Critics reviews

Les bonnes femmes is probably Chabrol's most pessimistic work, harping relentlessly on vulgarity, boorishness, and cruelty. Focusing on four young woman who work from nine to seven at an electrical appliance store in Paris, the film offers a definitive look at what they want from life and how poorly they fare in their aspirations — culminating in a remarkable, ambiguous final sequence set in a dancehall, leaving everything up to the audience's troubled imagination.

As ever with Chabrol, the grasshoppers fare better than the ants; he delights in exposing the perversions and the power plays that lurk beneath the surface of respectable pursuits and advertised fantasies. The camera (as wielded by the masterly Henri Decaë) alluringly caresses the city’s shimmering surfaces and its grubby corners, and Chabrol’s whiplash technique swings between blind exuberance and stunted introspection, sometimes in a single shot.

Claude Chabrol's early masterpiece, raucous, delicate, deeply unsettling, deeply moving.

["Les Bonnes Femmes"] has been rightly praised as an early example of the French new wave, and Chabrol himself considers this to be one of his best films. Yet 40 years later, the picture is fresh and vibrant in small ways and tedious and stale in ways that matter more.

I regard Chabrol's ["Les Bonnes Femmes"] as not just his masterpiece, but the high point of the new French cinema as a whole.

The girls' stories get gulped down too briskly, and the film is much more glamorized than the clerk subject demands, simply because Chabrol does what every New Waver does in a tight spot: he dodges the trashiness of the girls' lives and begins mimicking the revered Hitchcock.

Chabrol's satire is too savage for comfort, and so we react by calling Chabrol brutal, vulgar, and just plain horrid. I have done so myself in the past, but after a third viewing, Les Bonnes Femmes suddenly reveals itself as a work of extraordinary compassion, almost a fifth Gospel of four women, essentially and unironically good women, crucified in close-up at the climax of their disillusionment.