Fiendish! Fiendish! What a great trailer! And since it told me not to reveal the ending about 18 times--I won't.
Les Diaboliques is a thriller about a wife and a mistress conspiring together to kill the man who has made both their lives a living hell (that's not a spoiler by the way). Clouzot's real-life wife, Vera Clouzot plays Christina, a devout Catholic saddled with a wicked husband and a bad heart condition. Christina is a teacher at the private school her inheritance has purchased and that she runs with her husband Michel, a despicable and abusive sociopath, and one of cinema's all-time-great bastards. With her dark hair severely pinned and her collar buttoned tight, Christina is the warm-beauty turned depressed school-marm, withering under Michel's abuse. She flinches when he enters the room and makes herself small and insignificant to avoid attracting his wrath. Her state of constant anxiety is the worst possible thing for her delicate heart to have to endure, and her only solace is the makeshift shrine on her bureau that she constantly visits for guidance.
Michel has installed himself as the schools brittle and cheap headmaster and he rules with fear and tyranny. How evil is Michel? Well, in one of my favourite scenes, two of the belittled teachers decry the injustice of having to drink the cheap wine that Michel supplies at dinner. Ah, the French! While Christina walks on egg shells, Michel is positively reveling in his complete mastery over those weaker than him, be they romantically entangled women, faculty member underlings, or sheepish children. To make matters worse, he is having an affair with Nicole played by Simone Signoret, one of the other teachers at the school. But Michel, who can also add arrogant and entitled to his list of good qualities, conducts the affair so imprudently that even the school children talk about it openly at recess.
Nicole is Christina's polar opposite, a curvy blond with an attitude who commands a room, her confident presence hushing the loose talk that her name constantly floats atop. On the surface, Christina is the suffering wife and Nicole the femme fatale, but very quickly the film diffuses this notion and instead of pitting the women against each other, unites them in their hatred for Michel. When Nicole returns to the school from an evening out with Michel, he has given her a black eye and it is Christina of all people who is there for comfort. Nicole is as trapped by Michel's abuse as Christina, and so they plot how to get rid of him once and for all. Christina, being a deeply religious woman, is of course conflicted about her role in the scheme, while Nicole steadfastly maintains that Michel's torments will only end with his death. Michel is portrayed as such a ferocious asshole that there's never really any doubt as to whether he deserves his fate. But as fears of damnation cloud Christina's mind and cracks begin to show in Nicole's icy demeanor, uncertainty mounts. Can they out-fox the fox? And if they do, can they maintain a united front?
Clouzot takes his time building the world of the private school and allowing his characters to soak in with the audience. It's an uncommonly patient approach to storytelling, but this steady acceleration, as opposed to both feet pressed on the gas, works wonders for the engine of suspense that drives the film. Knowing the characters, or thinking we know them, is so integral to our investment and to the way Clouzot uses this investment against us. His structure--an hour of character construction followed by an hour of character deconstruction--is similar to the one used in The Wages of Fear and either feels so unique because of Clouzot's skill, or because our instant-gratification culture no longer has any use for patience. A film that holds off revealing itself for one whole hour stands in stark relief against the endless stream of movies that bow to the page-20-turn formula.
[*Sorta-not-really spoilers ahead]
After much hand-wringing and debate, both philosophical and practical, Nicole and Christina's plan to murder Michel is carried out, and the tyrant falls to their calculations (this isn't really a spoiler either since Michel's murder is treated as a foregone conclusion). They pack his body in a large coffin-like wicker hamper and drive it back to the school from Nicole's apartment--the scene of the crime. In the dead of night, the two women dump Michel's body in the school's neglected, dirty swimming pool, and it promptly sinks into the cloudy murk. The two women wait for the body to be discovered and for the moment they will begin performing the drama of their shared alibi for a rapt audience of police, faculty and students. They wait and wait, and excruciating days tick past shredding the already frayed nerves of the coconspirators. During this time Clouzot repeatedly gooses the audience and his characters until neither can take it any longer. Christina is frantic and she demands, perhaps foolishly, that the pool be drained, speeding up the process of Michel's death going public. But when the pool is drained, there is no sign of his body, and the film suddenly takes the first of many unexpected turns.
Les Diaboliques straddles the various lines between complimentary genres, moving back and forth with ease from crime story, to horror movie, to thriller. It builds masterfully, squeezing the air out of your lungs until its final scene delivers a shocking punch to the gut. When the last shot fades to black a title card appears urging the audience not to spoil the twist ending for anyone who hasn't seen it--perhaps the first "no-spoilers!" message. It really drives home what a wicked game Clouzot has been playing and makes you wanna watch it all over again with new eyes.
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