The Unfaithful Wife

Charles Desvallees, an insurance broker living outside Paris, grows suspicious of the days his wife Helene spends shopping in the city. He hires a private detective and learns she is meeting the writer Victor Pegala. He goes to the man's flat, sees there the lighter he gave Helene, and kills him with a stone bust. He disposes of the body coolly and cleans the scene. When the police open a missing person case he denies knowing him. Helene finds the trace that shows what her husband did. At the end Charles appears to give himself up. Claude Chabrol directed. Stephane Audran plays Helene and Michel Bouquet plays Charles. It opened on 22 January 1969. The closing shot uses the zoom-and-track technique known from Vertigo. The reviews were very strong. Roger Greenspun found it calmly and thoughtfully perverse; Vincent Canby put it among the ten best films of the year. Paul Taylor called it one of Chabrol's mid-period masterpieces, and TV Guide called it arguably the best of his superb, Hitchcockian studies of guilt, love and murder. It made the National Board of Review's list of top foreign films of 1969. The story was remade in America in 2002 as Unfaithful. Who it is for: viewers who like murder told coldly and Chabrol's portraits of marriage. Who it is not for: anyone wanting suspense. The film keeps the same quiet tempo even after the killing, producing unease rather than excitement.