Blast from the Past: Chabrol Revisited
New Wave founder Claude Chabrol directed Unfaithful Wife (French: La Femme infidèle), an erotic thriller, defined by isubtle and ironic humor, starring Stéphane Audran (his wife at the time) and the great actor Michel Bouquet.
Grade A: (***** out of *****)
Premise:
The story follows the behavior and action of a bourgeois businessman who discovers that his wife has been unfaithful.
Narrative Structure (Synopsis)
Insurance broker Charles Desvallées lives in a beautiful house in the countryside near Paris with his wife Hélène and young son.
Hélène often goes to Paris, allegedly for shopping, beauty treatments and cinema sessions. By accident Charles discovers she was not at the hairdresser as she had claimed. He gradually grows more suspicious about the way she employs her time and asks a private investigator to follow her. The investigator reports that his wife regularly sees a writer called Victor Pégala at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
On a day his wife is busy hosting a birthday party for their son, Charles pays Pégala a visit. He tells writer jovially that he and his wife have an open marriage, then asks for a tour of the small flat.
On seeing the bed his demeanour changes, as he spots a cigarette lighter, which had been his third anniversary present to his wife. He suddenly grabs a stone bust and kills Pégala with two violent blows. Charles then meticulously cleans up and removes the fingerprints, then disposes Pégala’s body in a pond.
Two detectives turn up to interrogate Helene about Pégala, reported missing by his ex-wife. Though her name is found in his address book, she pretends he had been only a distant acquaintance. Charles also denies having even heard of the man before.
Hélène finds a photo of Pégala in her husband’s jacket pocket with his name and address. After burning it, she joins her family, looking tenderly at Charles. When the two detectives show up again, Charles tells Hélène that he loves her and goes to speak to them.
In the last shot, presumably seen from Charles’s POV, the camera moves back from Hélène and their son while zooming in on them, implying that Charles is taken away from them, having surrendered himself to the police.
The film was commercially unsuccessful in France, generating only 682,295 admissions.
Some (conservative?) American critics described La Femme Infidele as “a calmly and thoughtfully perverse film, while others emphasized its brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of a “typical” bourgeois marriage.
Hitchcock’s Influence:
There was a comsensus, however, that this was one of Chabrol’s superb, ironically humorous Hitchcockian studies of guilt, love, and murder among the French elite.
The influence of Hitchcock, in particular Vertigo and Psycho, was manifest in several scenes. The last shot of Hélène and their son makes use of the dolly zoom technique first used in Vertigo, while the cleaning of the murder site and the disposal of Pégala’s body in the pond have been compared to similar scenes (the cleaning of the bathroom and the sinking of the victim’s car) in Psycho.
Remakes
An American remake of the film, Unfaithful, starring Diane Lane, was directed by Adrian Lyne in 2002
A Russian-language remake, Minotaur, directed by the Russian Andrey Zvyagintsev, premiered in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Fest.
Cast
Stéphane Audran as Hélène Desvallées
Michel Bouquet as Charles Desvallées
Michel Duchaussoy as Inspector Duval
Maurice Ronet as Victor Pegala
Louise Chevalier as maid
Louise Rioton as Mamy
Serge Bento as Bignon
Henri Marteau as Paul
Guy Marley as Police Officer Gobet
François Moro-Giafferi as Frederic
Albert Minski as King Club owner
Dominique Zardi as truck driver
Michel Charell as policeman
Henri Attal as man in café
Jean Marie-Arnoux as false witness
Stéphane Di Napoli as Michel Desvallées
Donatella Turri as Brigitte
