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...more conducive to progressive depiction of women. In addition to there being a sizeable female audience for the melodrama and the women's film, the studios provided their contract actresses with vehicles that capitalized on star image, presence and persona. Although the use of stereotypes was commonplace, these actresses were more frequently than not given the opportunity to play characters that were multidimensional, emobodied contradtions, and were unpredictable in their responses to experiences in both their personal and/or professional lives.
In the present day, most young actresses don't want to play a character that isn't simultaneously gender conscious and non-threatening, appealing to both the male and female viewer. Ironically, for the most part, the contemporary actress has less range in image and opportunity of expression than did her predecessors.
Chabrol isn't a director who has been identified with having a strong interest in women's identities within patriarchal-capitalist-bourgeois society. Yet from Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) onwards, he has often provided his actresses with roles that, in addition to giving them the opportunity to demonstrate and/or develop their performance skills, deal with women under pressure because of their placement in the social world. While it is the case that Chabrol's films tend to express empathy with (and, at times, sympathy for) both his female and male characters, the director's most notable and rewarding collaborations with actors have been with Stephane Audran and Isabelle Huppert. Audran, who was married to Chabrol during the greater part of their working relationship, wasn't from the beginning of the collaboration treated as his muse (although, interestingly, their first film together was Les Bonnes Femmes) or a presence he was moulding into an iconic image. She invariably played women, including bourgeois wife/mother figures, who are intelligent, aware and capable of making difficult decisions when pressured to do so. More recently, Isabelle Huppert, an almost defiantly independent and gender conscious actor who has appeared to date in six Chabrol films, has found him to be her most sensitvie director. Arguably, her work with Chabrol is at present the high point of her career. More recently, Isabelle Huppert, an almost defiantly independent and gender conscious actor who has appeared to date in six Chabrol films, has found him to be her most sensitvie director.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A Girl Cut in Two
A Girl Cut in Two, which Chabrol co-scripted with Cecile Maistre, is based on a notorious real-life incident that occurred in New York City in 1906. Stanford White, a famous architect, was killed by a mentally unstable millionaire, Harry K. Thaw; the latter, soon after marrying a young model, Evelyn Nesbit, shot White on the grounds that he, Nesbit's former lover, had defiled her. Their story was dramatized in Richard Fleischer's The Girl...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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