Cinema: The Futility Shop

Les Bonnes Femmes, made six years ago and presumably pigeonholed as insufficiently commercial, seems to be a film that is handicapped only by simple integrity. Its downbeat theme works against mass popularity, and Director Claude Chabrol strong-mindedly shuns the showy amateurism that occasionally passes for avant-garde chic. Instead, breathing a quick sense of verity into a perceptive screenplay by Paul Gégauff, Chabrol subtly spells out the humor, horror and futility in the lives of four unextraordinary Parisian shopgirls.

All four work behind the counter in an electrical-supply store, watching the clock, sizing up customers, idly assessing every salesman or delivery boy, and enduring the somewhat distasteful presence of M'sieur, the unctuously gallant old proprietor who owns their souls from early morning till quitting time. The cashier, Mme. Louise, is a placid-looking matron who secretly delights in an odd good-luck charm tucked into her purse—a handkerchief stained with the blood of a guillotined rapist.

Seven o'clock brings the girls to a nightly grind of pleasure seeking deadlier than the day's work. Savoring anonymity, they scurry forth among the masses of others like them to meet what ever excitement the evening holds. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is a giddy trollop who settles for a pick-up date, shlumps home at dawn after debauching à trois with a pair of crude businessmen on the make. Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) manufactures a dream of cottagey bliss with her fiancé, a flatulent young grocer who is sure that she is not quite good enough for him. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) creates off-hours glamour in a black wig, mangling Italian songs in a fourth-rate music hall, while shy Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) merely waits to be approached by an unknown admirer who follows her everywhere on his motorcycle. Too late, she discovers that she is the prey of a psychopathic killer.

As usual, Cinematographer Henri Decae catches the random, glittery neon cheapness of the milieu with an eye for telling detail. Despite a confession-story plot, Les Bonnes Femmes makes its heroines convincingly tragic, sums up their case in a memorable final shot—of a nameless demoiselle sitting demurely beside a dance floor, all her hopes vested in the stag line and in a slowly revolving golden globe hung from the ceiling to light a world of perfectly banal and timeless dreams.