Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...FEMME INFIDELE. A beautifully shot and plotted film by Claude Chabrol, which, as we have learned to expect from this New Wave director, zeroes in on a complex human relationship. This Time around, the people involved are an upper middle-class couple and the wife's extracurricular lover...
...screenplay, by Jorge Semprum and Costa-Garvas, is taut and suspenseful. Raoul Coutard's photography cannot be faulted and is particularly adept in its use of cold steel-like colors to add to the cauchemar feeling of the film. Costa-Garvas' direction is lickety-split and sometimes brilliant (his groupings of the pacifist heroes to show simultane-ously their solidarity, strength and fear; the demonstration scenes, which accomplish effortlessly what Haskell Wexler wasted a whole film on in Medium Cool...
...attempts to provide depth in characterization are the weakest parts of the film: a few quick flashback shots for Yves Montand, as useless as John Schlesinger's attempt to create a past for Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy; Costa-Gravas's seeming attempt to link one character's villainry with homosexuality...
...picture is witty (particularly in its cinematic references to Hitchcock's Psycho ), suspenseful, and edited to absolute perfection. It is cleaner filmmaking than Les Biches, and, for that reason, is probably less interesting. (Nor is the relationship of the characters as intriguing as that of the earlier film...
...Lindsay Anderson directed this flamboyant, and sometimes sloppy, film about all the fantasies-political, sexual and mystical-that keep us going in a civilization built on dehumanizing concepts of order. As an example of this civilization, the film presents the milieu of a British public school. For us, it provides a triumverate of students who dream of bloody mass assassination and wild sexual escapades...