Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Wow! How great that this masterpiece of a film, unavailable on video for so long, is finally out on both video and DVD. AWESOME! FANTASTIQUE! If you like French New Wave films, don't even think twice before buying this, IT'S ONE OF THE BEST and definitely the best film of Chabrol's career, in my not so humble opinion.
"Les Bonnes Femmes" is the 'lost' new wave film that's easily on the same level with "Breathless," "Shoot the Piano Player," and "Cleo from 5 to 7" yet completely unlike any of them.
Chabrol is playing around with genres here, exaggerating for effect. He straddles the fence between comedy and tragedy for the entire film, veering this way and that whenever it serves his purpose: to paint an allegory of absurd modern existence through the soul of 4 modern young French females (circa 1960 but just as valid today 40 years later). The surreal modern music at the beginning clues you in, and the magnificent final scene with the empty, tragic eyes of the girl finding her only happiness when a man asks her to dance brings it all together beautifully.
I saw this at the Nuart in LA and I didn't want to leave the theater after watching it twice in a row. As disappointing as Chabrol's films had been to me over the years, this one was a jackhammer of a surprise. The Hitchcock elements are there but they don't dominate and straitjacket everything else. It's funny, it's tragic, it's bizzare, it's a hundred things all that once and balances all the elements successfully. It's a film that has to be seen, its effect is visceral and poetic, very hard to describe in traditional 'movie' terms.
This film defines the "New Wave" aesthetic, which to this day, some forty years later provides a standard for Quentin Tarantino types to strive for. Films like these can only be directed by masters who have the nerve and audacity to bend genres to their whim and speak their ultimate truth through the nature of the medium itself. And no film is a better demonstration of Chabrol's credentials as an artist and master of the medium than "Les Bonnes Femmes."
5 stars for the film itself but 2.5 stars for the tranfer and the annoying
fact that the folks at KINO don't even give you the bare minimum option of
removing the subtitles; all they give you is 14 chapters to click to and
that's it. It's a fine transfer as far as the picture quality goes
throughout, except for the final two chapters which all of a sudden seem to
be undergoing a 'light rain' in the form of some very annoying visible
vertcal thin lines on the picture. Also, the image letterboxing is
undermatted and you can clearly see this on the very first shot when half the
'M' on the last name of the producers HAKIM goes off the screen. I have no
idea where KINO got the 1.85:1 aspect ratio from that they declare on the
box. The film itself is around 1.66:1 aspect ratio (if I remember correctly)
and as their own obvious slightly undermatted letterboxing shows. The sound
quality, like on most cheaply made new-wave films of this period, is a cheesy
mono and barely passable.
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