Les Diaboliques: The Stranger Details

O 'ello there.

I've greatly enjoyed Henri-Georges Clouzot's work before. Le Courbeau was one of the first pre-New Wave French films to really wow me, and Wages of Fear easily ranks in my top 5 all-time thrillers. So it was a no-brainer that eventually I'd check out ,Les Diaboliques, his most renowned film (according to IMDB, which, I know, isn't saying much). Supposedly, it was an influence on Hitchcock before he made a little film called Psycho. I can definitely see the influence it had in its suspense-building techniques. I'm a bit underwhelmed by the movie overall, but there's a lot of excellence going on throughout and a lot of peculiarities I'd picked out were resolved in the closing minutes. 

Anyway, I think it's only fair that I warn that there will be spoilers here. Normally, I don't care, but this film does end with a warning not to spoil the movie for my friends. Plus, it was nice of the movie to ask that specifically. And I do consider anyone reading this to be a friend.

Les Diaboliques concerns two women, the wife and mistress of a boarding school principal named Michel, and their plot to murder him. The wife owns the school, technically, but the principal's force of will seems to overpower that detail. He's a cruel man, not just to them, but also the schoolchildren and his other employees. He seems to have a short fuse, and the first time we see Nicole (his mistress, played by Simone Signoret), she's got bulky sunglasses on to hide bruises. The guy's painted as a bastard quick and hard, activating my Sword of Vengeance: Sense of Justice rule, as it should. The murder's only the setup, so it makes sense to make the audience understand why these women want this guy dead fast. Michel's murder is wrapped up in the first third of the movie; a less inspired film could've done that as the whole movie.

From the get-go, though, something's off: Nicole is awfully dead-set on killing Michel. Christina, his wife (Vera Clouzot), is nervous about it and backs out a couple of times when it's too late. This is one of the things the movie gets right, since my inclination to think the two women would turn on each other. They don't, which is an interesting surprise. In some ways, that's more surprising than the idea of a wife and mistress working together, but I digress. I was actually more worried about Nicole more than anything for the first third of the movie; she would not take "no" for an answer for the murder. At one point, she says that she's seen a corpse before in her life. Does that imply she's done this before? I was glad at the end that, winds up, she was conspiring with Michel all along to kill Christina via heart attack (she's got a heart condition. It's a movie. She's gonna have a heart attack.) to take ownership of the school. Winds up she wasn't a sociopath. Just your run of the mill... uh... Conspirator-Thief?

Also somewhat run of the mill nowadays: the detective character, a cold investigator, just interested in the facts, ma'am kind of fella. In this instance, he's a fresh presence on screen, mainly because of the added pressure he gives Christina. Odd that he never seems like his investigating Nicole. He asks questions of everybody at the school, and, at one point, shows up in Christina's room in the middle of her sleep. Again, it ratchets up the pressure. He's an odd character that adds to a movie that's already unsettling. I will say this, though: It does seem fishy when Christina admits to murder and he doesn't arrest her or have much of a reaction. Later, you find it's because he'd figured out Michel and Nicole's plot.

But then again, the guy does let them murder Christina. Their plan does come to fruition, and he only comes out of the shadows to arrest them after the deed is done. The ending may imply that she and he came up with their own solution - but how would they do that?

That ending, in and of itself, makes be absolutely glad we got this movie in 1955 rather than 2005. A young boy who'd previously been the only student to see Michel after his "death" mysteriously gets his confiscated slingshot back from Christina after she was already dead (I know! OH SHIT!). It's a final turn of the screw that maybe goes too far, since it doesn't make much sense. Yet, it's the kind of thing that's become standard for horror films. If this movie had come out in 2005, we'd be on our third or fourth direct-to-DVD sequel by now, where the ghost of Christina (or otherwise her ghastly friends) would be haunting the new owners and boarders of the school, slow dread of the original replaced by hilarious, cheap gore. I do appreciate that Clouzot thought it would be necessary to add one more mystery to the movie, though. It's some out of nowhere business to throw off a movie whose real twist is one of those "that makes so much sense, why didn't I think of it?" deals.

Another logical choice the film makes is to explain why the boarding school was so crumbling and shabby: because Michel's a cheap bastard who doesn't even want to run the school (again, Sword of Vengeance rule). That gives the movie the freedom to have the building be functional without ever seeming pleasant. In the black and white photography, it allows the pool to be so dirty it looks like ink. Along those same lines, the setting helps make the climax - where Christina seems to be chasing Michel's ghost - so much more enveloping. The sight of Michel rising from the tub after this chase is easily one of the most memorable images in film. It and the chase preceding it are easily the most virtuoso sequence in the movie; it's the one thing that moves Les Diaboliques from mysterty/thriller to horror movie. Its technique won me over, though, making me truly love the film in that moment.

Much of the middle part of the movie, where Christina and Nicole investigate the strange occurrences around Michel's disappearance, was tense and well-done, but I never bought it. I did get a real shock when I found out Nicole was planning this whole thing with Michel, but I had guessed that Michel was still alive. In some ways that makes me a jaded modern viewer, but I recently watched Psycho and found it effective, still, even knowing every step of the plot. Maybe my opinion of Les Diaboliques will improve with repeated viewings. There is much to love here, though, most of all, the way the movie makes all the little details matter.