Les Bonnes Femmes

Claude Chabrol’s forgotten masterpiece follows the romantic and professional tribulations of four young Parisian women in the early sixties.

Jane (Bernadette Lafont), Ginette (Stéphane Audran), Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) and Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) are bored by the tedium of their work on the shop floor of an electrical store. But when night falls their lives take on a different hue as they are freed to pursue their dreams and desires. Rita is a party girl, bouncing from the arms of one man to the next. Ginette aspires to be a concert singer but must combat her stifling confidence issues. Rita suppresses her real wants in order to please her petty fiancé in an unstoppable march to a humdrum life. Finally, Jacqueline daydreams about a prince charming, who appears to have materialised, with a motorcycle in place of a horse.

Forty years before Sex and the City, Claude Chabrol takes a candid look at the amorous lives of four young women in the metropolis. Scandalously overlooked upon its release, Les Bonnes femmes is a powerful piece of drama abound with top-notch acting. The four leads ooze respective amounts of enthusiasm and despair, vigour and vulnerability. Chabrol regulars Lafont (A Double tour, The Mother and the Whore) and Audran (Betty, Vincent, François, Paul et les autres) are as impressive as we have come to expect. Arguably however, Joano steals the show as the doe-eyed Jacqueline, evoking endearment, fear and frustration within the spectator.
A tour de force of the Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol cuts his experimental teeth in this film, perhaps more so than in any other. The scenes are vibrant with the bustle of the city and given free reign to absorb the atmosphere with non-distinct start and end points, in a manner prefiguring Cassavetes. The sublime Henri Decae (Bob le flambeur, Lift to the Scaffold, The 400 Blows) uses a raw black and white to maximum effect. This is a Paris of shadows and menace yet brimming with an idiosyncratic energy, that of the sixties. Chabrol’s canny juxtaposition of quick-fire montage with longer, free-style sequences encapsulates the diverse moods of the women as well as his settings: from a moribund shop to a city in flux.

Still unreleased in the UK, this is a chance to catch one of the great director’s most overlooked and underrated works.