The Unfaithful Wife(La femme infidèle)

Charles may find himself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, but his idyllic life comes crashing down when he discovers that his wife (again played by Stéphane Audran, Chabrol's own wife) is carrying on an extramarital affair with a handsome writer. Beyond the cross-references with Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder (1954), Chabrol’s infidelity thriller is easily a standout in its brilliant ambivalent scrutiny of middles-class marriage and decadence, quietly observing the psychology that drives crimes of passion rather than examining the mechanism of crime. Even though the story is driven by betrayal that juggles compassion and cynicism, it is first and foremost a love story about the fragile façade of the bourgeois ‘perfect life’.

7/9 (Sun): Film talk with Long Tin