Une affaire de femmes (1988)

Directed by: Claude Chabrol | 108 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Isabelle Huppert, François Cluzet, Marie Trintignant, Nils Tavernier, Lolita Chammah, Aurore Gauvin, Guillaume Foutrier, Nicolas Foutrier, Marie Bunel, Dominique Blanc, Evelyne Didi, Dani

In many lists of the best actresses of the past decades, her name appears: Isabelle Huppert. Like no other, the French know how to personify the restrained emotion. Behind that sometimes steel-hard facade hides a lot of obsessions and neuroses. From the outside she seems to be doing just fine, but inside she’s about to explode. She has something mysterious, something enigmatic. She’s also not afraid to put down unsympathetic women; women who manipulate or are capable of violence. On the one hand, she exudes an icy intelligence, but on the other, there are few actresses who can suffer so convincingly. She proves that she doesn’t need much time to make an indelible impression with her tiny but unforgettable role in ‘Les valuses’ (1974); she was only 21 years old at the time. Huppert’s international breakthrough came with ‘La dentellière’ (1977), the film that earned her a BAFTA. A year later, ‘Violette Nozière’ (1978), her first film with director Claude Chabrol, followed. In this true story, she plays a girl who poisoned her parents when she was eighteen and turned the country upside down. Undeterred, she portrays a woman who is both victim and perpetrator. A role that earned her the well-deserved award for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

After ‘Violette Nozière’, Huppert would make six more films with Claude Chabrol, including ‘Une affaire de femmes’ from 1988. This story is also based on true facts and here too she is fearless in her search for a way to to survive in France under the Vichy regime. And here too the question arises: is she a victim of the circumstances or is she a perpetrator, someone who profits from the misery of others? Who is more guilty of the abuses; the government collaborating with the enemy or this poor and lonely mother of two small children? In 1941 France, the humble Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert) tries to make ends meet as best she can. Her husband Paul (François Cluzet) has recently returned from a German penal camp and is quite weak. He is not the one who has to bring in money, she soon realizes. But what can she do? Then she accidentally encounters a neighbor (Marie Bunel) who is trying to abort her unborn fetus. After all, who wants an extra mouth to feed these days? Marie decides to help her by using a different method. The abortion was successful and as a thank you to the neighbor she gets a record player. While she enjoys the music, she realizes that a smart woman does not let poverty trap herself, but finds her own ways to earn money.

Vichy France is full of corruption and the black market is rampant; why shouldn’t she get her share? After all, there is a market for it and she can use the money well. And so she starts a clandestine abortion clinic at home. It soon turns out to be a lucrative business. Many women whose husbands fight at the front end have an affair and become pregnant while not expecting a baby. It never seems to cross Marie’s mind that abortion is illegal. When her old friend Lucie (Marie Trintignant) arrives, who now earns her money as a prostitute, she decides to offer her shelter in her apartment. Soon, all the women who have “go wrong” know where to find her and the money is pouring in. Much to the dismay of Paul, who is not only frustrated with the fact that he is not bringing in money, but also because Marie ignores his advances: she has now found a young lover in the person of Lucien (Nils Tavernier), a collaborator. To keep her husband happy, she pays the maid (Evelyne Didi) to seduce him. It’s the ultimate humiliation for Paul, who won’t stop there…

The story of Marie Latour, who was actually called Marie-Louise Giraud, is well known in France. Her fate fascinated Claude Chabrol so much that he wanted to make a film about it. What possessed her, what were her motivations? And wasn’t she more or less forced by the regime to engage in illegal activities because she and her children would not survive the rigors of the war? Chabrol plays subtle with that question of guilt. He knew better than anyone else how to paint a picture of a criminal who seems to feel no emotion at all when committing his criminal activities: he – or her – is cold. No wonder he loved working with Isabelle Huppert, an actress whose face makes little sense. The actress was awarded the prize for best actress at the Venice Film Festival for this role. She lets the viewer guess what is going on in her character, what she is thinking and feeling. Does she feel anything at all? Her role as an abortionist apparently has no idealistic purpose; it seems to her purely for the money it brings her. Despite that cold detachment and, related to it, the difficulty we have to fathom her and feel sympathy or empathy for her, we are fascinated by her. Chabrol does not condemn her – and neither does the other characters – and lets the viewer draw his own conclusion. And that is precisely what makes the elusive ‘Une affaire de femmes’ so fascinating and powerful.