In the occupied France in the World War II, the housewife and aspirant singer Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert) is a young woman that raises her two children alone with many financial difficulties. Her husband, Paul Latour (François Cluzet), was made prisoner by the Germans and sent to Germany. When her next-door neighbor gets pregnant, she performs an abortion and receives a record player as a gift. Meanwhile, Paul returns too weak to find a steady job. Marie befriends the prostitute Lulu (Marie Trintignant) and learns that she can make money performing abortions and renting her room for prostitutes. Her life improves, she buys foods and clothes for her children and she, and has singing lessons with a teacher, but she refuses to have sex with Paul since she is in a loveless marriage. When she meets Lulu's client Lucien (Nils Tavernier), who is a collaborationist crane operator, he becomes her lover. One afternoon, she brings Lucien and has sex with him in her bed. Paul arrives earlier and sees them on the bed. Humiliated, he denounces Marie to the chief of police, she is arrested and sent to Paris to be judged. What will happen to her?
"Une affaire de femmes", a.k.a. "Story of Women", is another excellent film by Claude Chabrol that changes his usual suspense genre to a drama about moral hypocrisy in a occupied country during the World War II. The plot is based on the story of Marie Latour, who is magnificently performed by Isabelle Huppert, an uneducated woman that finds a means to survive in times of war and give a better life to her two children performing abortion of women knocked out by Germans, affairs or their own husbands and renting her room to prostitutes during the days. Her husband denounces her, and she is sent to Paris to become the scape goat in a political judgement in a defeated and hypocrite country. Chabrol touches the wound and Marie is guillotined in 1943. In the present days, abortion is still a polemic theme specially in Catholic countries like Brazil. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "Um Assunto de Mulheres" ("A Subject of Women")
"Une affaire de femmes", a.k.a. "Story of Women", is another excellent film by Claude Chabrol that changes his usual suspense genre to a drama about moral hypocrisy in a occupied country during the World War II. The plot is based on the story of Marie Latour, who is magnificently performed by Isabelle Huppert, an uneducated woman that finds a means to survive in times of war and give a better life to her two children performing abortion of women knocked out by Germans, affairs or their own husbands and renting her room to prostitutes during the days. Her husband denounces her, and she is sent to Paris to become the scape goat in a political judgement in a defeated and hypocrite country. Chabrol touches the wound and Marie is guillotined in 1943. In the present days, abortion is still a polemic theme specially in Catholic countries like Brazil. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "Um Assunto de Mulheres" ("A Subject of Women")