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Masterful Cinema

Good idea lost in the noise

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This movie that I watched a long time ago, and I just watched a bit of it recently, is a sad portrayal of a selfish female monster.I read on the reviews that she was an uneducated helpless woman who was aborting the little human beings of French women who had been having sex with German soldiers during the German occupation of France during the second world war.This uneducated woman was savvy enough to figure out a way to kill a slew of human beings in their mother's wombs.If she was able to do that it would seem that she could find a real job to support her family.I read on the reviews that her husband was to blame.I think that is utter nonsense.She was responsible for the murders of the babies,not anyone else.I feel sad for the aborted children and her children.It must have been horrible for her children to have to live with the fact that their mother was executed on the horrific machine of death the guillotine.I feel sad that a woman who is a mother would resort to such a heinous way to make money for her family.

This earns a high rating simply for the gritty, persuasive performance from it's star, Isabelle Huppert, who is called upon to be a mother and an abortionist, to be a lover and a murderer, to be a free spirit and a prisoner of Nazi tyranny; Huppert may never gain your sympathy, and doesn't play for it, but she should gain your understanding as she plays a true-to-life story of a woman severely punished by the French government for a woman's crime that the dominant culture can not countenance because of the political atmosphere at the time--all this, and it's a gripping story,too--but not at all a cheerer-upper.When you have finished watching this film, you may find Huppert's character hasn't quite finished with you, an observant, quiet reminder of the consequences of our actions. Hers is a haunting performance.

With cool detachment and a subtle touch of horror, Claude Chabrol dissects the story of a woman who was guillotined during the Nazi occupation of France. One of his strengths as a director is that he allows the movie goer to form his/her own thoughts and opinions about the issues at hand. He is not a proselytizer. The film covers a lot of ground: illegal abortion, collaborating with the enemy, parenting, marital communication, greed and a slew of other human weaknesses. All of this against the backdrop of an occupied France, a country who witnessed the horrors of WWI and never fully recovered, and whose WWII soul (what is left of it) has been torn apart.Isabelle Huppert does a fine job interpreting Marie LaTour, the woman in question. Marie is not the most sympathetic of characters. In fact, most of the major characters are not "sympathique".(My favorite character is the prostitute Lulu, acted by Marie Trintignant.)All in all a well directed, well structured film about a tragic period in the lives of the French people. But you be the judge.Trivia: "Vera Drake" and "L'Affaire de Femmes" both begin in apartments which have the the same god awful green walls.

This is a true story and the heroine is not unlike Louis Malle's hero "Lacombe Lucien".They are too coarse,too immature to realize what they are doing.Lucien could have opted for the Resistance,but he's deemed too stupid by the schoolteacher and he winds up in Collaboration.Chabrol's heroine only wants to "help" her neighbors before she realizes she can earn a lot of dough with abortion.Chabrol watches his character as an entomologist,as she makes her way through those troubled times:the world has gone mad,and anyway is abortion worse than what the authorities are doing with the Jews ?Maréchal Petain's France was so humiliated that it tried to make up with it by focusing on "morality".The heroine could make also think of Violette Nozières,another Chabrol movie which also featured Huppert.And she's also akin to Sandrine Bonnaire's character in "la cérémonie".All are women overtaken by events,all are victims of a well-meaning society,Chabrol's trademark. "Une affaire de femmes" is certainly a good work although it lacks the sweep and the directing innovations of his late sixties/early seventies classics.