Having located the man who his wife is having an affair with through a private investigator, a well-to-do Frenchmen pays the man an amicable visit in this slow burn thriller from Claude Chabrol. While the film ends on a strong note with a nicely ambiguous final shot, an emphasis on 'slow' really is required as the entire first half-hour moves sluggishly along until the point when husband and lover finally meet. The precious few minutes that the pair share together are unquestionably the strongest in the film with lots of tension and uncertainty in the air as the husband wins the lover's confidence by pretending that he has an open marriage. This intensity peaks as he listens to the lover talk about how gentle and loving his wife is, enlightening him to a side of his wife that he clearly has not seen for a while. The immediate aftermath of their meeting together is pretty riveting too, but following that the film again loses tension and slows down in its final third, never again achieving the excellence of the husband-lover meeting scene. The film almost feels a bit long in a way, but then on the same account, not quite enough time is dedicated to fleshing out whether love, lust or otherwise existed between the two adulterers. Michel Bouquet's towering lead performance goes a long way to keep the film afloat though. Same goes for Chabrol's fluid camera movements, Pierre Jansen's atmospheric score and the rather novel premise of husband and lover meeting on amicable terms. It is such a great idea that is no surprise to learn that the film has been remade no less than three times to date.

Yet another one of Claude Chabrol's slow, dark, deceptively calm psychological / crime thrillers, and as these things go, "La Femme Infidele" is probably one of his most successful efforts. There is one sequence in particular, the confrontation between Michel Bouquet and Maurice Ronet, that is absolutely riveting cinema - it will have you holding your breath. And there is also an amusing homage to Hitchcock (the car accident - jammed trunk scene). Bouquet is superb in this film - he maintains a friendly, calm exterior most of the time, but you can see that there's a whole range of emotions hidden behind it. Stéphane Audran looks great (those legs!), but her best scene comes near the very end: a long tracking shot that follows her and focuses on her face as it takes a "Mona Lisa"-type expression, with just a hint of a smile. I do have three objections about the film: 1) The title leaves little doubt as to how "fidele" "la femme" really is; the first 30 minutes might have played even better if we were less certain that Bouquet's suspicions weren't mere paranoia, 2) Audran's affair is not very developed, and her marriage does not look dysfunctional enough for her continued infidelity to be in some way justified; 3) The last shot is technically beautiful, but very inconclusive; personally I think the film should have ended one scene earlier. For an even more twisty-turny variation on a similar scenario, check out Chabrol's "Innocents With Dirty Hands". *** out of 4.P.S: Brigitte the secretary is hot as hell!!!

Claude Chabrol is a director who has a vast (and reputedly hit or miss) career as one of the Cashiers du cinema alumni, and his film La Femme Infidele could possibly be counted as one of the top crop of his work. There's a control over mis-en-scene, as might be expected (as he puts forth, unexpectedly and hilariously in a song that plays from a car stereo at one point, it's French), that is precise, observant, but also never overtly manipulative- it's almost so held-back emotionally that whenever a character seems to emote it's either through deception or by just the tip of the iceberg seeping through. This makes it all the more powerful, particularly because of how the ending doesn't really resolve anything except that these characters are doomed with each other. "I'm in love with you like mad," says the husband Charles (Michel Bouguet, perfect at that very understated, sincere and almost sinister approach to relating to people, even when seeming to be kidding), as there seems to be a sense of total disaster heading for both of them. But it's more of an existential sort- the law is left most ambiguous of all- and it's that which usually makes the best of dramas in lock-step with cuckolded and cuckolds and the like.If one's already seen Unfaithful, the Adrian Lyne 2002 Hollywood adaptation (not so much remake) of this film, then one already knows certain big pieces of the plot. The important thing though, in comparison with that film, which is still very good in its own right, is that this time we get only suggestions as to why Helene (Stephane Audran, maybe her best performance) is cheating on her bourgeois husband with writer Victor Pegala (Maurice Ronet), and this is something that irks at Charles most of all. Idyllic comfort broken to pieces and shoved underneath is the context here, and it's with this that we see as opposed to Lyne's film a look not so much at the super-sexual and eventually melodramatic side of infidelity and the aftermath (albeit just seeing Audran's legs is enough to get some men watching panting), but at complacency in the marriage and parenthood of their only child. Even if the child actor isn't very good at expression (he says "I Hate You" and "I Love You" in the same note), there's always the level of discomfort in seeing the unspoken tension in the scenes with the three of them.And, if for nothing else, La Femme Infidele is a masterpiece of technique. So many shots and angles had me glued to the screen, knowing that there could be no other way to get it right. Surely the script leads much of Chabrol along his paths (the actual moment of murder, however, is an ingenious editing trick), and what isn't there under the surface on screen is assuredly there on the page. But it's safe to put Chabrol on the level of artistry with his new-wave counterparts for shots like the one with Audran lying down on the bed, creeping up ever so slowly, and then cutting to a close-up, the one moment when we see just a slice of conscience. Or when Chabrol gets the emphasis of violence with a quick, simple shot of blood trickling down. Or how he balances out perspective at the house: look as the husband is watching out in the backyard at his wife, her out of focus yet still walking forward as the camera zooms a little more forward. And the last shot- following up on what has been many a decidedly Hitchcokian angle or note put forward, with a contemplative 'Vertigo' shot of mother and son in long-view out of focus. It's one of the saddest ending shots in the history of French movies.It might sound like I'm hyping up this film up a little, but considering how underrated Chabol can be- in comparison to Truffaut and Godard and even Rohmer to an extent (who, by the way, he co-wrote a book about Hitchcock with)- La Femme Infidele deserves to be seen and re-evaluated not just in the context of "ah, it's French, and it's romance and tragedy." To say that it's better than Unfaithful is an understatement, and it's only fault is that, if anything, it could be a little longer.

'The Unfaithful Wife' is really about a faithful husband, who will kill to save his marriage. This kind of fidelity is a chilling exercise of power - the film's many point-of-view shots are mostly his - with adultery a rebellion, a bid for freedom that must be crushed. It's not enough that Charles uncovers his wife's lover, he must sit on the bed they make love on, drink the same drink...Chabrol's most perfect film, where character inertia is expressed in blatant artifice, both in the home and in 'nature'; where a materialist filming of materialists conceals an austere spirituality, embodied in those Fateful policemen. Like his namesake Bovary, Charles sleeps when his exquisitely beautiful wife offers herself to him. He deserves what he gets.