JONATHAN BAUMBACH
283
eighteen-year-old French girl's poisoning of her parents in 1933, the
film makes no attempt to clarify motives or to penetrate the opacity of
Violette Noziere's behavior. As with
The Shout,
though not so sche–
matically, time sequences are reversed or confused, intensifying the
puzzle-like quality of the film. Both aspects of Violette's double life–
bourgeois teenager, conniving woman of the streets-contain their
own contradictions, deviousness cloaked in innocence, integrity sec–
reted in decadence. Violette (Isabelle Huppert) pursues an idea of
freedom, fleeing the entrapment of petit bourgeois life, ultimately
exchanging one form of imprisonment for another. Her parents'
awkward sexual conjunctions in the room next door-the two room
apartment they share suffocatingl_y small-involve Violette as if she
were in bed with them. Consequently, when Violette, on trial for
murdering her father, accuses him of incestuous attack, one perceives
the subjective truth within the lie. The triumph of
Violette-the
best
work Chabrol has done since
Wedding in Blood-is
as much in the
strategy of its unfolding as in the complex characterization of its
heroine. Chabrol shows us Violette at her worst, at her most devious
and vicious, and yet manages remarkably to enlist sympathy for her.
When Violette returns home to discover her parents dead from the
poison she has given them (in the guise of medicine), she eats the cold
meat from their uneaten dinner with a cannibal's compulsion, ingest–
ing her parents through the sacrament of the meat, incorporating them
into herself. Her rebellion is for them as well, an acting out of the
unexpressed rages of stultifying respectability. As in
Le Boucher,
the
film of Chabrol's with which
Violette
has most in common, the
monster turns out to be at once pathetic and perversely heroic, a
seismographic figure.
It
is a recurrent concern in the cinema of
Chabrol to show us the pinpoint of light in the darkest extremes of
human behavior.
Violette,
though based on documentary material, is a
transcendent work of the imagination.
