Story of Women movie review & film summary (1990)
We begin to see her pattern. She does what is necessary to save herself trouble and keep her income out of jeopardy.
Eventually, the notoriety of her activities catches up with her.
She is arrested, and taken to Paris for a wartime show trial. Now her eyes are as blank as they were before. What does she feel? Guilt? Fear? Does she understand it will be necessary for the occupation government to make an example of her? Claude Chabrol is one of the most prolific of active directors; he has made more than 40 films, of a very wide range of quality, from masterpieces ("Le Boucher," "This Man Must Die") to whodunits and steamy melodramas. He is at his best where sex and crime intersect, and he is most fascinated with criminals who do not seem to relate emotionally to their own crimes (study the character of the murderer in "Le Boucher"). Huppert is the perfect actress for him.
The story he tells here, of a real woman named Marie Latour, is well known in France, where she was one of the last three women to receive the death penalty. The Latour case obviously fascinates Chabrol, perhaps because he does not know what her true motivations were. She began in poverty and was able to thrive and flourish under the Nazi occupation. She bought furs and kept a lover. She was not a "liberated woman" in any sense, and did not see her role as an abortionist as a brave or necessary one, but simply as a profitable and even inevitable route to a larger income.
Nor did the government really see her as a criminal. The prosecution in the film is shown as devoid of moral outrage, but obsessed by the need to "set an example." The whole episode seems to have unfolded without anyone really feeling much of anything - anyone except for the family of a desperate mother of six who dies after one of Marie's abortions.
Today the collaborationist government is reviled in France, abortion is legal and paid for by the government, and Marie Latour is dead. What is Chabrol's message? He does not say. His film is as opaque as his character. "Story of Women" is a morality play without a conclusion. We have to make up our own minds. Most movies on themes like this instruct us about how to think, by portraying its characters as good or bad, and casting them to seem attractive or otherwise.
Chabrol does not make it so easy.
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