Small wonder that this film had difficulty making its way to the American shores. It deals simultaneously with two grand taboo subjects: abortion and capital punishment. Most amazingly, perhaps, it does so non-dogmatically, thanks to the skill of Claude Chabrol.

Historical Background: Claude Chabrol has had a long and distinguished career and more lives than a cat. He first came to international attention as part of the French New Wave. After financing his debut film, Le Beau Serge (1958), with his first wife's inheritance, he was able to set up his own production company that facilitated not only his own career but those of other New Wave Directors, including Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Philippe de Broca. He made a name for himself early on with such successes as Les Cousins (1959), and Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). After that pair of films, his reputation began to sag a bit during the rest of the early- and mid-sixties as he generated a number of commercially successful films that were critical failures. From 1968 to 1972, he enjoyed a middle golden period, nicknamed his “Hélène” period, that included several of his most highly regarded films: Bad Girls (1968), La Femme Infidèle (1969), Le Boucher (1969), This Man Must Die (1969), La Rupture (1970), Just Before Nightfall (1971), and Docteur Popaul (1972). The name of the female lead was "Hélène" in most of these films. Many of these films featured Chabrol’s wife (at the time), Stéphanie Audran. Chabrol’s third great period occurred in the mid-1990’s with such films as L’Enfer (1994) and La Cérémonie (1995). Story of Women (1988) was the rare instance of a superior film from Chabrol made outside of his three golden periods. Story of Women is also something of a stylistic departure for Chabrol, being more conventional in its narrative approach than the Hitchcock-like thrillers that were Chabrol's specialty. On the other hand, Chabrol was in familiar territory in relying on Isabelle Huppert and their working relationship would also continue for another decade plus thereafter. Huppert has already appeared in Violette (1978) for Chabrol and later worked in Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995), The Swindle (1997), and Merci pour le chocolat (2000).

The Story: The location is provincial France in a small village near Dieppe. It is the early forties and the time of the German occupation and the collaborating Vichy regime under Pétain. Marie-Jeanne Latour is a young housewife whose husband was wounded in battle early in the war and who has been away for some time in a German labor camp. Marie struggles to feed and care for her two young children, Pierrot (Guillaume Foutrier and, later, Nicolas Foutrier) and Mouche (Aurore Gauvin and, later, Lolita Chammah). She makes a bit of money knitting patterns to order but her options in Vichy France are very limited. She's a decently caring parent, though the stress in her life sometimes manifests itself in inappropriate remarks to Pierrot, the older child, in particular. There's a shortage of French men and those who remain in town are either collaborators or profiting from black marketeering. Both Marie and Pierrot are nonplussed when Marie's husband, Paul (François Cluzet), suddenly shows up, having been released from the German labor camp. For Pierrot, it means he can no longer sleep in his mother's bed. For Marie, it means having to fend off unwanted demands for sex from a husband that she can no longer abide. Paul suffers from shellshock, is somewhat disabled, lazy, and unemployable and Marie simply has no respect for him. Although he cajoles her for sex and engages in emotional blackmail on one occasion, he is not physically abusive to her and interacts pretty well with the children. She just wants nothing to do with him.

Marie stops by her neighbor's apartment to recover a utensil and finds her neighbor in the midst of a crude attempt at self-induced abortion (bathing in a mustard bath). Although Marie knows little about abortion, she knows that her neighbor's approach isn't going to succeed. She offers to help her out and the next day the abortion is accomplished, though the woman loses a lot of blood. Later, the neighbor brings Marie a record player as a thank you gift. It occurs to Marie that she might better her lot by performing additional abortions, for a fee.

At the hair salon, Marie runs into a woman named Lucie (Marie Trintignant), who goes by Lulu in her work as a prostitute. Marie and Lulu hit it off, though Marie has no intention of taking up her friend's line of work. Marie mentions that she can help out Lulu or her co-workers if any should encounter an unwanted pregnancy. Many of the prostitutes have husbands who are off at war or imprisoned and are making do by servicing the German soldiers of occupation. As Marie's business starts to boom, she also acquires customers who hear about her by word of mouth. One woman seeks her help because she's pregnant and already has six children that she and her husband can barely manage. The woman had already tried a variety of supposed methods of abortion, including ingestion of an unspecified poison. Unfortunately, the woman dies a few days after Marie provides her with an abortion. After the husband commits suicide, the woman's sister brings two of the children around to make sure that Marie gets the message regarding the harm that she most likely caused.

With the money that Marie makes from her abortion business, the Latour family moves into a better apartment and, later, into a still bigger one. Paul isn't bringing in any money and doesn't especially like what Marie is doing, but decides to close his eyes and enjoy their improved situation. Marie offers Lulu the use of one of their extra rooms for her business with her johns – for a small cut of the action. Later, Marie adds a second prostitute in another small spare room. So, now, she's conducting illegal abortions and running a small brothel in her home as well.

Paul is too uncouth for Marie's taste, but she takes a shine to a young man, Lucien (Nils Tavernier), who is making money collaborating with the Nazis. She spots him at a Nazi-sponsored event where blindfolded young men try to chop the head off a trussed-up goose with a sword. Lucien cleanly severs the goose's head from its neck and presents the goose to Marie as a gift. Later, Marie spots Lucien again when he is utilizing Lulu's services. Soon, Marie and Lucien have begun an affair. Marie begins wearing furs and developing a taste for champagne and fancy clothes. She also offers her fortyish maid extra money if she'll have sex with Paul, hoping to take some of his pressure off herself. Paul is duly insulted, but once again opts to overlook his wife's activities, until he comes home early one day and finds Marie and Lucien sprawled out in his own bed – which, for him, is a loveless bed. Paul has finally had his fill and sends an anonymous letter to the police, detailing his wife's illegal activities.

Marie is arrested and sent to Paris for trial under one of the state tribunals that operated during the Vichy era. These tribunals were originally aimed at communists and resistance fighters and the French government had actually made a promise in advance to the Germans that they would provide a certain number of executions. Later, the rightwing Vichy government had added its own agenda – improving the "moral climate" in France. Abortions were rampant, at the time, and, it was claimed, and they were depriving the State of future soldiers! Marie started out imagining that she would only have to promise not to conduct any more abortions or that she might, at worst, get a short jail sentence, but the State wanted to make "an example" of her in order to suppress a "national blight." She was convicted and sent to the guillotine. Marie-Jeanne Latour was one of the last women ever to receive capital punishment in France.

Themes: There's plenty of thematic material in this film to stimulate hours of conversation for those so inclined. Perhaps the one sense in which Chabrol fully tips his hand is on the topic of the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the Vichy regime. Whatever the moral ramifications of Marie's activities, there can be no doubt about the moral repugnance of the Vichy government's collaboration with Germany in the deportation of Jews from France to the horrendous death camps. Additionally, the Vichy government effectively agreed to slaughter a certain number of their own people through mock trials overseen by the state tribunals, to generate a prescribed number of executions. The conversation among the lawyers near the end of the film suggests that the Vichy government had assumed their hypocritical moral posturing out of shame for their own cowardly collaboration. Chabrol was fond of the following quotation: "The worst horrors in history were not perpetrated by the greatest rogues in history, but by the weak and cowardly." Clearly, the Nazis were the rogues and the Vichy government the weak and cowardly.

The other two major themes of Story of Women are abortion and capital punishment. On the subject of abortion, I've learned not to speak very often on the topic, first, because I'm a man and, second, because my views are neither fully on one side or the other. For dichotomized and emotionally hot-button issues, those fully committed to one side or the other have no tolerance for those of us who see the issue as gray, rather than black or white, so we often end up having to defend our views from both sides at once. I value both choice and life. I believe that the life side of the argument is inherently relative, not absolute, because I reject the idea that there is such a thing as a "soul" or that it is imbued suddenly at conception. For me, a fetus is neither a full-fledged or independently viable human being nor an inanimate object to be lightly discarded. The moral significance of a fetus, in my judgment, undergoes an incremental increase from negligible to all-important (from a humanistic perspective) over a nine-month period. As a society, in my opinion, we should not be interfering with a woman's personal choice until a fetus acquires human rights through viability as an independent entity. At the same time, we should be working toward non-coercive policies that discourage abortion as a routine substitute for more benign approaches to prevention of unwanted pregnancies.

Story of Women provides plenty that could be used to support viewpoints on either side of the abortion debate. We are shown the extremes to which desperate women will go in the absence of availability of medically safe abortions, but we are also shown the ugly aftermath of one of the abortions, the loss of life of one of the women, the anger of her relatives, and the failure of one couple and several prostitutes to manage their sex life in such a way as to avoid producing more children than they can effectively manage. Although I find the pious, hypocritical moralizing of the political right in America obnoxious, I do not believe that a society is best served by offering no moral vision at all. We need a more intelligent, more nuanced moral vision rather than none. Nevertheless, on the issue of abortion, I feel that women rather than men should set the tenor of the debate. Chabrol makes this point himself when Marie exclaims to one of her cellmates about the make-up of the tribunal: "It's all men. How could they understand?"

On the issue of capital punishment, Chabrol is again careful to keep his cards close to his vest. Where he does reveal his position, it is more through symbolic associations than outright dogmatic assertions. It is interesting, for example, that Marie is enthralled when Lucien severs the head of a goose with a sword. Later, however, Marie becomes the goose and the guillotine is the sword. Capital punishment, by this reckoning, reduces humans to the status of slaughterhouse animals. Early in the story, the young Pierrot announces that he'd like to be an executioner when he grows up because they get to wear hoods and nobody knows who they are. When the State executes criminals or political dissidents, we all hide behind the anonymity of the impersonal State. The biggest problem (in my personal view) with capital punishment is that it is too readily subverted to political purposes. I believe that capital punishment should be abolished except for a tightly restricted set of circumstances: guilt beyond all doubt and offenses of an especially heinous nature or by those already under maximum sentences of incarceration. There is no way that Marie remotely deserved capital punishment or that her children should have suffered her loss in that manner. Her sentence was a crime on the part of the tribunal that pronounced it.

It is distressing to me, as an American, to note the parallels between the Vichy government and the right half of present day America. The wealthy in America have become the world's aristocracy and our government a semi-fascist collaborator. We can observe the same alliance between the wealthy and religion developing here in America that existed for so many centuries in Europe. Capital punishment and hypocritical moralizing have been used throughout history as tools for maintaining class disparities. America is gradually becoming the kind of society that my ancestors came to America to escape.

Production Values: This screenplay for Story of Women was based on a book by Francis Szpiner entitled Une Affaire de Femmes, which was in turn based on the real life story of Marie-Jeanne Latour. It is a story well known in France. An interview with Szpiner is included as an extra on the DVD from Home Vision Entertainment, and provides some interesting additional insights. At times, the character Pierrot, the young son of Marie, acts as narrator, especially near the end of the film, as the trial phase begins. This device becomes especially powerful when the following line closes the film after Marie's execution: "Have pity on the children of the condemned." The script is subtle and intelligent in several respects. First, it ably illustrates that Marie had no plan to take up the abortion business or to operate a brothel but simply slipped into these activities in the natural course of events and motivated by her desire to improve the lot of herself and her children. We see her progression as a natural evolution and not unlike that of any good capitalist businessman or businesswoman. Second, the script is effective in presenting Marie without idealization. In many respects, she is not a particularly likable individual. She cheats on her husband and humiliates him. She is careless, at times, in conducting abortions. She clearly suffers from a bit of avarice. She exposes her children to all sorts of negative influences. On the other hand, most viewers will understand the difference between a person being unappealing in their personal attributes or in the immorality of their behavior and that person deserving to be put to death by the State. Then, finally, the script is also highly effective because it takes no stance on the pivotal questions that it raises. This is a film that would provide an ideal vehicle for discussion of issues because Chabrol doesn't reveal his own views on either abortion or capital punishment. He simply presents the story with some distance and objectivity. Huppert adds her part, as well, by her usual impenetrable demeanor that leaves us guessing exactly what she is thinking and feeling inside.

The cinematography for this film is very good, not ravishing, but all that the story allowed. You'll appreciate what goes into making an excellent film if you watch the special feature in which Chabrol walks us through his thinking for several individual scenes. The DVD transfer is superlative, providing warm, enhanced coloration. There's a nice musical soundtrack featuring the song El Rancho Grande in French.

The highest achievement in relation to this film is the performance by Isabelle Huppert. She is one of the best actresses ever at making you wonder exactly what is going on in her mind. She teases us with glimmers of emotional expression, without ever giving away the whole game. Don't just take my word for it, however. Huppert won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1988 for her performance in this film. I've been impressed with Huppert in the past, but this is the best performance I've seen her deliver. Some of her other works include Going Places (1974), Every Man for Himself (1980), Heaven's Gate (1980), Coup de Torchon (1981), Entre Nous (1983), La Cérémonie (1995), and 8 Women (2001).

Bottom-Line: This is an excellent film with an exceptional lead performance and strong thematic material. Probably a lot of you are fed up with the topics of abortion and capital punishment, but rest assured that this film does not jam a particular viewpoint down your throats. It is a factual and thought-provoking story that might deepen your understanding of issues on both sides of both debates. The Home Entertainment DVD offers a nice package of extras, including the trailer, a few comments by critic Joël Magny, scene comments by Claude Chabrol, an interview with producer Marin Karwitz, and an interview with writer Francis Szpiner. Story of Women is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 108 minutes. I give this film a strong four-stars.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older