cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Chabrol turns adultery and murder into a coolly observed bourgeois trap, with the same unhurried pacing, provincial respectability, and mordant sense that ordinary people rationalise the unthinkable.
02
Why this pick
Its sunlit domestic luxury conceals a poisonous lovers’ scheme; the pleasure lies in Chabrol’s detached, precise observation of desire, greed, and plans becoming less controllable.
03
Why this pick
Another deceptively peaceful French town becomes the setting for restrained dread, intimate suspicion, and Chabrol’s clinical interest in the violence beneath polite routines.
04
Why this pick
It shares the icy social scrutiny and steadily tightening menace of Wedding in Blood, watching class rituals and small resentments with devastating calm rather than melodrama.
05
Why this pick
For its elegant surfaces, poisoned domestic atmosphere, and dry ambiguity: Chabrol makes a cultured household feel quietly dangerous through measured performances and accumulating unease.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
In a small French town, filmed in Valençay, the deputy mayor Pierre is having an affair of snatched meetings with Lucienne, the mayor's wife. So that they can be together more often, Pierre poisons his sickly wife without anybody suspecting and Lucienne then starts visiting his house at night. Her husband Paul, aware of what's happening, blackmails Pierre into supporting a dubious land deal. To escape this, the two lovers decide to get rid of Paul, who they kill on a lonely road and set fire to the car. Under orders from Paris, the police treat it as an accident, until they receive a letter from Lucienne's teenage daughter who has deduced the whole story. When arrested, the guilty couple do not deny their crimes. Incredulous, the police inspector asks them; "Why didn't you just leave? Go and live somewhere else?" Bemused, they reply; "We never thought of that."
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Pierre Maury
Paul Delamare
Lucienne Delamare
Clotilde Maury
Hélène Chevalier, la fille de Lucienne
le préfet
le conseiller
Berthier
