Four shop girls long to escape the monotony of their existence: Ginette sings in a tatty music-hall; Rita drifts into a bourgeois marriage; Jane simply wants a good time; Jacqueline yearns for romantic love but is strangled by a maniac. Chabrol’s early masterpiece offers a gallery of grotesques, macabre and farcical humour, but also poetry and tenderness. The mixture of compassion for the girls and contempt for their dreams created an ironic structure that disturbed the majority of critics when it first appeared.
Credits: Producer, Robert and Raymond Hakim ; director, Claude Chabrol ; writers, Claude Chabrol, Paul Gegauff ; photography, Henri Decae ; music, Paul Misraki, Pierre Jansen.
Cast: Bernadette Lafont, Stephane Audran, Clotilde Joano, Lucile Saint-Simon, Ave Ninchi, Mario David, Sacha Briquet, Claude Berri.
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How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
X000441
Languages
English
French
Subject category
Foreign language films
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Black and White
Holdings
16mm film; Limited Access Print (Section 2)