The Delassalles run a second rate boarding school in St Cloud, the site of cruelties both quotidien and painstakingly planned. Monsieur le directeur, is a penny-pinching fastidious tyrant, Madame la directrice, a child-tender blessed spirit of the building, and to complete the love triangle, Nicole, a sort of a statuesque female Tom Ripley. The film creeps up on you slowly in its apparent effortlessness, lack of showiness, and reliance on suggestion. It is known for its gradually crescendoing tension, which is heightened by Mme Delassalle's weak heart, a case of art imitating life as actress Véra Clouzot would die of a heart attack a few years later, aged 46.
Henri-Georges Clouzot has been accused of straightwashing the Boileau-Narcejac story, although a wordly eye notices many allusions to a relationship between Christina and Nicole, the clearest example when asked whether a bed is Christina's or Nicole's, Christina defiantly replies, "ours". This is as much as commerciality and the mores of the 1950s cinema allows. An easy intimacy is shown by the implied dorsogluteal (bum!) injection Nicole delivers to Christina late on in the movie (Christina lies on her front and the injection is delivered too quickly to have been intravenous).
The opening credits background, a chaotic strew of duckweed and water, is accompanied by an enervating tune, increasingly sinister and raucous, one of several times Les Diaboliques is unsettling without resorting to crassness. The movie is one of those examples where artistic restraint noticeably elevates the results, where redolence trumps exposition. Perhaps my favourite image in the movie is of Nicole using tongs to carry a glass retort around her classroom, full of a boiling black substance, a stomach-shaped visual metaphor for what is going inside her.
The dialogue is very tight and pretty flawless, and again, very suggestive. As the Insitut Delassalle breaks for half term, M. Raymond breaks the prim facade of school life by mentioning that tomorrow he will be completely naked; he must escape from the stifling bourgeois act. Various hints of the inequity of the world and its inherent stupidity garnish the central black pudding. The children have taxis and chauffeurs whilst the well-studied teachers have to beg for a swallow of cheap wine from the headmaster, and live stifled and petty existences. A choice dark note is when the teachers who Nicole lets rooms to confidently prognosticate that Mme la directrice and their landlady must eat far better food than them due to their social situation; we the audience have already seen them eating flaccid gone over morsels out of slop. How easy it is to get our imaginations of one another's existences flat out wrong; hell is born in how we appear in other peoples' imaginations, as Sartre opined.
The film escalates to a diaphanous vision in the night and unhinges into the mystical. Highly recommended.
Henri-Georges Clouzot has been accused of straightwashing the Boileau-Narcejac story, although a wordly eye notices many allusions to a relationship between Christina and Nicole, the clearest example when asked whether a bed is Christina's or Nicole's, Christina defiantly replies, "ours". This is as much as commerciality and the mores of the 1950s cinema allows. An easy intimacy is shown by the implied dorsogluteal (bum!) injection Nicole delivers to Christina late on in the movie (Christina lies on her front and the injection is delivered too quickly to have been intravenous).
The opening credits background, a chaotic strew of duckweed and water, is accompanied by an enervating tune, increasingly sinister and raucous, one of several times Les Diaboliques is unsettling without resorting to crassness. The movie is one of those examples where artistic restraint noticeably elevates the results, where redolence trumps exposition. Perhaps my favourite image in the movie is of Nicole using tongs to carry a glass retort around her classroom, full of a boiling black substance, a stomach-shaped visual metaphor for what is going inside her.
The dialogue is very tight and pretty flawless, and again, very suggestive. As the Insitut Delassalle breaks for half term, M. Raymond breaks the prim facade of school life by mentioning that tomorrow he will be completely naked; he must escape from the stifling bourgeois act. Various hints of the inequity of the world and its inherent stupidity garnish the central black pudding. The children have taxis and chauffeurs whilst the well-studied teachers have to beg for a swallow of cheap wine from the headmaster, and live stifled and petty existences. A choice dark note is when the teachers who Nicole lets rooms to confidently prognosticate that Mme la directrice and their landlady must eat far better food than them due to their social situation; we the audience have already seen them eating flaccid gone over morsels out of slop. How easy it is to get our imaginations of one another's existences flat out wrong; hell is born in how we appear in other peoples' imaginations, as Sartre opined.
The film escalates to a diaphanous vision in the night and unhinges into the mystical. Highly recommended.