Critics reviews

His great play with tone and point-of-view in Story of Women is perfectly matched by the infinitely versatile Huppert... capable at once of immersion and irony, emotional warmth and watchful intelligence, high comedy and harrowing tragedy, fearless physicality and spiritual torment. Her mercurial persona matched to Chabrol’s proliferating ironies means that this Story of Women never sits still.

Story Of Women contains a potent gender critique, given that Huppert's venality makes her as suspect as the paternal power structure that shuts her down, and the film subtly examines how people excuse amorality by claiming a higher purpose.

"Story of Women" is a morality play without a conclusion. We have to make up our own minds. Most movies on themes like this instruct us about how to think, by portraying its characters as good or bad, and casting them to seem attractive or otherwise. Chabrol does not make it so easy.

"Story of Women" is not only about the extraordinary, it is extraordinary; an unflinching treatment of a volatile issue, it refuses to simplify or close its eyes.

Despite its ambitious title, "Story of Women" does not expand to its full metaphorical height. It remains one woman's story, intelligent and efficient and moving. Not a spectacular work of imagination, but in its own stern fashion, a penetrating one.

Claude Chabrol’s beguiling yet mordant “Story of Women”... takes us into the demoralized heart of Occupied France... It represents the culmination of Chabrol’s three-decade obsession with bourgeois hypocrisy, and he has never had such rich, complex material with which to express it.

As Marie Latour in Claude Chabrol's icily haunting, beautifully delineated ''Story of Women,'' ... Ms. Huppert gives a performance that won her a well-deserved best-actress award at the Venice Film Festival last year, and she has one of her best roles. And Mr. Chabrol, whose career has had its distinct ups and downs and whose work has barely been shown here in recent years, makes a triumphant return to the kind of emblematic crime story that has long attracted him, in films as different as ''Violette'' (1978) and ''Le Boucher'' (1971).

Chabrol, in peak form, wisely avoids a sensational presentation. He gives the facts a stirring intimacy... Huppert allows us to understand this woman without ever pushing us to like her.