Nearly a year ago, just after he had finished La Femme Infidèle …, Claude Chabrol said in a television interview that he always made films about the bourgeoisie because that was the class he knew best. And the reason for that was simple: "I am one of them," he went on, "I am one myself—but I don't like them."

He's talking about a class of Frenchmen we should judge as somewhere between comfortably-off and rich. He's fascinated by their high degree of social organisation…. [On] the whole Chabrol seems inclined to view [the organisation] as a defence against the unexpected, against indignity, and against passion. In this aspect, La Femme Infidèle, set as it is in a mansion in Versailles, inescapably presents a picture of an ancien régime. It is as though Chabrol had decided that the barriers that crashed in 1789 were the most superficial ones: economic, political, social. Beneath them the emotional rites which sustained the haute bourgeoisie—refined or calcified according to your taste—clicked on unperturbed, even in the arriviste. La Femme Infidèle is about the irruption into this ritual not so much of passion itself, as of the evidence of passion, the awareness of passion, above all the threatening acknowledgment of passion….

The marks of ritual are beautifully recorded. The long, slow left-to-right pans bringing the car to the side of the house and Desvallées across its frontage, the patient and smooth attention of the camera as Desvallées and his wife take tea on the lawn, look at snapshots, enjoy the sunshine….

What's even more impressive is the manner in which Chabrol controls the pace. A great deal of the film passes in watching movement, not always purposeless, but often inconsequential. The interest lies in the degree of haste, the familiarity of the movement, its utility or pointlessness. Desvallées is steady-paced, his small purposes served by careful, economic movement, the camera following him with unemotional, unironic attention as he proceeds from telephone to cigarette packet to car-parking disc to record player. Hélène is more languid, more mysterious, her secret purposes hinted at by long slow tracks-in which close her off from her surroundings, isolating her narcissism, her passion or her grief. With Pegala [her lover] gone, she shuts herself in her bedroom and, standing at the foot of the bed, lowers herself backwards on to it, her limbs dead, the only sound a wordless gasp of hurt which the camera has to lean over her to hear. (p. 209)

When Desvallées kills [Pegala] we are at first as astonished as the murderer is by the revelation of that secret strength, not merely physical. But we recognise that the core of subterranean violence is not only held in check, but husbanded, by a skin of civilisation which perhaps generations of Desvallées had worked hard to preserve…. Desvallées' violence is suddenly shocking because it is in contrast to his habitual economy of effort, and the power of the sequence in which he disposes of the body is proportionate to that economy. For here he turns himself with great efficiency into a work-machine and, mopping blood, wrapping, dragging, heaving, driving the body of Pegala, he is sustained as always by the rituals of habit and the pull towards normality which govern his life….

What has Chabrol demonstrated? That despite appearances—everything in Chabrol is despite those—the heights and depths of emotion can be visited and returned from safely?—or encompassed and assimilated?—or encountered and avoided?—paradoxically by cleaving to just these restrictive forms of life? Chabrol doesn't like the bourgeoisie, but we doubt whether he is more fascinated or repelled by this artificial skin of behaviour. Are the heights scaled, as it were, or skirted, after all? Doesn't he admire, despite himself, the sophistication of this fighting unit, and their ability to survive? When Desvallées confesses to Hélène, 'Je t'aime comme un fou,' is he preserving an invaluable relationship or (the bourgeois sin) a priceless possession? At any rate this sure-footed, finely acted and spellbinding film is not ruffled, but deepened, by that ambivalence. (pp. 209-10)