Thriller Thursdays: Diabolique - A Devious French Thriller

In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

“A painting is always quite moral when it is tragic and it presents the horror of the things it depicts.” ~ Barbey DÁurevilly

This is the quote with which Diabolique starts its narrative — and it is a strange affirmation of the film's intrigues. For embedded in that assertion are the questions about the constructs of morality, tragedy, and horror. In a life buffeted by choices which are often made for what we stand for, and not for what is right, there is space for all three to coalesce into that unpredictability called life.

A boarding school outside Paris is run by a beastly headmaster called Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse), whose cruel treatment of students is only matched, if not further exacerbated, by his treatment of his sickly wife Christina (Véra Clouzot),  and mistress Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), whom he shamelessly parades as his own. The irony is that the school belongs to Christina, but has been usurped in every way by her cruel husband as his own.  Michel is relentless in his badgering of Christina. He often ridicules her in front of a large audience, "She was delicate when she came from Caracas, but now she is a sweet little ruin." He mocks her continuously about her poor heart condition. He forces her to eat rotten fish in the common dining area, forcing her to swallow it, even though she struggles to do so saying "You have to be an example." And to balance the treatment he metes out to his wife, he hits Nicole so hard that she has to hide her face behind large dark glasses. But the cruelty meted out to both the women makes compatriots of them, as they swap tales of their misery at the hands of their common lover. Both Christina and Nicole turn to each other for consolation. And they soon hatch a plot to take revenge against their abuser and decide to kill Michel.

Christina vacillates at the plan because of her Christian faith (symbolically she blows a candle in front of an image of Christ into complete darkness), but moves forward when abused again at a critical juncture. Nicole is in complete control, as she plans and moves forward with the nitty-gritty of the murder — and kill Michel they do. Drowning him in a bathtub, no less. But when has murder ever been simple? They dump the body in the school's swimming pool, hoping to make it out as an accidental drowning — but lo-&-behold, the body disappears! The film moves into the realm of a quasi-horror movie, as the intrigue of the disappearance aggravates. There are multiple signs which keep appearing that signify that Michel is alive. The killers are stumped and terrified.

This 1955 film is a black and white masterpiece. It works on its premise in a tapestry of shadow and light. Once one accepts the (slightly outré) premise of both wife and mistress co-existing under the same roof, one is sucked into the story of cruelty and collusion. The contrast between the two women presents its own dynamics — Christina is a woman of faith, for her even divorce is a sin. Whereas Nicole is hard, unfazed with her intentions, and unforgiving in her retaliation. The women synthesize their plan in a journey they undertake to Nicole's village, and their straightforward one-frame conversation inside a car, as they swap details of their lives with the common man between them, and what he told each about the other, is like the cutting of a common vein and letting blood flow to mix as one.

The beauty of this film is its population of full characters around the trio in the middle. The co-teachers, Nicole's obstinate neighbours, the boys in the school, and the detective offer small strokes of conversations and incidents which place the protagonists in the middle of a thriving world rather than in isolation of misdemeanours. And the last minutes of the movie are complete with a sense of skin-crawling eeriness, with its light schemata. The sweats on the sides of a forehead, the sliver of light as a door slowly opens, and sound design relying entirely on ‘au naturel sounds  - the squeaking door, the ragged breath, the hushed footstep, the sudden typewriter sound’, the house closes in to suddenly become a cavernous place of danger. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot plays the story for its rich thriller and horror elements with a flair rooted in verisimilitude.

It is in the nature of the times that its 1996 English remake directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, and starring Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani is chock-o-block with the charisma of its actors, a sumptuous background score, and gorgeous cinematography, but paradoxically falls short in its depictions — and hence its import and impact.

Diaboliques is Hitchcockian in its cleverness but could have used a chuckle along the way, the way the legendary director invariably delivered. But then again he was quintessentially English and Diaboliques is a French film!

Trivia

1. The film is based on "Celle qui n'était plus" (She Who Was No More), a book by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.  Alfred Hitchcock apparently missed out on purchasing the rights to the book by a few hours! The authors subsequently wrote another novel called "D'Entre les Morts" (From Among the Dead), especially with Hitchcock in mind, which he then filmed as Vertigo.
2. The film has music in the film only over the opening credits.
3. Simone Signoret signed an 8-week contract for the film but the shooting actually took 16 weeks. She was thus paid for only 8 weeks of work despite completing the film. This caused major tension between the director and the actress, and they were no longer on speaking terms by the time the film ended.
4. Diaboliques is included in Steven Schneider's famous "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die".

Watch The Diabolique here.

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)