Behind the Wall

By John Skow

VIOLETTE

Directed by Claude Chabrol

Screenplay by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger and Frederic Grendel

Violette Noziere was a pretty and a dissolute French working-class girl who, in 1933 at the age of 18, poisoned her mother and father. The father died, but the mother survived, and at her trial for murder Violette claimed that this outcome was deliberate. She murdered him to escape his incestuous attacks, she said, and merely gave her mother enough poison to disable her so that she could not rescue her husband.

The crime and trial created an enormous stir, which Director Claude Chabrol has depicted -- there are angry crowds and balladeers singing laments in the street outside the courthouse -- but his main interest is in the spoiled innocence of Violette. She is played with astonishing virtuosity by an extraordinary young French actress named Isabella Huppert. Violette's twisted mind seems to have been truly monstrous. The incest story was pure invention. She got her parents to swallow poison by telling them it was medicine. Yet something in her character was capable of generating sympathy. What we see in Actress Huppert's portrayal is a scrubbed and plain schoolgirl who escapes from the stuffiness of her parents' small apartment, puts on makeup and fashionable clothes in a hall lavatory and swings gallantly out into the night.

Even before the murder, she is trapped and knows it -- and does not care. Her response to hopelessness is a drink and a shrug. She lets herself be picked up by a rich young man. After they have slept together, it is clear that he expects to pay her; but with a fine gesture she takes some wadded franc notes from her purse, drops them on the bed and leaves.

The visual quality of the film is lush -- sets and actors perhaps too lovingly dressed in period trappings -- but Huppert gives astringency to the scenes. The camera lingers on her plump, spoiled, intelligent face, and it is possible to see the wall that she has built between herself and the world. Behind the wall is Violette; what she may be is only partly guessable. Her crime is solved, but the mystery remains.

Director Chabrol's strategy is the appropriate one: simply to watch Violette with obsessive fascination, in the hope of catching a clue. Not many actresses could make this sort of scrutiny fruitful, but Huppert has the knack of suggesting endlessly watchable depths. The film ends (after Violette has been sentenced to be guillotined, then reprieved and sentenced to twelve years in prison) as did The Lacemaker, the first movie in which she starred: with camera and character star ing at each other gravely and impassively, until the screen goes dark.

-- John Skow

Huppert's performances are so strik ingly vivid and so markedly personal that they seem not to be performances at all.

After seeing The Lacemaker, in which Huppert played a sweet dull-minded girl broken by her first love affair, it is impossible to believe that in real life she is not at least slightly bovine. Violette (for which she won the Best Actress award at this year's Cannes Festival) leaves the viewer convinced, contrarily, that she must be willful, neurotic and blown about by stormy emotions. Neither turns out to be the case. Her face is lively and full of intelligence, and it shows none of the opacity that she assumed for these two roles. At 23, she is a small fair-skinned redhead, wearing, for lunch in New York, a professional beauty's noontime getup: pants and a T shirt.

She talks with animation and the slightest of accents. Yes, she says, the similarity in the endings of Violette and The Lacemaker was intentional; it was Chabrol's way of tipping his hat to Claude Goretta, the director of the earlier film. But she notes that the endings are only the same "for the camera -- visually. For Violette, you know, the ending is open; there are chances for her. For Beatrice in The Lacemaker, it is closed, without the possibility of hope." In a way, she goes on, the two films are about young women and authority, one struggling, one submitting. The theme is important to her, and she sees the two differing stories as part of her own artistic development.

There has been little torment and oppression in Huppert's own experience. She was the clever youngest daughter in a big, prosperous Parisian household, and her parents (her father is a manufacturer of safes, her mother an English teacher) were full of encouragement when she decided that she wanted to change her educational direction from Russian studies to acting. At 15, freckled, a bit chubby, with the look of a beauty five years before she would be beautiful, she had a small part in Faustine et le Bel Etc. Even then she was very much self-propelled, and by now she has an unusually firm idea of what she wants to do with her career. She has just finished playing Anne, the youngest Bronte, in Andre Techine's The Bronte Sisters. She prefers directors who let actors work out their own interpretations. This list includes Goretta and Chabrol but not the notoriously tyrannical Otto Preminger, for whom she played a part in Rosebud, his not very successful film of a few years ago. "He yelled so much," she recalls.

Then, lunch over, she trots off in the direction of Lincoln Center, where Violette is to be shown at the New York Film Festival. Elsewhere, at this very moment, producers are using her name to dazzle bankers, and writers are stubbing out cigarettes and typing lines that tell of bruised innocence. There are so many small, pale, lightly freckled and heavily troubled young women to play. So many older ones, when the wine has matured. She wants to do Lady Chatterley. She wants to buy some American jeans. The sun is shining on Central Park West, and the world is young.

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