Wedding in Blood

Wedding in Blood (Les Noces rouges), directed by Claude Chabrol, is a French film starring Michel Piccoli and Stéphane Audran, about a passionate affair between a mayor's wife and a politician in a small French town that ends in murder. The film draws on a real 1970 case in the town of Bourganeuf: Bernard Cousty and Yvette Balaire, in love but each married to someone else, decided to get rid of their spouses; Cousty first smothered his own wife on Christmas night, then two months later shot Yvette's husband and staged it as a car accident. Cousty was sentenced to death in 1972, the last person condemned to that penalty in Limoges; on appeal his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, while Balaire received ten years. Because the film so closely resembled the real case, its release in France was contentious and had to be delayed so it would not coincide with the trial. Who it's for: anyone curious about a Claude Chabrol film that brings a real double murder case to the screen, staying close to the actual events aside from changed names. Who it's not for: those wanting a purely fictional thriller, since the film was made in the shadow of a recent, real criminal trial.