Claude Chabrol
1960
100 minutes
This is another awkward French New Wave comedy/drama film by Claude Chabrol. It follows four young women in Paris who work in a shop and their "romantic" misadventures. It spends most of the film as a fairly light, loose comedy and then takes a quite sudden and dramatic twist at the end that is quite jarring if you aren't expecting it. It hits some of the usual beats. A couple of the women are pursued by two boorish shitheads, and one of the girls possibly bangs both of them, which is mildly depressing. One of the shopgirls has a plotline where she has a secret cabaret career at night that the other girls don't know about and she's afraid they'll find out about it and tease her. Much of the film is the girls having bad dates and relationship problems, and it's not immediately obvious how much the audience is supposed to sympathize or care, and it's especially hard watching this later since even the more innocuous men are ultra-dickheads by today's standards. One of the quieter women has a mysterious suitor who keeps showing up on his motorbike. It almost seems like a relief when he whisks her away for what appears to be a sweet romantic encounter. But then of course he suddenly decides to kill her and the film ends on that dark note, and we're reminded that this is the same Claude Chabrol who directed a film about the infamous serial killer Henri Landru.
The whole ending reminds you a bit of the song "Where the Wild Roses Grow" from Murder Ballads by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the one where Nick Cave does a duet with Kylie Minogue:
This seems a very apt comparison since this song was from the era where Kylie was more known for her "bubblegum pop music" like "The Loco-Motion" than some of the moodier, sexier tracks from later in her career. One of your gay friends is a Kylie Minogue superfan. You were surprised and impressed a few years ago when he correctly predicted that her "Padam Padam" song was going to be one of the utterly unavoidable gay synth-pop hits of the summer in 2023. Quite a lot to expect from a fifty-something year old pop singer widely regarded as washed up and no longer relevant.
You never dreamed that watching this film was going to send you on a spiral of watching Kylie content. You throw on a video of "Can't Get You Out Of My Head", which still sounds fresh to your ears and is certainly fresh to your eyes. Kylie at age 33 in severe make-up rocking an extremely loose-fitting top with nothing on under it. You rarely find blonde women extremely attractive, but Kylie is actually one of your exceptions.
You've spent a lot of late nights in gay bars, usually with your belated wife or, since the pandemic, with some mix of your straight and gay friends in one of the few spots nearby that actually stays open late until bartime. These bars would often put on current or classic pop music videos, usually by female artists. You'd often find it startling and a bit funny when you'd catch yourself trying not to drool over one of the women in these videos only to look over and see a couple of out-of-uniform drag queens in the corner solemnly watching the video with their friends and carefully trying to copy the choreography. Everyone has different reasons for liking this stuff. As far as you're concerned, it beats watching an ESPN 3 documentary about some NFL quarterback's gravely ill children who are hooked up to tubes and dying, which always seems to be on the televisions in straight bars at this hour.
Time to choose something different: