Two women, one man and a swimming pool. Sunset
Boulevard meets Bound in a film
that might have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I am talking about Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, a film
made in 1955 which is a noir thriller with the usual roles reversed. Instead of
the steamily seductive femme fatale enticing her disposable lover into her web
of intrigue (see The Postman Always Rings
Twice, Double Indemnity, The Last Seduction), in Clouzot’s film the figure
of the naive male is replaced by a woman, in this case boarding school owner Christina
Delasalle (played by Clouzot’s wife, Vera), a woman with a heart condition who
is seduced into ‘murdering’ her bullying and
salacious husband Michel by her
colleague and ostensibly her lover Nicole (played by Simone Signoret) with whom
Michel – who is also the school principal, benefitting from his wife’s money
and generosity - is having a less than secretive affair. Together, the two women
do away with Michel by drowning him in a bath after first sedating him with
some mysterious chemical and a few glasses of Red Label, then dumping him in
the school swimming pool only to find that his body disappears, triggering
several mysterious incidents, notably the dead man’s suit delivered to Christina from a dry-cleaners and a particularly lively child, Moinet, claiming that the
dead Michel has appeared to him. In the film’s surprise ending, we learn that (and I’m going to give the game away) all along Michel and Nicole have
conspired to dupe Christina, hoping that the stress of covering up the murder
combined with the sheer terror of the apparent supernatural reappearance of her
husband will prove fatal to her weak heart. In the final climactic moments,
when Christina sees the body of her dead husband rise from a bath full of water
in a macabre reversal of his death scene, their plan succeeds as Christina
collapses and dies, clutching at her ruined heart.
Les Diaboliques is
a remarkable film, not only because of the strength of its narrative but also
for the way it deals with the inversion of gender roles. Clouzot had adapted
the film from a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who were also responsible for D’Entre les Morts or Amongst the Dead, later filmed by Hitchcock as Vertigo) in which the lesbian
relationship between the two killers was ‘more pronounced’. I use quotation
marks because Clouzot had supposedly toned down the homosexual content and yet I
feel that its presence remains throughout , in the dialogue and the
mise-en-scene. Simone Signoret adopts the butch masculine role: short blonde
hair, tall and athletic, she is the decisive partner. Vera Clouzot as Christina
plays the more fragile and submissive role of the femme: she is both infantilised (with her braided
hair and chequered dress she looks more like Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz - even Nicole upbraids her for thinking ‘like a
child’) and sexualised (on several occasions, Clouzot draws the spectator’s
gaze towards his wife’s body – in one scene, she lifts her skirt to reveal bare
thighs and then there is the diaphanous night-gown which she wears during the
film’s denouement and which Clouzot lights in such a way to reveal surprisingly
more of his wife than might one might have thought permissible in the 1950s).
It is this inversion of roles, or as Virginie Selavy puts it
“the dissolution of certainties” (http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2011/03/04/les-diaboliques/),
which makes Les Diaboliques such an
engaging film. For me, on watching the film for the first time, I was aware not
only of the inversion of gender roles but of how the motif of water pervades
the film. Water is a symbol of femininity and of health, but it is also a
harbinger of death and disease. Elsewhere, (http://www.cathoderaytube.co.uk/2011/04/world-cinema-classics-les-diaboliques.html
) Frank Collins has written about ‘the foetid quality’ of the film, connecting
watery motifs – from the opening close-up of the swamp-like swimming pool to
the bathroom scenes which foreshadow Hitchcock’s Psycho - to the atmosphere
of decay as well as Christina’s deteriorating health. But water can also be
seen as a liminal space, a space of fantasy: as Fichet, the Columbo-like
detective, tells Christina “You dream too much about water”. It is a site of
that which is to be feared. Christina constantly surveys the pool for fear of
what secrets it might reveal: gazing at it on the morning after she and Nicole
have dumped Michel’s corpse into its murky depths or apprehensive whilst the pupils play ball around its perimeter.
Anxious eye-line matches during a mathematics lesson connect her fear to the
site of death as she waits for the caretaker to empty the pool. Water both
engorges and disgorges human bodies and creates in the process something abject
and in the two scenes in which Michel is first immersed in his watery grave and
then rises from it, Lazarus-like, his bulging eyes suggest something amphibian
and beyond human, repulsive and abject.
This brings me to
Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject which I believe is another underlying
motif within the film. A psychoanalytical concept, I cannot do justice to Kristeva’s
labyrinthine thinking here, but the abject for her is that which defies
borders, that which is sickening and repulsive: filth, waste, dung, the corpse:
“It is ... not lack of
cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system,
order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules... The clean and proper
... becomes filthy...” (Kristeva pp. 4 - 8)
I like to think of films by David Cronenberg – The Brood, Videodrome, Slither, Crash, The
Naked Lunch – as films which portray narratives of abjection. Think of
bodies turned inside out, of the fascination for wounds and viscera. There is
both a celebration and a revulsion at the body and its borders. IN Les Diaboliques, water is that marginal
space between worlds; it both cleanses and defiles. Interestingly, one of the
teachers at the school is called Monsieur Drain
and when Nicole flings her keys into the pool, they are retrieved by one of
the pupils who claims that the bottom of the pool is like ‘chocolate soup’:
water and excrement seem to converge in
these two images. But if we think of Kristeva’s idea that the abject is the
defilement of the clean and proper body, then Michel seems to be at the centre
of this abjection: his is the clean body defiled by its immersion in water.
Bedecked in his Prince of Wales suit, Michel is the narcissist who needs to
women to satisfy his ego. Only when Christina spills the ‘drugged’ whiskey onto
his suit does he lose control over his clean and proper self, striking out at
her in his rage. Before he is ‘drowned’, the women put his shoes back on, and
his first act as a corpse is to send his suit to the dry-cleaners: even in
death, his narcissism remains intact. He recognises that water has polluted his
self and there is irony in this act of cleansing. Another strikingly effective
instance of abjection is when Michel’s body is wrapped up in the plastic
tablecloth and we discover that it leaks, threatening to betray the women to a
petrol station attendant who mistakes it for the waste fluids of a drunken
soldier who tries to hitch a ride with the women on their way back to Paris
from Niort.
For Kristeva, “food loathing is perhaps the most elementary
and most archaic form of abjection” and Michel is also a symbol of bad
consumption. For one of the teachers at the school, Michel’s absence means that
he can now drink his wine ‘chemically pure’. Buying fish past its sell by date
on sale from the local fishmonger, Michel then feeds it to pupils and teachers alike. When
Christina takes a mouthful of the fish and, finding it repulsive, gags on it
she is exhibiting that most elementary form of abjection. Monstrous in his need
for male egotistic control, Michel demands several times that she swallow the
food, humiliating Christina in front of the whole school. Later he will rape
her, thus linking abjection with sexual humiliation, defiling the borders of
the clean and proper self.
Why does Les
Diaboliques reveal such a rich ‘abject’ reading? I think that, at its roots, the film deals
with the inversion of gender roles and power only to submit to traditional
power relations at the end with Nicole falling into the arms of Michel who, it
appears, has been pulling the strings all along. But beneath this lapse into traditional
narratival norms, there lurks beneath the surface of this film a longing to
reveal more subversive elements: of women taking control, wrenching power away
from the dominant male. In his adaptation of the source material, Clouzot
humiliates Michel: a narcissist who needs to control and dominate two women to satisfy
his ego. Although he plays, in the end, the powerful patriarchal role and Nicole’s
masculinity is subsumed into the maternal one (note the three-shot after the humiliating
dinner scene in which Nicole and Michel sit together whilst Christina sits
alone, chastised for not finishing her meal), his body is abject and is treated
as something foul. Although Clouzot is working within the parameters of an
industry and culture that limits transgressive images on screen, he also
subverts these by turning Michel into a figure of filth.
