After his shorts,Georges Franju made three classics: "La Tête Contre Les Murs" "Les Yeux Sans Visage" and this one.
"Therèse Desqueyroux",based on a celebrated novel by François Mauriac (the writer wrote the screenplay of the film)strongly recalls Franju's first masterpiece "La Tete Contre Les Murs" .Both Thérèse and François rebel against a hypocrite society whose sole concern is to keep up appearances .François is confined to a mental hospital;Thérèse is forced to live in an isolated house ,in the middle of a forest the trees of which are like bars of a cage.Franju's use of the nature,of the trees ,of the leaves ,of the Landais landscape is really breath-taking.
Nobody can understand Thérèse but her cousin's boyfriend (Samy Frey):the long conversation they have in the forest is the only moment in the whole movie when Thérèse COMMUNICATES with another human being.Her cousin,Anne (Edith Scob,Franju's favorite actress) is too superficial ,too conformist (even in her love affair) and finally too preoccupied with her own interests to be someone the heroine could rely on.After the young intellectual has left,Thérèse is definitively alone.
Emmanuelle Riva is one of the ten (maybe five) greatest French actresses of all time.As Roger Boussinot wrote: "Unfortunately for her and her career,she 's that kind of artist who cannot survive mediocre cinematographic ambitions".Her best parts were,besides "Therese Desqueyroux" , "Hiroshima Mon Amour' ,"Kapo" and "Leon Morin Prêtre"and "Thomas l'Imposteur" ,another Franju movie ,actually his last important work .She even transcended Cayatte 's conventional art in "Les Risques Du Métier" .
Philippe Noiret ,playing opposite her,portrays her husband with talent: a man so mean,so spineless ,so sexless he is almost frightening.A bourgeois eunuch.
