MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Women’: Study of Corruption, Hypocrisy

Claude Chabrol’s beguiling yet mordant “Story of Women” (opening Friday at the Fine Arts) takes us into the demoralized heart of Occupied France. In a drab port town near Dieppe, a young mother, Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert), comes upon a neighbor taking a mustard bath in hope of aborting herself. “You’ll never do it that way,” says Marie, who, after some basic research, calmly performs the abortion on her friend.

A whole new world of possibilities opens up for the impoverished Marie, who is dazzled by the rewards of her new-found profession. For her, the joy of obtaining such precious commodities as cigarettes for herself and jam for her children is as seductive as Eve taking a bite out of that apple. “When you have money, you always want more,” observes Marie’s prostitute friend Lulu (Marie Trintignant), to whom she is soon renting a room for assignations as yet another source of income.

“Story of Women,” whose French title is “Une Affaire de Femmes” (“Women’s Business”), is based on a true story. It represents the culmination of Chabrol’s three-decade obsession with bourgeois hypocrisy, and he has never had such rich, complex material with which to express it. Chabrol clearly favors women being in control over their bodies. But timely--and scathing--as “Story of Women” is regarding abortion and women’s rights, it is above all a terse, tragic yet exhilarating evocation of the most painful period in modern French history.

Chabrol, co-writer Colo Tavernier O’Hagan and Huppert, who took the best-actress prize at Venice last year for her portrayal of Marie, show us a shrewd yet fundamentally naive woman who sees herself as no worse--and probably much better--than many of her neighbors, an appraisal that is actually quite accurate yet blinds her to danger.

In peacetime, Marie almost certainly would have lived out a drab, dutiful existence, faithful to a husband she no longer loves, but the Occupation has given her a freedom and opportunity so totally unexpected that she’s sent reeling. Even though her perfectly ordinary husband (Francois Cluzet) has inconveniently been sent home from his internment by the Germans, she takes a dashing younger lover (Nils Tavernier), a cynical collaborator. She’s as oblivious to the impact of her new way of life upon her husband as she is to the risk of being an abortionist at a time when the Vichy government is assuaging the shame of defeat with a fierce embrace of moral rectitude.

Chabrol does not judge Marie but rather sees her as a catalyst for her times, revealing the full extent of their corruption and signaling that nothing will ever be the same in the wake of the war.

As a mature work of a master, “Story of Women” (Times-rated: Mature for adult themes) has a terrific sense of immediacy, an enormous vitality and a deep and broad perspective. It’s as if Chabrol is reminding us that social change, inevitably slow and painful as it is, is possible even in the face of seemingly immutable human nature.

You couldn’t ask more of a cast--Cluzet’s diffident but finally enraged husband, Trintignant’s gorgeous, warm-hearted hooker, and on and on--but Huppert’s Marie is the film’s focus, eliciting widely contradictory emotions as we watch her evolve. We become caught up in her sheer joy in embracing life’s pleasures fully, in her steadfast love and affection for her children, in her increasingly cruel and dangerous follies and in her eventual self-awareness and calm courage. Huppert, who a decade ago was Chabrol’s “Violette,” a frustrated murderer of her own parents, has that rare gift that Garbo had in sublime abundance: She is able to give you a complete woman, yet remain a radiant enigma in her beauty and dignity.

‘STORY OF WOMEN’

An MK2/New Yorker Films release. Producer Marin Karmitz. Director Claude Chabrol. Screenplay and adaptation Colo Tavernier O’Hagan, Chabrol. Camera Jean Rabier. Music Matthieu Chabrol. Costumes Corinne Jorry. Film editor Monique Fardoulis. With Isabelle Huppert, Francois Cluzet, Marie Trintignant, Nils Tavernier, Evelyne Didi, Dani, Francois Maistre, Vincent Gauthier, Lolita Chammah, Aurore Gauvin, Guillaume Foutrier, Nicolas Foutrier. In French, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.