#35: Les Diaboliques
Good morning, babes!
This past Sunday was the first day I didn’t have something to DO (an appointment, a class, work, homework) since the summer (and the first Sunday since my yearlong writing class concluded 😭) and I can’t tell ya how aimless and weird it was. I could’ve read for fun, cooked, painted, cleaned, or started one of the 42 shows I’ve been meaning to “definitely check out” for the past year—all things I haven’t done a lot of recently.
What I did instead was completed the first step of this recipe for buckeyes, hung out with my mom for an hour, ate Chinese food, wrote this review, and watched Teen Mom 2 (something I’ve done every day for the last 6 weeks). That is to say, I was paralyzed by free time. Which I think also speaks to probably a deep fear I have of the current sort of timelessness we’re all living inside of HA 😅
It will take some time to adjust (story of my life) to this little bit of space, but I will not stop watching Teen Mom 2 until there is no more Teen Mom 2 and you can run and tell that.
#35: Les Diaboliques (released as Diabolique in the US)
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Country: France
Year: 1955
Runtime: 117 minutes
Language: French
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: Domestic abuse (verbal and physical), murder
Y’AAAAAALLLLLL. I am so happy to announce that this is my favorite movie in the collection so far (after, of course, The Silence of the Lambs).
And it is the first time I am ever going to tell you that if you have any interest in seeing this film spoiler-free, please do not read this review. I will leave a spoiler alert right before the end as well. In fact, the director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, was so concerned with the plot being spoiled that he put a title card at the end of the film begging the audience not to tell their friends what they saw. We’re not s-ing around here!
The movie is available for free on YouTube with an annoying frame (movie starts at 1:50) and on Amazon Prime.
But, if you know you won’t actually watch it and just wanna hear a great story, please come with me!
***
We begin in Paris at the Delassalle Boarding School, a boarding school for boys, and meet our two main characters: Christina Delassalle (Véra Clouzot) and Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret).
Christina is the headmistress of the school and the wife of the headmaster, Michel (Paul Meurisse). She is originally from Venezuela and is apparently very rich, but has dedicated her life to the boarding school because she wanted to help kids. She’s innocent and childlike and also has a serious heart condition. Nicole is the headmaster’s mistress. She is cool, casual, confident, and kind of a hard-ass.
But! The two women are friends, having bonded over their unfortunate shared fate of being physically, verbally, and emotionally abused by Michel. They both hate him deeply. On this day, Nicole is wearing sunglasses to hide the black eye he gave her.
Later that day, they sit by the school’s pool and vaguely discuss their plan to do something to Michel. Christina, a devout Catholic, is clearly more trepidatious, asking Nicole if she believes in hell. Nicole says, “Not since I was seven.” Christina responds, looking into the distance, “I do.”
That night in the dining hall, Michel, Christina, Nicole, and two of the male teachers, M. Drain (Pierre Larquey) and M. Raymond (Michel Serrault) eat at a table together. This dude Michel is AWFUL. He forces Christina to eat even though she’s not hungry and the food is gross. She can’t even swallow it and he berates her.
“Some things are hard to swallow. I’m not talking about the fish,” Nicole chimes in, sticking up for Christina. Ope!
Okay, also, who does this actor who plays M. Raymond look like??
Josh and I both agreed he looks like a person who was digitally inserted into this film from the future. BUT I also think he looks very familiar. Does he look familiar to you or is it just like a guy I did a biology group project with in college or something?
After dinner, Christina goes off on Michel because she’s the one paying for everything with her own money. She says she wishes she could die and this DUDE says deadpan, “Die darling. Die and do it quickly. The school won’t suffer and I’ll feel much better.” Hey. AH-FUCK AH-YOUUU, PAL. God!
Nicole leaves to pack for her weekend trip to her hometown of Niort where she is a landlord and has an apartment. But, she doesn’t leave alone because Christina sneaks out in the middle of the night to join her. With them they take a large wicker trunk.
The next morning, the school’s doorman accidentally reveals to Michel that the women left together. Of course, Michel lies and says he already knew.
As the women are unpacking at Nicole’s apartment, Michel calls. Christina answers and threatens him with divorce and keeping the school. He says he’ll be at Nicole’s apartment the next evening.
This is when we learn their master plan: lure Michel to Nicole’s apartment where they will sedate him with a drug hidden in whiskey, drown him in the tub after he’s asleep, transport his body in the wicker trunk back to the school, and dump him in the pool. It will be suspected that he drowned and the women will have an alibi because they will have been in Niort.
I. Simply. Love. Revenge. Plots. Why is that? I think I love when people experience consequences? IDK it’s too much to unpack here, so JUST LET ME LOVE IT.
As they wait for Michel to arrive, Christina gets major cold feet. Nicole uses reverse psychology to snap her out of it, Christina gets super excited, and then Nicole tells her she just needs to be chill. It’s a REAL rollercoaster of emotions over here.
Nicole goes to listen to the radio with her neighbors while Christina waits with a baguette for Michel.
Michel arrives and they talk, mostly about divorce, and he tries to seduce her, all while calling her CriCri, which is extremely cute but NOT WHEN HE SAYS IT.
He goes to take a sip of the spiked whiskey and she knocks it out of his hand. It spills all over his fancy suit and he slaps her. And then, after helping him clean it, she pours his glass to the rim with the drug-laced whiskey. To which Josh said, “YEEEEESSSS.”
He drinks a couple of glasses and starts to get very sleepy. As he falls asleep, Christina empties the bottle in the sink and Nicole appears in the bathroom to run the bath they will drown him in.
This movie is ~*~tense~*~. It always feels like something is going to go wrong but you don’t know what and you don’t know when, but it’s sumpthin.
They carry Michel into the bath with all of his clothes on.
He briefly opens his eyes very wide before Nicole pushes his head under the water. Christina watches on in horror. Nicole tells her to fetch the big bronze figure on the mantle to weigh him down in the tub.
As Nicole covers the tub with the nylon tablecloth, Christina, who has a weak heart, coughs and falls on the bed in exhaustion. Nicole tells her it’s over and closes the bathroom door.
The next day, Michel is still in the tub, but his eyes are rolled back in his head.
Nicole’s neighbor helps them carry the wicker trunk with Michel’s body to their car. They arrive back at the school and although she is very weak, Christina helps Nicole dump the body into the pool. PHEW.
However, the next morning, Christina is concerned because his body isn’t visible from their window; he should be floating by now. Nicole says it’s just because the pool is super dirty and their angle is bad. In the rest of the school, the hubbub is that the principal is missing. Oooohhhh! Honestly, could you imagine the utter scandal of that? Especially if you hated your principal? Nothing cool ever happened at my school.
Nicole is very chill about the whole thing while Christina is very much falling apart. They agree in two days they’ll have the pool drained so his body will be discovered and they can move on. Hoping to speed up the process, Nicole tosses her keys into the pool and asks one of the students to dive in after it, hoping he will discover the body. Instead, he emerges with Michel’s lighter and not the keys, so they have to drain the pool.
And when they do...there’s no body. Christina collapses. The doctor says it’s obviously her heart and she needs to chill tf out.
So now Nicole is freaked out because hi they dumped a dead body into a pool and now it’s gone. She can totally murder someone but that murdered person disappearing is crossing a line. Then, the suit he was wearing when he died appears from the dry cleaner, delivered by a messenger boy and she really loses it.
Nicole and Christina go to the dry cleaner to see if they can tell them who dropped the suit off to be cleaned. The employees don’t really remember, but he did leave a key to a hotel room in his pocket. Christina goes to the room alone and all she finds in his room is a janitor. He tells her the man who stays there is never there during the day. “Don’t look for him here,” he says, “His life is somewhere else.” So cryptic. So wise.
Later, back at the school, the two women fight about who is truly responsible for Michel’s death. Christina gave him the sedative, but Nicole pushed him under the water, but Christina put the bronze sculpture on top of him, but Nicole bought the nylon tablecloth they rolled him up in, and on and on. They threaten to call the police on each other because in the eyes of the law, they both would have a motive: jealousy. Christina picks up the phone to call and Nicole hangs it up.
Which, by the way, isn’t it wild how vulnerable phone calls where back then? Someone could just walk by and put their little finger on the receiver and it’s OVER. Now you have to basically commit simple assault to hang up on someone else’s cell phone call.
The next day, Nicole reads in the paper that a body was found in the Seine and, thinking it could be Michel, encourages Christina to go to the morgue. Unfortunately, the body isn’t Michel so she leaves with no answers. What she DOES leave with, however, is a little old man with a cigar and a moustache who is sneakily following her. Turns out he’s a retired police commissioner named Alfred Fichet (Charles-Marie Vanel) who happened to be at the morgue and is interested in her missing husband. He says he’ll help her find him. 🚩🚩🚩🚩
They take a taxi back to the school together where Alfred walks around and questions the doorman. This is where we find out that the dead man is supposed to be in his early 30s. I—please look at this man:
🙄🙄🙄 my turn to roll my eyes in the back of my head.
Detective Alfred goes through Michel’s mail and wardrobe looking for clues and questions the women. They can’t answer his question about what he was wearing when he disappeared because their alibi is they were out of town. He asks Christina which one of his suits was missing, then. She describes the gray suit he was wearing when they killed him and Alfred discovers it when he closes the door. Sooooo he’s getting suspicious.
One of the students at the school further ruffles feathers when he says Michel recently punished him for breaking a window with a slingshot. He says Michel took the slingshot. The student is further punished for lying because obviously the principal is missing.
Christina finds the slingshot in her room. This is when I started to feel afraid.
So, Christina is obviously losing IT. She is weak and paranoid. The doctors tell her she needs to stay in bed.
The next day is picture day. And of course, because this is billed as a horror movie, when they develop the picture, Michel’s terrible face is in the window behind the group.
This is the absolute last straw for Nicole who says she has to get the fuck outta there. She asks Christina to go with her, but she’s too weak to go so Nicole leaves on her own.
So this police detective is a total freak. He just sits and smokes in Christina’s room while she sleeps. She wakes up from a nightmare and he tells her that he found Michel and he’ll be back at the school very shortly. Christina, sweet Christina, says that is impossible because she killed him five days ago. She tells him everything: the tub in Niort, the wicker chest, the pool, how Nicole helped her.
But shockingly, Alfred doesn’t look phased. He simply tells her maybe she shouldn’t trust Nicole because she’s his mistress. He says, “Tomorrow you’ll wake up acquitted,” and leaves.
THIS IS A SPOILER ALERT. THIS MOVIE IS GOING TO BE SPOILED IN:
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That night, Christina hears noises in the house. She creeps around in her nightgown in the silent dark as an unknown man follows her. THIS IS VERY SCARY. She hears someone typing in the office and enters to see Michel’s gloves on the typewriter. On the paper is just “Michel Delassalle” typed over and over again.
THIS IS VERY SCARY. The lights go out, she screams, and runs back to her room.
She reaches her bathroom and in the tub she sees Michel’s body submerged under the water with his eyes rolled back in his head.
Christina has a heart attack and dies.
And UGHHHHH this motherfucker Michel gets up OUT OF the tub, takes the enormous contacts out that made his eyes look rolled back, and walks to the bedroom door where Nicole emerges. They embrace and kiss and Michel says Christina was tough but now it’s over. He says, “Now, we’re rich. Just by selling the school, we’ll get a lot…”
And then I took back everything bad I ever said about that weird detective because he shows up in the doorway and says, “Between 15 and 20 years. Depending on the judge.” OOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
These two skanks (lmao) concocted this WHOLE thing to scare Christina to death so they could get her $$$!!! The trip to Niort, the tub, the wicker trunk, the pool! He was alive the whole time with Nicole pulling all of the strings. Also I would just like to say I cannot believe the major thing keeping me from figuring out this twist sooner was that I didn’t know they could make contacts like that in the 50s. I would entertain the idea that maybe he was alive and then I just kept thinking but those eyes…
Cut to later that day when news has traveled the halls that Christina has died. The same little boy who said he saw Michel when he was missing (we now know he really did see him) says he saw Christina and she gave him his slingshot back. “She’s not dead. She came back. I saw her. I know that I saw her.”
!!!!
THE END.
Y’all I just--I love a twist. I LOVE A TWIST. Don’t you?!
Of course, I can’t ignore the fact that this is another goddamn Criterion film where a woman is abused by a man. Ten minutes in, I felt that familiar heat of annoyance in my belly. Another one? And then I honestly felt heartened seeing the women plan his murder together lol And then I felt conflicted because why do we romanticize women being “strong” and surviving horrible men instead of focusing on why we produce so many horrible men and trying to stop doing that instead of fetishizing strength? And welcome to the experience of being even just a *scosche* aware 🙃 can’t have anything nice. And then in the last ten minutes, as I squeezed Josh’s forearm, I was so mad that Nicole had betrayed Christina so intensely.
The first hour and forty minutes is a fun ride to see two women band together to get revenge instead of the common trope of bitter wife vs. “homewrecker.”
But I do really think Christina ultimately got the last word. Unfortunately, she lost her life, but I believe her spirit visited the little boy and returned his slingshot because she was finally free from the trappings of this murder plot. She was free from the torment of it and could do what she always wanted to do before Fuckboi and Traitor came into the picture: take care of the boys at the school. So while Nicole and Michel are being punished for their crimes, Christina is free from them both.
I still think Criterion has a bit of a problem with the stories it has prioritized so far, but I just love a well-executed twist!!! SUE ME.
Next up is one more Clouzot movie! This one is called The Wages of Fear and is another thriller. I am ready to be THRILLED. See you there, bbs.
XOXO,