"Les bonnes femmes" (1960)

A 3rd film by a man, about women (in the plural):
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Touches of Fellini: nightclub scene, men masked as pigs or jesters, accompanied by scanty-clad young ladies and older obnoxious harlots, gathered around a long table cluttered with champagne bottles and glasses full and empty and tipped over, confetti, party streamers, dim lights, while a lascivious blonde (a la Anita Ekberg) dances and strips to raunchy afterhours jazz.

Hints of italianism everywhere: a saleswoman attempts to teach one of the clerk girls how to enunciate an expression in italian. The stalker - who prefigures the film's disarmingly elliptical plot - looks viciously italian, dressed in a motor-jacket and driving a motorcycle (reminder of Rocco & His Brothers, released the same year).

What does the film propose? That men are predators, pigs, & pansies. That the good women simply seek romance, 'true love'. What surrounds them is an ambiance of desire, strangely debauched or disenchanted in unforeseen ways. Paris by night. The film, from the title credits to the end, is brought to life by a peripheral love for the hermetic charms of Paris. These good women are infused by Paris, driven by Paris, enraptured by it: they seek love in Paris because they are in love with it. Yet in the particularities of men, they find none of Paris' allure: only the vulgar insidious backs of men's necks, the lurid sight of hairy arms.

Point of comparison (to Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion): the men escort the young ladies in a shiny cadillac, on their way presumably to riotous drunken fun. One of the girls, Jacqueline (the romantic one), asks the men, "Where are we going?" To which the joe on the passenger side leans over and with sinister insinuation answers, "Don't worry about it." Exactly the same scene occurs in Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion: except the insinuation does lead toward miscreancy, and the girl ends up beaten and thrown off a cliff. (If it had been made now, she would no doubt have been raped.)

The soundtrack music channels doom, intrigue, mystery. Chabrol even when young demonstrated an ability to create unearthly tension, disconcerting for us because the tension emanates from nothing in particular: a stray glance, an awkward silence, a sudden zeal for laughing. Chabrol even when young was attracted to murder: before Lynch, after Mizoguchi, he was a director exclusively interested in the subject of 'a woman in danger'. Yet nothing in this film prepares us - as his later films formally do - for the sharp turn it takes down a dark dark passage: the denouement leaves us thoroughly floored and nervewracked.

The brilliance of this film shows in the bizarre but preternatural fusion it makes of the dominant cinema-trends of the time: it is proto-Chabrol, post-Hitchcock, quasi-Italian, semi-Nouvelle Vague. Somehow deceptively gleeful & struck by a morbid Nights of Cabiria-like romanticism, Chabrol anticipates his own brand of perverse irony.
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(Of the fraction of Chabrol films I've thus far seen, this is undoubtedly the one which has impressed on me the exorbitant powers he lays claim to, and which he promised as a young filmmaker. As an older director, I cannot say that he has matched the exuberance and terrific abnormality of this one.)
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