Stéphane Audran died last march 27, 2018. She was the fetish actress of director Claude Chabrol, and his wife since 1964. As an homage to her, I reviewed this movie again today.
Stéphane Audran was awarded the Best Actress prize of 1968 in the Berlin Film Festival, for this movie. The film was cut in different markets from the original 104 minutes to 99, 97 (in USA for a PG rated VHS 1980 release), and even 88 minutes.
«After seven years of rather paltry stuff, Claude Chabrol re-established his reputation with this elegantly enacted, cool, callous, and witty bisexual ménage-à-trois. It was also the first film in which Stéphane Audran (Mrs. Chabrol since 1964) was given a role worthy of her subtle expressiveness.» - Bloomsbury's Video Guide.
«This movie "proves that you can make a very sexy movie with practically no nude or copulation scenes. Yet the underlying sex drive is steamy and erotic.» - The X-Rated Videotape Guide, vol. II.
«1967 was the year of lesbianism in French cinema. Two films were turned with just a few months between them: "Les biches" by Claude Chabrol, with an original script, and "La Religieuse" by Jacques Rivette, upon Diderot's novel. Chabrol admits: "It was explosive for it's time. For the first time you were seeing a girl «taking» another girl... Be it the scene of the bathtub, or Stéphane's stripping, I never photographed below the navel: I always cut right in time! After all, both my does fell in love with a boy, and the most rich «won» him, what, as far as I saw it, was more immoral than a special relationship. Besides, to tell you the truth, lesbianism doesn't attract me; it only interests me as an abnormality. If a woman wants to have children, that is not the best way to achieve it..."» - Chabrol cited by Frank Deeth, "Sapho c'qui faut! Quand les biches envahissent l'écran", in "Le Crapouillot", nº 23, December 1972.
The original title sends a complex message. "Les biches" (French for female doe, the sweet animal a girl is drawing on the pavement when we first meet her character) is also French slang for "girls" in the way the British used to refer to young women as "birds", and the Americans as "chicks" or "foxes", with no derogatory intention. The Portuguese title (when the lesbian word was taboo), "As Rivais" erases the essential subject of the story, emphasizing the threesome of the story. The American title, "Bad Girls" adds an ethical judgement on the two women's behaviour that is far from what we are told about their characters.
Claude Chabrol was an upper-middle-class man, a bourgeois, and though he did not subscribe to the leftist agendas current in France in the 1960s, he was a permanent critic of the upper classes hypocrisy and disdain for the others. Some reviewers have pointed that the end of the movie represents the victory of the rich girl over the poor girl in their dispute for the man - therefore representing the usual, realistic triumph of the rich and powerful. Having seen many of Chabrol's films, I agree that in this one he was sending that message too, that we mostly missed for the blatant dare of showing, with taste but explicitly, love among women.
Stéphane Audran was awarded the Best Actress prize of 1968 in the Berlin Film Festival, for this movie. The film was cut in different markets from the original 104 minutes to 99, 97 (in USA for a PG rated VHS 1980 release), and even 88 minutes.
«After seven years of rather paltry stuff, Claude Chabrol re-established his reputation with this elegantly enacted, cool, callous, and witty bisexual ménage-à-trois. It was also the first film in which Stéphane Audran (Mrs. Chabrol since 1964) was given a role worthy of her subtle expressiveness.» - Bloomsbury's Video Guide.
«This movie "proves that you can make a very sexy movie with practically no nude or copulation scenes. Yet the underlying sex drive is steamy and erotic.» - The X-Rated Videotape Guide, vol. II.
«1967 was the year of lesbianism in French cinema. Two films were turned with just a few months between them: "Les biches" by Claude Chabrol, with an original script, and "La Religieuse" by Jacques Rivette, upon Diderot's novel. Chabrol admits: "It was explosive for it's time. For the first time you were seeing a girl «taking» another girl... Be it the scene of the bathtub, or Stéphane's stripping, I never photographed below the navel: I always cut right in time! After all, both my does fell in love with a boy, and the most rich «won» him, what, as far as I saw it, was more immoral than a special relationship. Besides, to tell you the truth, lesbianism doesn't attract me; it only interests me as an abnormality. If a woman wants to have children, that is not the best way to achieve it..."» - Chabrol cited by Frank Deeth, "Sapho c'qui faut! Quand les biches envahissent l'écran", in "Le Crapouillot", nº 23, December 1972.
The original title sends a complex message. "Les biches" (French for female doe, the sweet animal a girl is drawing on the pavement when we first meet her character) is also French slang for "girls" in the way the British used to refer to young women as "birds", and the Americans as "chicks" or "foxes", with no derogatory intention. The Portuguese title (when the lesbian word was taboo), "As Rivais" erases the essential subject of the story, emphasizing the threesome of the story. The American title, "Bad Girls" adds an ethical judgement on the two women's behaviour that is far from what we are told about their characters.
Claude Chabrol was an upper-middle-class man, a bourgeois, and though he did not subscribe to the leftist agendas current in France in the 1960s, he was a permanent critic of the upper classes hypocrisy and disdain for the others. Some reviewers have pointed that the end of the movie represents the victory of the rich girl over the poor girl in their dispute for the man - therefore representing the usual, realistic triumph of the rich and powerful. Having seen many of Chabrol's films, I agree that in this one he was sending that message too, that we mostly missed for the blatant dare of showing, with taste but explicitly, love among women.