So, herewith, in Part 1, some random comments on Chabrol's film. In my next post, Part 2, the Surrealists on the Noziere case and other crimes.
Part 1. Chabrol's Violette, portrayed brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert, is several years younger than the actual Noziere, who was eighteen at the time of her crime. Though Chabrol embroiders and enhances the Noziere story, and adds to it an elusive atmosphere of ambiguity, he generally follows fairly closely the facts of the case.
The teenage daughter of a proper lower middle-class couple, Violette lives a cramped existence in a tiny claustrophobic tenement. At home, she is well-behaved and virginal-- a typical though somewhat dour and buttoned-up schoolgirl, always busy with homework. But in fact she has been leading a do
uble life as a quasi-prostitute. After her parents are asleep, she slips out of her bedroom, changes into flashy clothes, puts on heavy makeup, and goes into seedy neighborhoods in search of romance, i.e., of men with whom to bed.Two events interrupt this pattern-- first, Violette discovers that she has syphilis. Frightened that her parents will learn the truth, she pressures her doctor to tell them the disease is inherited-- one of them must be the carrier-- and that she is still a virgin. The second development is Violette's fateful encounter with Jean Dabin, a good-looking scoundrel with whom she falls hopelessly in love. Dabin turns out to be a leech. To meet his constant demands for money and to keep him in style, Violette uses her earnings as a prostitute. She also begins to steal petty amounts from her parents without their knowledge.
As Dabin's requirements increase, Violette seeks other sources of money. She tries unsuccessfully to break into her parents' cache of savings, stored under lock and key in the apartment. When it is clear that Dabin will leave her if she can't come up with more cash, Violette plots to murder both her mother and father. The syphilis story conveniently provides a method. Violette forges a letter from her doctor indicating that the whole family should take the syphilis medication. The parents, humiliated by the possibility that they are the source of Violette's infection, agree to take the medicine and are promptly fed poisonous powders by their daughter. To finish off the job and disguise the cause of death, Violette turns on the gas in the apartment and leaves.
Her plan, however, goes awry. Though Violette's father dies immediately, her mother survives, recovers, and provides testimony against her daughter. Meanwhile, Violette has gone into hiding. When she is inevitably caught and arrested, she has her defense ready. She claims that she was a victim of her father's abuse, that he had regularly raped her, and that the only reason she tried to kill her mother was to spare her the shame of knowing about her husband's guilt.
The case is sensational and widely exploited by the press. Screaming headlines pop up everywhere. The public is fascinated and divided. Partisan groups form for and against the parricide. Conflicting theses for the crime are expounded in public forums. Noziere becomes a cause celebre for feminists and the Surrealists. When the case comes to trial, Violette's mother, changing her position, begs that her daughter be spared. Violette is nevertheless condemned to death. We learn from the film's coda that the sentence for the real-life Noziere was subsequently changed to life imprisonment, then shortened. Years later she was pardoned and set free earlier than expected. She married the son of an official at the prison where she had been incarcerated, had five children, and was even reconciled with her mother.
Both visually and in its use of a broken narrative line, Chabrol's treatment of Violette's story is uneasy and equivocal. It's never apparent whether he wishes us to admire or condemn his icy heroine. Perhaps we are meant to do neither, or to do both simultaneously. Violette's sexual escapades, in deep blacks and dull greys, are sometimes viewed as glamorous, but also as shabby and distasteful. Her life on the streets is pathetic as well as a means of escaping her dreary, cluttered and oppressive family existence. Like the Surrealists, Chabrol seems to appreciate the liberationist role of romantic desire in Violette's life. But if he approves of Violette's flouting of the norms of bourgeois respectability, he also knows the frightening downside. Her entanglement with Dabin is seen with no less complexity. If the young woman desperately in love provokes our sympathy, she also seems an utter fool for submitting with such passivity to her lover's extortionist demands.
The film's discontinuous method accentuates all these dualities. Certain key events are seen in flashbacks that suddenly interrupt the present action. Sometimes hazy and thus shrouded in indeterminacy, they may represent Violette's romanticization and/or distortion of the past. But perhaps-- it's hard to tell-- they represent actual events in the young woman's life, like a scene which reveals (without definitive justification) Violette's painful feeling in childhood that she has been neglected by her mother.
As for the crime itself, here Chabrol also deals in ambiguity. Though the depiction of the murder is blunt and unsparing, as are Violette's mercenary motives for it, there are still uncertainties surrounding the event. We know that Violette is a habitual liar, and so must doubt her claim that she'd been regularly molested by her father. Yet certain flashbacks possibly provide supporting evidence. In one, the teenage Violette, boldly naked, stands at a sink and washes herself while her father is nearby, trying to talk to her. He is either engaged in lasciviously eyeing his daughter's body or-- again, it's difficult to tell-- he is carefully looking the other way. At an earlier time, Violette's father is seen vigorously bouncing the young teenager on his lap. Both appear to like the fun, but Violette's mother furiously pulls her daughter away. A mother's jealousy or a father's incestuous lust? As elsewhere, Isabelle Huppert's cool impassivity encompasses all these possibilities.
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