LES BONNES FEMMES (Claude Chabrol, 1960)

Written by Chabrol and Paul Gégauff, Claude Chabrol’s masterpiece depicts the bleak, harsh world of four Parisian shopgirls. Along with Que la bête meure (1969), this is Chabrol’s most personal film, as well as his starkest and most exacting. Its initial hostile reception found Chabrol (after a dip into rank commercialism) replacing its style with a silken, elegant one that yielded many beautiful results, but nothing to compare with the profound tragic disposition of Les bonnes femmes.
     Chabrol signals his intent. The opening credit sequence, in gray daylight, shows Parisian traffic from an unsettling low camera angle. Immediately afterwards, blaring lights punctuate pitch blackness—a brusque shift to nearly lurid visuals that undoes the commercial come-on, “City of Lights.” We hear an offscreen voice at the Grisbi Club huckstering naked women, commoditizing humanity and suggesting the vulnerability to economic and other forms of danger of close-by shopgirls Jane, Jacqueline, Rita and Ginette, who work together at an appliance store.
     Chabrol expertly handles the individuation of the shopgirls and their participation in a group identity, a joint fate.
     Empty workdays, off-hours fun, romantic connections and pickups: the moment of truth between Jacqueline and the man on a motorcycle who has been shadowing her, who is as lost and compulsive as G. W. Pabst’s Jack the Ripper (Pandora’s Box, 1928), who yet saved her from drowning in the community pool, brings things to a head in Federico Fellini’s woods (The Nights of Cabiria, 1956).
     Robin Wood has remarked that even the shopgirls’ dreams have been constricted by their limited environment, debasing these dreams. Theirs is a life absent transport, transcendence.
     A four-shot of three of the girls and Jane’s fiancé, a soldier, “cages” them at the zoo.
     Chabrol’s closing passage is the most heartrending in cinema.

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CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (Jirí Menzel, 1966)

     An alternately rich and not-so-rich behavioral comedy largely set in a rural Czech railway station during the Nazi occupation, Jirí Menzel’s Ostre sledované vlaky, from Bohumil Hrabel and Menzel’s script, tracks young trainee Milǒs Hrma as he surveys the sexual shenanigans of his elders and achingly longs to lose his virginity. Twice, one thing or another interrupts the consummation even of a kiss with his girlfriend (in one instance, accounting for one of the most irresistible and iconic shots of the sixties); but, in any case, he will have to lose his virginity elsewhere, because Masa, a train conductor, is “a nice girl.” Meanwhile, family history or legend—take your pick—has given the boy big shoes to fill when it comes to the cause of Czech nationalism.
     When a Nazi officer leaves the station house, instead of moving forward his car moves backwards—this is not a car in reverse, but a shot in reverse motion: one of several lovely touches. It is an historic retreat—and a reminder that Milǒs’s grandfather, a hypnotist, had tried to hypnotize the driver of the first invading German tank and cause him and his cohorts to retreat. The effort failed; Granddad was (literally) crushed.
     The opening is absolutely wonderful. The camera, in closeup, upwardly takes in the row of buttons on Milǒs’s uniform, suggesting it is a military uniform. Another closeup shows his mother’s hands transporting the cap to his head: a mock coronation, but not to Milǒs’s mother. The momentousness of her son’s first job—his retired father also was a railway worker—justifies the visual grandiloquence!
     The title refers to trains shipping German munitions. Milǒs succeeds in blowing one up. His family may have its first real hero—but, alas, not the boy himself.