closer approximation might be “women’s business.” While “story” is bland and neutral, “women’s business” would be truer to the film’s vision, in which men, as a result of the French defeat, are largely absent or negative figures. Women must deal with the vital problems of living, whether pregnancy or economic survival, on their own. The women for whom Marie performs abortions are driven by an undeniable desperation; one describes how she has spent most of her marriage in pregnancy and doesn’t even like her six existing children.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Much of this film’s richness and inner balance comes from Chabrol’s willingness to assume the perspective of several of his characters. Most powerful are images involving the seven-year-old Pierrot. At the end of his parents’ arguments, he is seen standing as a silent witness. It is through his eyes that we first see his father’s clothes on the table, as he opens the apartment door. Perhaps the film’s strongest images occur when, on different occasions, Pierrot observes, through a keyhole, his mother performing an abortion. The intersection in these point-of-view shots of childhood innocence being lost, voyeurism, and the seen tangle of limbs, arms, and tubes is enough to leave one mute–as Pierrot often is. One understands how these images, a dysfunctional father, and the reality of the occupation must have a strong effect on Pierrot; it should be no surprise that he identifies with the strong Germans. He picks up a coin for a Nazi soldier in a bar and reveals that he can speak some German. When asked what he’d want if given one wish, he replies that he’d want to be an executioner “because they wear that thing on their heads, and because no one knows who they are.” This is one of the few times Pierrot speaks more than a few words in the film, revealing him as a bit more of a poet–or perhaps a bit less hopeless–than the other characters in his movingly displaced desire to escape having an identity.
