It somehow seems bizarrely fitting in the year when the bicentennial of the French Revolution is being so enthusiastically celebrated that French film director Claude Chabrol has chosen to make a film about the last woman in France to be executed by that revolutionary instrument, the guillotine.
Une Affire de Femmes (Women's Business) is not a particularly easy or appealing work, given that the protagonist, played by Isabelle Huppert, was condemned as an abortionist during the dark days of Vichy France under the German occupation.
Presented at last year's Venice Film Festival, the subject matter of the film--still clearly a highly charged issue--provoked the explosion of a tear-gas bomb in a Paris movie theater, causing one man to die from a heart attack while trying to escape. It premiered this spring in the United States at New York's Museum of Modern Art in a series devoted to the film's producer, Marin Karmitz. Since then it has played only at Washington, D.C.'s, annual Filmfest.
Like many of Chabrol's films, Une Affaire de Femmes is provocative. The story is rich in moral ambiguities. Marie, the character portrayed by Huppert, is a working-class housewife who becomes an abortionist almost inadvertently, when a friend pregnant by a German soldier comes to her for help in desperation. Although Marie performs her first abortion acting out of a humane instinct, she is latter shown performing abortions for money, earning increasingly large fees for this illegal activity.
Recklessly, Marie rents out a room to a neighborhood prostitute and begins an affair with one of her new tenant's customers, a Nazi collaborator. She makes the mistake of treating her weak, cuckolded husband so contemptuously that eventually he denounces her and her activities to the Vichy authorities, which leads to her trial and execution.
The screenwriter, Colo Tavernier O' Hagan, former wife of French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, has opted to slant the story very much from Marie's point of view, with the sensibility of a contemporary feminist. Hence, Marie sees herself performing abortions in order to help fellow women in distress, being a good mother herself while sheltering her children from any knowledge of her activities.
As she becomes enmeshed in the toils of the law, Marie sees that she has been informed on by men, accused by men, tried by men, and condemned by men. The Vichy government is made to stand for centuries of male oppression, and since every one today recognizes that the Vichy Government was evil, then ipso facto the audience is being asked to give its sympathies to a basically thoughtless, irresponsible woman who was an abortionist.
We are asked to care about Marie's fate, because--as she sullenly explains to the lawyers and judges--she was only involved in "the business of women." Men don't know what goes on in women's heads, she thinks. Women would understand, women would sympathize. After all, Marie reasons, "the business of women" is none of men's business. Women, to Marie's way of thinking, help other women. This is life under the occupation as a feminist tract.
To perhaps give the film a slightly larger moral
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