For many years, Chabrol’s magnificent Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) was out-of-print in America and largely unknown to audiences anywhere in the world. That situation was rectified by a new DVD release by KINO that provides an excellent transfer from as clean a print as could be found. Although this DVD provides no significant extras and no subtitle options (turning them off or another language other than English), we can still be thankful for the mere fact of access to this fine work of art in a good quality print. Les Bonnes Femmes uses a slice-of-life approach that immerses viewers in the beguiling air of the Paris nightlife circa 1960.

Historical Background: Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) was the fourth feature film of Claude Chabrol, whose career spanned from 1958 to present times. Like some of his fellow New Wave auteurs (Truffaut and Godard), Chabrol had been a film critic for the magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Chabrol’s work was varied, over the course of his career. His early films (including Les Bonnes Femmes) were cutting-edge New Wave fare, highly experimental and bursting with energy, a bit similar in feel to Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (1959) (known as Breathless in America). Les Bonnes Femmes is widely viewed as one of the five formative films that launched the New Wave along with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Rohmer’s The Sign of Leo, and Godard’s Breathless, all of which were released in 1959. The middle of Chabrol’s career, however, found him moving beyond (or turning his back on, depending on one’s viewpoint) the New Wave precepts to making two quite different kinds of works: (1) films for commercial consumption for which he functioned largely as a hired gun, subordinating his own artistic impulses, and (2) art films influenced by the style of Alfred Hitchcock. Chabrol has sometimes been dubbed the French Hitchcock, but, in fairness, his Hitchcock-style works are imbued with his own distinct style and feel.

The Story: Since one element of New Wave philosophy was a disdain for direct narrative style, it is perhaps misleading to entitle this section of my review “The Story.” Les Bonnes Femmes has precious little story. In fact, the film seems to be going nowhere until very near the end when a catastrophic event somewhat amazingly pulls together much of what we have previously seen into a coherent package. In lieu of a story, what we observe is a quasi-documentary sharing of the experience of four young Parisian woman – vignettes from their lives occurring over a three day period. These four young ladies work in a dreary and boring appliance store by day and seek love and romance (in one form or another) by evening. Each of the four has a distinctive identity.

The first we encounter is Jane (Bernadette Lafont). She is fun-loving, spirited, and somewhat promiscuous. Her soldier boyfriend has to return to his barracks, so Jane talks Jacqueline into letting themselves be picked up by a couple of oafish lotharios, Marcel (Jean-Louis Maury) and Albert (Albert Dinan) after just a few boorish pickup lines. They are fed a cheap dinner and wine and duly liquored-up at a strip club. Jacqueline insists on being dropped off at her own apartment but Jane allows herself to be seduced, returning to Albert’s apartment “for a nightcap” with the two men, where she is groped and pawed by both before finally getting it on with Marcel in the bedroom. In the morning, she returns to her own apartment (which she shares with Ginette), sprays some cologne onto her armpits, and goes straight to work, reminding Ginette to say that she slept at home if asked by the other girls. Jane’s agenda is simple: until love comes along, she’ll settle for sex.

Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) is quite different from Jane. She is gentle, sensitive, shy, and romantic. She is quietly waiting for her true love, her knight in shiny armor, to whisk her away from her dreary existence. She exists almost in a kind of somnambulistic state, dreaming relentlessly of her perfect love. Jacqueline is late arriving at the shop on her first day of work there and subjected to something of a dressing down by the elderly, semi-lecherous shop owner. This seems to be the owner's closest remaining equivalent to sex. Jacqueline is followed (stalked, perhaps) wherever she goes by a man, André Lapierre (Mario David), who wears a leather jacket and rides a motorcycle. Jacqueline is torn between the idea that he is the man of her dreams, too shy to approach her directly, or a menace.

The third young woman is Ginette (Stephane Audran). She doesn’t spend evenings with the other girls but is mysterious about what she does instead. Unknown to her friends, Ginette hopes to escape from their dreary existence by becoming a singer. She works at a ratty local night club doing a tasteless imitation of an Italian street chanteuse but keeps it secret from her friends. When she sees them in the audience, one evening, she doesn’t want to perform, but her boss coaxes and berates her into going on and offers her a black wig as a disguise. She is recognized anyway and visited by her friends backstage.

The fourth young woman is Rita (Lucille Saint-Simon). Her hope for escape from her lower class prison is marriage. She is engaged and her fiancée, Henri (Sacha Briquet), hails from a snobbish haute bourgeoisie family. She is to meet his parents for the first time and he primes her on precisely how she should behave: what topics to discuss, how to suppress her crass tendencies, and what to order for dessert. Much to her chagrin, this humiliating spectacle plays out with her friends at the adjacent booth of the cafeteria.

Also working at the appliance store is an older woman, the middle-aged cashier, Mme Louise (Ave Ninchi). She has a secret “fetish” or souvenir about which all of the younger girls have great curiosity. She is saving it for a special occasion. Jacqueline finally convinces her to reveal it to her for good luck. It is a handkerchief soaked in the blood of a guillotined serial killer!

One interesting scene has the girls taking a trip to the zoo. They imitate the calls of the primates and tease the Bengal tiger. We see multiple parallels. Like the caged animals, these women have limited options and are on display for spectators – in the shop, as customers in the nightclubs, as performers in strip joints or night club acts. These ladies exist mainly as ornaments. We are also reminded that even a caged tiger is a dangerous animal and a predator when it roars at the women and frightens them.

The girls accompany Henri to the pool for a nighttime dip. There they are accosted by Marcel and Alfred, who tease them mercilessly, like bullies on a playground – pushing them into the water and dunking them repeatedly. Henri, who is something of a wimp, is helpless to intervene. Finally, Jacqueline’s mystery stalker comes to the rescue, intimidating the bullies into retreat. Jacqueline has finally met her hero, or so she thinks. The love of her life has miraculously materialized. André and Jacqueline spend some quiet time together, at lunch and walking, falling in love. He delights her with infantile antics, like taking a lit cigarette into his mouth, blowing smoke, and making gross sounds with his elbow. Ultimately, in the climactic and penultimate scene of the film, he literally sweeps her out of her humdrum existence.

In the last scene, a mysterious fifth girl appears, at a dance club. With sad, downcast eyes, she sits all alone, until she is asked to dance. Then as she dances, she looks into the camera at us, the viewers, and smiles contentedly, as if to say, now she’s happy – she’s being held by a man. We don’t see much of the man. It’s as if we are dancing with her and complicit in the shallow foundation of both her happiness and her previous misery.

Themes: The basic theme of Les Bonnes Femmes is built out of three interrelated ideas: men are louts, women are ornaments, and romance is therefore an empty charade. On the first point, all of the men in this film (except, perhaps, one mild-mannered, sincere delivery boy who has no luck with the women) are buffoons, predators, childish pranksters, seducers, or priggish snobs. Chabrol even goes so far as to accentuate the negative aspects of these men by having them, at various times, wearing silly bathing caps, sucking in tubby bellies that hang over their bathing trunks, or wearing pig noses at a nightclub. This is one of those films that makes male viewers like myself ashamed of our gender.

The women fare only a bit better in Chabrol's presentation in this film They may be innocent, vital, and pure of heart, but they’re also naïve, shallow, lead empty and meaningless lives, and lack any personal identity separate from their relationship to men. Their entire purpose in life appears to be finding romance. All seek “true love” but the reality of what’s available to them is quite different. Jane settles for sex, Jacqueline gets victimized by a stalker, Ginette seeks to become a display object, and Rita to sell what little identity she has to be a subordinate housewife. Ginette might seem to represent an exception, if one views her aspirations as a singer as a legitimate effort at self-improvement, but her options in the seedy nightclub will, in the end, be limited to being another kind of display object. She’ll simply have a larger audience. There is no true artistry involved.

So, Chabrol, in my opinion, is condemning both men and women in this film, though in different respects. Most of all, he’s offering a scorching indictment of the concept of romantic love between men and women. Chabrol is showing us a valentine, but it is one written and signed in poisonous ink. Les Bonnes Femmes makes about as compelling a case as I’ve ever seen in film for the need for liberation of women – certainly in relation to this particular time, around 1960, and place – Paris. These women have no sense of independent identify and see themselves only in relationship to their ability to attract men. Certainly they are objectified, but they are objectified as much by their own self concepts as by the men around them. This film places the blame squarely on the social system as a whole, not the individual participants – male or female. The men in this film want women largely for sex; the women want men largely to confer meaning to their otherwise empty lives.

These four women exhibit little of the sense of sisterhood advocated by leaders of the women’s movement. They provide little moral encouragement or support and hide the more banal and desperate of their efforts to escape their dreary lives from one another – Ginette is mortified to be discovered working at a theater, Rita is mortified that her debasement in front of Henri’s parents is overheard by her friends, Jane wants her promiscuity hidden from her friends, and Jacqueline keeps her romantic daydreams to herself.

I need to add one more point from my own perspective about the issue of judging the existence of other people as being either “meaningful” or “meaningless.” I think that we all need to be careful in making such assessments. We need especially to distinguish between differences in tastes and preferences on the one hand and deficiencies in capacity for fulfillment on the other hand. If another person leads their life in a way that I would experience as trivial but that person is happy and fulfilled, it would be arrogant of me to conclude that that person’s life is meaningless. For example, some of us enjoy socializing and small talk while others view those pursuits as empty. Some of us enjoy spending much of our time contemplating, reading, learning or experiencing art; others might view such activities as evidence of lonely brooding or social withdrawal. In my opinion, neither a happy hermit nor a happy bimbo leads a meaningless life if he or she feels fulfilled. The women in Les Bonnes Femmes have a largely meaningless existence not because they choose to go clubbing at night, to be clerks in a boring appliance store, or to engage in casual sex (in Jane’s case) but because their own demeanors indicate that they are unfulfilled in the choices that they have made. A person’s existence can only be fairly judged as meaningless if, from that person’s own perspective, they are dissatisfied. These women are clearly not satisfied with the lives they lead because they are alternately fretting, bored, anxious, and deflated, between a few isolated moments of genuine laughter and high spirits.

Production Values: Les Bonnes Femmes shares with many other New Wave films the quality of making the viewer feel like a participant in the action, as though we were casual eavesdroppers. This is accomplished by the camera techniques, location shooting, and the slice-of-life approach. This film magnificently captures the ambiance of the Paris of 1960, from the restaurants, to the girls’ outfits, the swimming wear at the pool, to the burlesque houses and night clubs. We feel that we have gone back in time to visit Paris as it was. Les Bonnes Femmes was filmed in moody black-and-white by Henri Decae, a world-class cinematographer, who was also responsible for several of the great New Wave films, including The 400 Blows.

Like many New Wave films, Les Bonnes Femmes makes playful and skillful use of music. Ambient sound is kept to a minimum, most of the time, accentuating every little kiss, laugh, or splash. The musical elements in the club scenes are very well conceived and matched to the mood and ambiance of each moment. Chabrol makes more limited use of cinematic homages than his colleague Godard.

All four of the female stars of this film are bursting with beauty, femininity, and talent. Two of the four (Lafont and Audran) went on to have impressive careers in film while the other two (Saint-Simon and Joano) largely disappeared. Lafont’s credits include Le Beau Serge (1958) (Chabrol’s debut film), The Mother and the Whore (1973), and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me (1973). Audran married Claude Chabrol and starred in many of his films. Her resume includes Bad Girls (1968), La Femme Infidèle (1969), Le Boucher (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Coup de Torchon (1981), and Babette’s Feast (1987). Clotilde Joana worked in television, mostly, in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. She had film appearances in Z (1969) and The Clockmaker (1974). Lucile Saint-Simon appears to have left the film industry after 1963.

Bottom-Line: This is a deeply unsettling film – the antithesis of a good date movie, since its portrayal of gender relationships is all negative. Les Bonnes Femmes was a box office flop when it was released in France. Audiences jeered and hissed at it and the critics panned it. Its release in America was delayed until 1966, but it was highly praised by influential American critics, ensuring its ultimate prestige. It is not difficult to understand why it would be more highly regarding in America than in France. It is a whole lot easier to enjoy the skewering of a group of people when one does not belong to that group. The French view themselves as the world’s connoisseurs of romance, yet here was one of their own telling them that love in gay Parie is so much empty rubbish. Chabrol himself considered Les Bonnes Femmes one of his best pictures. Les Bonnes Femmes is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 95 minutes. It is unrated but would probably warrant an R for sex and violence.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age