Violette Nozière
***/**** Image C- Sound C+
starring Isabelle Huppert, Stephane Audran, Jean Carmet, Jean-François Garreaud
screenplay by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, Frederic Grendel, based on the novel Presses de la Cité by Jean-Marie Fitere
directed by Claude Chabrol
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Violette Nozière (or Violette, as inexplicably shortened by some cretinous American distributor) isn't highly ranked in the canon of Claude Chabrol. Reviews range from the mildly indulgent to Leonard Maltin's assertion that "Chabrol lacks his usual directorial flair"–a strange thing to say about a man whose style is famously relaxed. While I wouldn't place it in the company of Les bonnes femmes or La femme infidèle, I would say that Violette Nozière returns Chabrol to his preoccupations with women and class with lethal accuracy. Its tale of an amoral 14-year-old who robs, sleeps around, and attempts to murder both of her parents is perceptively half-in, half-out of her desire to escape the confines of a small world and a smaller bankroll. The protagonist is completely horrible, and yet we're just as completely trapped in her point-of-view. The film's total commitment to her awful behaviour subsequently makes the audience both judge of and accomplice to Violette's terrible, terrible misdeeds.
Based on a famous case that rocked France in the 1930s, Violette Nozière trails the eponymous Violette (Isabelle Huppert) as she generally lets down her parents in the worst possible ways. Her mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) is already suspicious of her daughter as the film begins, while her train-mechanic father Baptiste (Jean Carmet) has an infinite capacity for denial. Violette steals money from them to finance romances with older students, sleeps with jazz musicians, commits blackmail, and invents friends (and thus alibis) who don't really exist. She even contracts syphilis, only to wriggle out of the implications in the most hilarious example of parental blinkers ever recorded on film. But this is not enough: Violette resents her folks placing any sort of limits on her. Once she's told too many lies and been caught too many times, she invents a doctor's note and poisons her parents, opening a firestorm of controversy that will spill out into the public sphere.
Chabrol and co. refuse to furnish Violette with any grounds for moral outs. Though she repeatedly protests (or rather, boasts) that her father rapes her, the film never substantiates these or other claims that would give her some kind of excuse. In fact, the only suggestion of psychological trauma is the fact that her real father (François Maistre) is a wealthy man who refuses to acknowledge her beyond paying the blackmail–and Violette enjoys this power trip far too much for it to count as pity credit. As the film goes on, though, we see all Violette, all the time, her treachery rendered in pornographic detail and without apology. We also see the stunningly unattractive lower-class domesticity of Violette's home and grow a little claustrophobic ourselves: faced with the void of a nothing life, the yearning for a little excitement is almost too much to bear.
Where Violette Nozière gets especially interesting is in the relationship between Violette and her mother. Not only does Audran turn in a brilliant, nuanced performance (she should've copped the Cannes award that went to Huppert), but her character also serves as a counterpoint to Violette. Mother has accepted her lot and loves her husband, making the hellraising ways of her daughter a heartbreaking betrayal–she's the conscience of the movie, as well as a constant reminder that the actions of the protagonist have serious consequences. It's an important gesture that complicates the movie and our identification alike: with neither wholesale endorsement nor righteous condemnation, we're left to simply gasp at the heroine's indiscretions. By the time the outside world has gotten hold of the story (and invents its own conclusions with second-hand information), we admire and deplore Violette in equal measure. For Audran's part, she anchors a film with more heft than a sordid crime story would normally entail.
THE DVD
Koch Lorber has unfortunately dropped the ball in bringing this gripping Chabrol to R1 DVD. The vertically-cropped 1.33:1 presentation (inexcusable in and of itself) sports an unstable image that's one step up from bleary old VHS: skin tones are alarmingly pink, shadow detail is poor, and strobing is insanely common; flecks of print damage are virtually indistinguishable from a flux of analog video noise. An accompanying French-only Dolby 2.0 mono track is nearly as poor, sounding soft and tinny and lacking in clarity. The only extras are trailers for Comedy of Power, Le petit lieutenant, Nathalie…, Gilles' Wife, Changing Times, and La belle captive.
123 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; French DD 2.0 (Mono); English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Koch Lorber
