CHABROL'S subdued descriptions of situations work most strongly in the home. When the wife lies back on her bed she is surrounded by the deep blues of coverlet and dressing-sreen, which Chabrol had avoided showing in an earlier bedroom scene. We hardly need hear her quiet sobs to feel the sorrow into which she has fallen. Chabrol tells us visually, and tells us emotionally more than intelectually. His realistic avoidance of significant dialogue throws the job of character delineation onto acting, set design, and camerawork. Chabrol's mastery of all three is complete.
This does not mean that he is a good craftsman who can use his stylistic means only for character descriptions. The visual style of La Femme Infidele is a consistent unity which he has developed beyond that of his earlier films. One notes the familiar traits of his camerawork: shots that track across a situation rather than into characters; telephoto lenses used at certain points to achieve selective depth of field, so that he can pull focus from a character in the foreground to the background. Beyond their narrative function, these techniques turn the background from a spatially articulated field of objects into a flat surface of colors. The only place where objects are distinct from one another is in the son's bedroom. Elsewhere we see behind the characters a single plane which is frequently out of focus, no one part being separately comprehensible or related specifically to the character in foreground. The background works on the characters emotionally, through its colors. The walls behind them are so brightly lit that one's attention is not drawn to any single object; the character seems to stand before a colored screen. The lengths to which Chabrol carries this lighting method throws all detailing of behavior and motivation onto the actors in the foreground. They rise magnificently to the challenge.
The shooting style's sensitivity to personal events is nevertheless unique. The cutting, instead of condensing the narrative, is designed to detail personal changes. The extraordinary cuts from the hero in motion to the hero standing still, as he cleans up after the murder, reveal the effects of his actions upon him, a thing few directors are able to do. Because of Chabrol's cutting, more delicate than in his previous films, the hero's crime of passion is also a crime of precise action.
Despite their perfection, the cuts like the camera motions are made deeply affecting by the background's quality of malleability. One closeup in bed is extremely disturbing because in the dark the characters' faces become part of the tangibly expressive world of the background. More generally, the characters' detailed actions in the foreground gain incredible emotional resonance from the deeply colored backgrounds, and when a tracking shot turns a corner with a character and sets the background plane at a different angle, the affective quality of the shot is completely changed.
Such stylistic precison and detailing of motivation are more typical of the fifties than of today's film-making. On many scores-his dramatic premises, his recurrent themes and characters, his stylistic means-Chabrol seems to be working with traditional material. But to take stylistic means as far as they will go is to break new artistic ground. La Femme Infidele, which uses an ultimately experimental style with extraordinary emotional power, deserves not to be dismissed as "perfect."
