Chabrol: Une Affaire de Femmes (Story of Women) (1988)

A rare period drama from Claude Chabrol, Story of Women is based on the life of Marie-Louise Girard, who performed almost thirty abortions during the French Occupation, and was subsequently guillotined. It’s an unusual period film, in that’s it’s largely devoid of period detail – although it moves between a number of different social stations, the backdrop always feels drab, unglamorous and functional, and never exceeds a small collection of rooms at a time, all of which feel more or less interchangeable. That’s appropriate, though, for a drama about occupation – with the streets continually patrolled, monitored and curfewed, the sense of outside tends to vanish in an occupied country. More pervasively, period detail is precisely what an occupation is designed to remove; a country can’t make over another country in its own image without anonymising it somewhat first, reducing it to a certain blankness and formlessness, perhaps explaining why the film itself is considerably less stylistically flamboyant than Chabrol’s more canonical works; his camera does little more than occupy space here. And that’s the perfect mode for Isabelle Huppert’s performance of Marie, which is one of the most opaque and inscrutable in her career. Speculations on whether Marie was a feminist or a mercenary dissolve in the materiality of Huppert’s face, which rarely changes or modulates, as Chabrol meticulously refrains from assuming why a woman might choose to have or facilitate an abortion. In doing so, he transforms Huppert into a object lesson in the ambivalences of collaboration – it’s genuinely unclear whether Marie was assisting France or Germany by aborting the children of absent French soldiers and transitory German lovers (and Marie herself certainly doesn’t know). What is clear is that the trial and execution, as Chabrol presents it, is completely devoid of moral sentiment: it’s a bureaucratic gesture, a way of making a public statement. And that suddenly makes the film contemporary, makes the lack of period detail feel right, as Chabrol evokes a moment of bureaucratic disavowal that hasn’t properly passed, a collaborationist past that continues to haunt the present.