A PIECE OF PLEASURE (director: Claude Chabrol; cast: Danielle Gegauff (Esther), Clemence Gégauff (Elsie), Paul Gégauff (Philippe), Paula Moore (Sylvia Murdoch), Michel Valette (Katkof), Cécile Vassort (Annie), Pierre Santini, Giancarlo Sisti, 1974-France)
A very bitter love story unfolds, reflecting on the break-up of a seemingly happy marriage, by circumstances that seemed odd and inexplicable, unless it is true, that certain people can't handle their happiness and have to do something to screw that up. The stars of the film, who play a married couple, are probably playing out on screen a lot of what their married life was like before their real-life divorce. Paul Gégauff (Philippe), his ex-wife Danielle Gegauff (Esther), and their daughter Clemence Gégauff (Elsie) are the stars of the film.
An odd thing occurred after the movie was made, Paul Gégauff, Chabrol's favorite screenwriter, was stabbed to death in 1983 by his second wife.
This film has both the look of a daytime TV soaper and a cheapie movie. It never develops into anything more than it starts out to be, no matter how the story turns, it can only be a twisted psychological tale depicting a couple living on the outskirts of Paris, with him being the very erudite and upper-class teacher of life to his attractive but unsophisticated peasant born wife. One day he tells his wife that he had six affairs that didn't mean anything to him during their ten years of marriage, and when she is forced to tell him that she never had an affair he insists that she have an affair with an Arab guitar player named Habib, someone he doesn't even like. I can't begin to explain why he does that, unless he is so arrogant and bored with life that he feels he has to do it. That he loses his wife after she has a number of sexual encounters with her new lover, should not be particularly surprising.
How Chabrol handles this volatile material is what brings even more vagueness to the story then he usually brings to his stories, as he concentrates on Philippe's changing psychological states that vary from being a doting father to his cute daughter to being a vile bully to his wife. As things change for the worse in their marriage, the couple give up their rented house in the country and move back to the city, as Paris offers them a chance to change and grow intellectually and emotionally. She takes a job as a publicist with Habib's musical company. It is not really clear how Philippe earns his money, but he is involved in some kind of business dealings with his friends. The tables are now turned on him, as he angrily and jealously pursues his wife, who continues to see Habib, as he disparages her taste, disapproving that she hangs around with his superficial philosopher friends, who don't even read what they are bullshitting about, and he becomes terribly disappointed that she falls for that group. Their break-up is now for real. So what does the love-sick Philippe do, but meet a Scottish lady, Paula Moore (Sylvia Murdoch), who has been divorced three times, and one of her former husbands is Habib. Philippe quickly marries her, but soon is pained by the sweet memories of Esther, and once again seeks Esther out.
I found enough interest in this film to say that it is not completely without merit, but I did not think it told a crisp enough story to make it anything but one of Chabrol's experimental so-so films. The demise of Philippe, the failure of him to let his wife be who she is without letting go of his tyrannical hold on her, made him an unsympathetic character from the beginning to the end of the story. For the film to say, that men always ask questions and women don't, is not exactly a modern attitude to have these days, and it was unclear to me what Chabrol's thinking about this really was, whether it was an ironical attitude or a stab at saying something that was so ridiculous that no one could take it seriously. Chabrol has made a career out of being vague in his films, and more often than not it has worked to his benefit, but not this time.
REVIEWED ON 3/21/99 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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