The Good Girls

Just to prove that portraying males as all-negative is nothing new, see Les Bonnes Femmes: the employer with wandering hands, the drippy suitor, his bossy Dad, the snobbish fiancé, the lurking psycho, the bad-jokes bully-boy and his fatty hanger-on, the absent lad on national service. Every one of them is no good. And yet the four shop-assistants are no better, they exist only for the men. Whatever the fellows throw at them, they're up for it. It's a chilling worldview, with a cynical twist at the end, (plus a tacked-on coda that seems to be from another movie). Along the way, there's some really hammy acting from the girls' employer that clashes badly with the realistic mood, and some longueurs as the girls get bored at work and we get bored right along with them. The young Bernadette Lafont is a joy, but she fades out in Reel Three when the lovely Clotilde Joano comes to the fore. Whatever happened to Clotilde? Her subsequent career was undistinguished, and she died at age 42. This is mostly a watchable slice of Paris life from the late 50s, although the Algerians who caused so much mayhem only a few years later are nowhere to be seen.

The 'overacting of the boss' mentioned in the previous comment is totally intentional! Chabrol is playing around with genres here, exaggerating for effect. He straddles the fence between comedy and tragedy for the entire film, veering this way and that whenever it serves his purpose: to paint an allegory of absurd modern existence through the soul of modern young females. The surreal modern music at the beginning clues you in, and the awesome final scene with the empty, tragic eyes of the girl finding her only happiness when a man asks her to dance brings it all together beautifully. Man! what a great film! I didn't want to leave the theater after watching it twice in a row, but I was too tired. As disappointing as Chabrol's films have been to me over the years, this one was a jackhammer of a surprise. The Hitchcock elements are there but they don't dominate and straitjacket everything else. On a level with "Breathless," "Shoot the Piano Player," yet completely unlike either of them, this film defines the "New Wave" aesthetic, which to this day, some forty years later provides a standard for Tarantino types to strive for. Films like these can only be directed by masters who have the nerve and audacity to bend genres to their whim and speak their ultimate truth through the nature of the medium itself.

The film shows a weekend in the lives of four Parisian shop girls, from their Friday night out in the nightclubs of Paris through to a Sunday outing into the countryside. All four dream of escaping their humdrum existence: Ginette (Stephane Audran) is trying to start an alternative career as a music hall singer, Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is engaged to a shop owner, Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is wined and dined by two married businessmen, and Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) falls in love with a biker who is stalking her. The monotony of the girls' lives is shown as they spend Saturday in the shop just waiting for the moment when they can go home. At the same time Chabrol shows a fascinating portrait of the city at work and at play. The storyline holds the viewer's interest, the acting is excellent (especially Lafont, and despite some terrible overacting from the girl's boss), and the director hints at some of the gruesome shocks of his later films.

A friend of mine - a film scholar - once said that this film shouldn't work but it does. He was absolutely right. I cannot think of one good reason why this film should be as good as it is. The tone is observational, like many films of the "New Wave," but it lacks the frenetic energy of Godard, or the jaded lyricism of Truffaut. The tone of the film changes drastically at several points, and in any other film this would become a big turn off. But a strand of sincere honesty about the characters and their emotions holds the film together, stronger than any formality.

Let the film take you where it wants you to go, and the experience is wonderful.

In Paris, Jane (Bernadette Lafont) and her colleague and roommate Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) are walking home when the friends Marcel (Jean-Louis Maury) and Albert (Albert Dinan) hit on them and invited them to go to a restaurant. Later, Jacqueline goes home while Jane goes to Albert's apartment and has a threesome. On the next morning, they go to the appliance store Maison Belin where they work with Ginette (Stéphane Audran), Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) and the spinster Mme Louise (Ave Ninchi), who is the cashier. The owner Monsieur Belin (Pierre Bertin) is an abusive boss, and they hate their work. Jane has a boyfriend but is a promiscuous party girl. Ginette has a secret life at night, singing in a music hall. Rita has a bourgeois fiancé, Henri (Sacha Briquet), who does not respect her and believes she is empty. Jacqueline is naive and believes in love, and when a biker follows her everywhere with his motorcycle, she believes he is her shy prince charming. When Jacqueline meets him at a public swimming pool, they introduce themselves to each other and the biker Ernest Lapierre (Mario David) dates her. They go to a remote restaurant in the countryside, and he asks her why she dated him without knowing him. But soon Jacqueline learns who he is.

"Les bonnes femmes" (1960), a.k.a. "The Good Time Girls", is the fourth film by Claude Chabrol disclosing the dull life of four young working-class women in the job at an appliance store. Their moments of joy are after hours, each one with a lifestyle. Jane is a promiscuous woman; Rita does not have self-respect; Ginette likes to sing in a music hall; and Jacqueline, who seems to be the youngest, is a dreamer. In common, they are treated like objects. It is funny to see how silly some men like Marcel and Albert were in those years in Paris. The conclusion is a great surprise from Chabrol. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Mulheres Fáceis" ("Easy Women")