Violette Nozière

In Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Noziere runs two lives: a good daughter at home, and out at night in a world of men and money. She tells her parents they are carrying syphilis and gives them poison as medicine. The first attempt fails and both survive, her mother taken to hospital. On the second her father dies and her mother survives again. At trial Violette claims her father raped her; the film neither confirms nor refutes it. The jury sentences her to the guillotine. Claude Chabrol directed. Isabelle Huppert plays Violette and won Best Actress at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival for the role. The case is real and it shook France in the 1930s. At the end the narration says her sentence was commuted by degrees, that she left prison after twelve years, married and had five children. The film sold more than a million admissions in France. Who it is for: viewers interested in true crime files and in early Huppert. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a verdict. The film chooses neither to absolve nor to condemn her, and that suspension bothers some viewers.