Anatomy of a murder: "The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle"

The flagship film of the BFI's current Claude Chabrol season, 1969's La Femme Infidèle, lures us in: it opens in sundappled soft focus, before allowing the scrutiny of its characters to become harsher by the frame. Insurance broker Charles (Michel Bouquet) lives in apparent bliss on the outskirts of Paris with his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), the very model of a lady of leisure, and the couple's bright young son. Darker clouds blow in after Charles discovers Hélène has been spending her leisure time in the arms of another man, yet when he goes to confront her lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet), the conversation is initially very cordial (and decidedly French): the men bond over the body they've shared, and the husband - with a characteristic degree of condescension - blithely dismisses the affair as just another of his wife's so-called "adventures". It's cordial, that is, up until the point Charles feels compelled to take a marble bust to the other man's bonce. Now Chabrol begins to bear down and hone in, hunting something more psychologically revealing: Bouquet's extensive clean-up of the murder scene, undertaken in much the same committed silence as the heist in Rififi, serves to (further) feminise a protagonist already stricken by the nagging doubt he doesn't measure up as a man. Just when you think the film might develop outwards and explore the consequences of this rash act of violence, it instead folds inwards; a later interrogation of the chief suspect takes place over the dinner table, in the family's home and garden. (The sting, when it comes, is that those who slay together usually stay together.) Chabrol relies heavily on a discordant Pierre Jansen/Dominique Zardi score to draw out these characters' mounting mental unrest, but he also picks up on several subtly unsettling signifiers: a lost TV signal, a crucial jigsaw piece going AWOL. Audran's reptilian beauty holds up remarkably well under the duress, while Bouquet's thin-lipped, blandly amenable smile serves to conceal all manner of frustrations and insecurities. Adrian Lyne reheated the premise for the modern multiplex with 2002's Unfaithful, casting Richard Gere and Diane Lane as the husband and wife, but this forensic original remains genuinely fascinating in its froideur.

The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle returns to selected cinemas from Friday; the BFI's Chabrol season runs until October 6.