Les Diaboliques (film)
Les Diaboliques is a 1955 French psychological horror thriller film co-written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, and Charles Vanel. The story blends elements of thriller and horror, with the plot focusing on a woman and her husband's mistress who conspire to murder the man. It is based on the 1952 novel Celle qui n'était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Clouzot, after finishing The Wages of Fear, optioned the screenplay rights to the novel, preventing Alfred Hitchcock from making the film. The film helped inspire Hitchcock's Psycho. Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho, stated in an interview that his all-time favorite horror film was Les Diaboliques.
Released in France in January 1955, Les Diaboliques was the seventh highest-grossing film of the year, with a total of 3,674,380 admissions. It received largely favorable reviews from French critics, and won two Louis Delluc Prizes. While reception in the United Kingdom was mixed, the film was favorably received by critics in the United States, where it won the title of Best Foreign Film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. By late 1956, it had become the highest-grossing French film released in the United States at that time.
Les Diaboliques went on to garner a reputation as a classic film with significant influence on the horror genre, particularly due to its twist ending.
Plot
A second-rate boys' boarding school in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, in the Paris metropolitan area, is run by the tyrannical and cruel Michel Delassalle. The school is owned, however, by Delassalle's wife Christina, a wealthy, devout Catholic émigrée from Venezuela who works there as a Spanish teacher. The frail Christina suffers from a chronic heart condition. Despite Christina's unstable health, Michel subjects her to significant emotional abuse, humiliating and mocking her, as well as mistreating the students. He also carries on an extramarital relationship with Nicole Horner, another teacher at the school, whom he physically abuses. Rather than antagonism, Christina and Nicole have a somewhat close relationship, primarily based on their apparent mutual hatred of Michel.Unable to stand his mistreatment any longer, Nicole devises a plan to murder Michel. Though hesitant at first, Christina ultimately consents to help Nicole. Using a threatened divorce to lure Michel to Nicole's apartment building in Niort, a town several hundred kilometers away, Christina sedates him with laced wine before the two women drown him in a bathtub. Concealing his body in a wicker trunk, the women drive back to the school, where they dump his corpse in the school's unused swimming pool. When his corpse floats to the top, they think it will appear to have been an accident. Almost everything goes according to their plans until the body fails to surface. Michel's corpse is nowhere to be found when the pool is drained. Afterwards, the suit that Michel had been wearing when they drowned him is returned from the dry cleaners. When the proprietor of the dry cleaners also returns a key to a room in a nearby hotel that was with the clothes, Christina goes to the room. There, the cleaning man tells her that Michel had kept the room for a while but was rarely if ever seen and stored nothing there.
Nicole sees in the newspaper that the police have found the corpse in the Seine. However, when Christina goes to the morgue, she finds it is not actually Michel's body. There, she meets Alfred Fichet, a retired senior policeman now working as a private detective. He becomes involved in the case, much to Nicole's chagrin.
Christina, Nicole and other teachers find a student who claims that Michel has ordered him to rake leaves as punishment for breaking a window. Accusing him of lying, Christina confiscates his slingshot. Under the stress, Christina's heart condition worsens, and her doctors fear she may die soon unless she maintains strict bed rest. When the school photograph is taken, the result seems to show Michel's spectral figure in the window behind the students. Unnerved, Nicole leaves the school; she asks Christina to accompany her, but she is too ill and afraid.
Christina, overcome by fear, confesses everything to Alfred. He does not believe her, but he investigates the pool. That night, Christina hears noises and wanders around the school. When she realizes that someone is following her, she runs back to her room. There, she finds Michel's corpse submerged in the bathtub, which is filled with water. Michel rises from the tub, and Christina suffers a fatal heart attack. It is revealed that Michel and Nicole have set up Christina from the beginning, with Michel acting as a vengeful ghost to scare Christina to death. However, Alfred hears their celebration and exposes their plot, telling them they will be sentenced to 15 to 20 years in prison, depending on the judge.
The school is closed in the wake of the scandal. As the children and teachers leave, the same boy who had earlier broken a window breaks another. When asked how he recovered his slingshot, the boy says that Christina gave it to him.
Cast
Themes
Film historian Susan Hayward regards Les Diaboliques as "something of an unsettled text" which crosses genres, combining elements of psychological thrillers and film noir, ultimately classifying it as "a transgressive and transcendent film noir. There is fragmentation and excess, both of which are played out through the narrative and the body, and both of which function to challenge the constructed order of things, social restrictions, established laws and hierarchies as they relate to notions of censorship and sexuality."While the film's source novel explicitly reveals a lesbian relationship between Mireille and Lucienne, the equivalents of Christina and Nicole, the film eliminates this element; however, Hayward suggests that this implication is still present, though allowing other interpretations: "It can equally be seen for what it is, namely a lesbian relationship. It can also be seen as a mother-daughter relationship. Nicole takes care of Christina; she speaks to her at times as a mother would to a daughter. Patiently and meticulously she explains why the murder must be carried out and why it must be carried out in a particular way. She is protective of her sexual immaturity. She soothes her when Michel is cruel to her. Already, we are looking at three types of ambiguity here, unfixing the social order of things. Nothing remains in place."
Academic Daniel Tilsley interprets Les Diaboliques as a film whose horror emerges "because of the perceptual dissonance between the subjective and the objective world, with the psychologically tormented protagonist Christina unable to accurately make sense of the world around her... focuses on the gradual distortion of Christina's perception of the world around her as she is plunged deeper and deeper into fear."
Production
Writing
Director Henri-Georges Clouzot's wife, Véra, initially drew his attention to the Boileau-Narcejac novel on which the film is based. Clouzot read it through the night and optioned the rights the following morning. He and his brother Jean spent 18 months adapting the novel. In the book, the action takes place between Enghien-les-Bains and Nantes but Clouzot transposed it to Saint-Cloud and Niort, his own birthplace. He was not particularly interested in the insurance scam that was the criminal motive in the book. He switched the gender of the murderers and invented the private-school setting.Film historian Susan Hayward suggests that the gender switch made by Clouzot was caused not so much by censorship considerations, but by his desire to create a sizeable role for his wife. The book has only one principal female character, Lucienne, since the supposed victim, Mireille disappears early on. Véra, with her distinctly feminine demeanor, was ill-suited for the role of Lucienne. So in Clouzot's script, Mireille is the character who has a weak heart, and is the object of manipulation of her husband Michel and his mistress Nicole. Clouzot also followed the convention that the culprits should be exposed by the detective in the end.
Casting
Véra was the first to be cast in the film in the role of Christina. Director Clouzot cast Simone Signoret opposite her in the role of Nicole; he previously directed Signoret's husband Yves Montand in The Wages of Fear, and the two couples became friends. Clouzot was also aware of his wife's Vera's limitations as an actress, and sought someone to lend her support in such a demanding role.Signoret signed an eight-week contract but the shooting actually took 16 weeks. She ended up being paid for only eight weeks of work despite staying until the end of the filming because she neglected to read the small print. Signoret's co-star Paul Meurisse also recalls in his memoirs that the actress was further bemused by Clouzot's constant attempts to find clever ways of lighting Vera's face while muting the light on Signoret so she would not upstage his wife.
Clouzot had known Meurisse since 1939, when the latter was attempting to pursue a singing career. Clouzot then was trying to sell his song lyrics to Edith Piaf, Meurisse's lover at the time. By the late 1940s, Meurisse had become an established stage and screen actor, known for the roles of "icy and sophisticated villains," and he seemed a natural choice for the role of Michel.
The film featured two Clouzot regulars: Pierre Larquey as M. Drain and Noël Roquevert as M. Herboux. Michel Serrault made his screen debut as M. Raymond, one of the schoolteachers. Charles Vanel—who previously co-starred in Clouzot's The Wages of Fear—was cast as the seemingly inept Inspector Fichet.
Clouzot also auditioned 300 children and selected 35. Among them were Jean-Philippe Smet, Patrick Dewaere's brother Yves-Marie Maurin, and Georges Poujouly, who previously received acclaim in René Clément's Forbidden Games.