The Moviegoer La Femme Infidele

at the West End Cinema through next Tuesday

THE NEW YORK critic who called La Femme Infidele a "perfect bourgeois drama" had reason to be proud of himself. Claude Chabrol's new film takes for its subject the most hackneyed situation in melodrama, the triangular love relationship. Its subtlely of expression bespeaks the most exquisite taste. The critic's label nevertheless implies that the film's scope is restricted, and while most audiences may find that true. La Femme Infidele is far from the good little movie the label implies. It is perfect not because Chabrol has restricted his aims, but because he has taken his dramatic situations, themes, and expressive means to their limits.

The perverse characters and grotesque objects of Chabrol's earlier films take a part in La Femme Infidele. The taller of the two anarchic clowns, whom he has repeatedly employed, turns up unshaven in a bar and insults the protagonist as he passes through. The shorter one appears as a truck driver who rams the rear of the hero's car at a crucial moment. But like the extravagant colors and camera motions that La Femme Infidele inherits from the earlier films, these characters have become precisely integrated and thereby far deeper in emotional effect. The boorishness of the second clown, which had always grated on the audience, here expresses the tension and guilt operating on the hero at the moment that the collision occurs. He accuses and reviles our bourgeois hero, generating a crowd and a cop, who tries to open the car trunk in which the hero has hidden a corpse. While this threat of exposure is specific, the situation is more significant as a direct metaphor for the hero's emotional state. People surround him pointing and shouting; the possibility of escape decreases with every second. In an earlier Chabrol the metaphor would first have been amusingly demented, and only on second thought serious and meaningful. In La Femme Infidele the balance has shifted and the incident is only touched by Chabrol's perversely anarchic humor.

Similarly, the themes and characters of this earlier films are here so integrated as to make their significance more immediate. The hero is Chabrol's destructive romantic, but his dialogue hardly reveals profound love or the insane determination to preserve close personal relationships. It is his facial expressions that detail his momentary emotional states and reactions to other characters' words that betray his character. He is the most completely motivated character I have even seen in a film, for Chabrol has chosen to use dialogue obliquely, turning rather to acting and camerawork to describe his characters.

The minutest details of each situation play an essential part. That the film's second section takes place at home has the deepest possible bearing on the emotional climate of the relationships then developing. The world of the film contracts and its relationships become less existential, more archetypal, as they turn to the family: man, wife, and son. Here again scenes are played less outrageously than in earlier Chabrol, so that the child who sees through the superficial amicability of his parents' relationship reacts to his intuitive insights only indirectly. His inability to finish a picture puzzle, a metaphor for the changed relationship of husband and wife, describes his position in the family as that of a passive being subjected to the flaws in that relationship. He cries and accuses his father of hiding the missing piece, thereby provoking his nervous mother into upsetting the puzzle. He turns to his parents with tears in his eyes and says, "I hate you." The position of the child-as a reflection of the strains upon a marriage, and as an independent moral being who is really hurt-has been fully described without letting him take over the film as the boy of La Muette (1965) did.