Therese

Thérèse is married to Bernard, a provincial man whose only real interest is his family name and his property. They live in an isolated house full of servants in the middle of his pine forest, which was more or less why she married him in the first place. Her comforts are the forest and Anne, Bernard's half-sister. In flashback, the film lays out the road to the day she was charged with poisoning him. Georges Franju adapted François Mauriac's 1927 novel with Mauriac himself and his son Claude. The interest is not the crime but the enclosure: a woman looking at her own life from outside it and arriving somewhere she cannot explain to herself. Emmanuelle Riva took the best actress prize at Venice in 1962 for it.