Good women

At long last Chabrol's Les bonnes femmes

by Jeffrey Gantz

LES BONNES FEMMES, Directed by Claude Chabrol. Written by Paul Gégauff. With Bernadette Lafont, Clothilde Joano, Stéphane Audran, Lucile Saint-Simon, Mario David, Pierre Berlin, and Sacha Briquet. At the Harvard Film Archive October 1, 2, and 4.

When the French New Wave began crashing onto American cinematic beaches, Claude Chabrol was distinctly part of the undertow. Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut led the assault with the likes of Breathless and The 400 Blows and Jules et Jim. Even Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, whose films were more talked about than seen, made a bigger splash than Chabrol, whose 1960 Les bonnes femmes ("The Shopgirls") didn't open in New York till 1966. Reviewing it for the Times, Robert Alden wrote that the film "is a worthwhile piece of cinema and deserves more recognition than it has had." He's right. Les bonnes femmes hasn't been seen in Boston for decades, I'm told, but the Harvard Film Archive has a print and will be bringing it out for four screenings next weekend.

The plot could fuel a new fall sit-com: four young Parisian girls work in the Maison Belin electrical-appliance store and dream of romance. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is the earthiest and the most high-spirited; her roommate Ginette (Stéphane Audran) is less vivacious and tends to go off by herself at night. Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) is the most dramatic-looking, with her long, slender neck and long dark hair, and she's attracted the attention of a mysterious motorcyclist (Mario David), always attired in tie and leather jacket, who seems to be following her. Marguerite (Lucile Saint-Simon) has already snagged her man, an upper-class twit named Henri (Sacha Briquet) who appears more concerned about his parents' approval than hers. The workplace contingent is completed by cashier Madame Louise, an older woman with a dark secret in her purse, and the proprietor, Monsieur Belin (Pierre Berlin), an elderly gentleman who enjoys ogling the girls, though that's as far as it goes.

Chabrol's set-up could have made for an exhilarating comedy, but this is not the technicolor city of Hollywood films like An American in Paris and April in Paris and Gigi, and it doesn't even have the monochrome elegance of Les enfants du paradis. It's more like the Rome of Fellini's Le notti di Cabiria with overtones of noir LA: a sad place, especially for women. Monsieur Belin's unwelcome attentions apart, the shop is impossibly tedious (for all that it has five employees, the Maison Belin does hardly any business). And the girls' options scarcely improve at night. In the opening sequence, Jane and Jacqueline get picked up by Marcel and Albert, a pair of would-be swells who make Jerry Lewis look like Cary Grant; after the ladies have been "treated" to drinks at a strip club, Jacqueline opts out but Jane goes on to the fellows' apartment, where she spends the night. We never see our heroines at the cinema (no interest in New Wave films, it seems), or the theater, or anything as classy as the Parisian equivalent of the Boston Pops: their entertainment is limited to sleazy nightclubs and low-talent variety shows and coed public swimming pools.

It's a shock, this life of theirs, and you're tempted to ask who's responsible. Chabrol stacks the deck by making the men preposterously bad: Marcel and Albert are ludicrous, Henri is embarrassing, and the motorcycle man turns out to have a nasty surprise in store for Jacqueline. Yet the film's box-office failure may have owed to the director's perceived coldness toward the ladies as well. It's hard to sympathize with Jane after her evening with Marcel and Albert, especially since she seems to have a boyfriend of sorts, in the army. It's hard to believe the attractive Marguerite can't do better than Henri. And it's hard to identify with Jacqueline when she gets that starry-eyed-but-stupid look (great acting from Joano) on her face when she's fantasizing about her motorcycle man.

But then you have to consider the pun of the title: shopgirls, but also "good girls." Chabrol's working women aren't Hollywood-smart like the ladies of How To Marry a Millionaire -- they're the genuine article, undereducated, not overbright, mostly good-hearted. So maybe he's asking us whether that shouldn't be enough to get them a decent life. Les bonnes femmes ends with a fifth girl, same type, drinking alone at some kind of club. A man asks her to dance; we see only her face, never his, as she looks vacantly, romantically, at the mirror ball of dreams. (Chabrol may have been thinking of Renoir's three famous dancing couples, where we see the woman's face more clearly than the man's.) She may be a fool for love, but in Chabrol's cinematic universe, it's the meek who inherit.