Released the year before Godard’s Breathless, Chabrol’s early entry into the cool realism of the French New Wave is a dark, haunted sketch of modern living. “Independent” and inaccessible, four pretty Parisian shop girls spend empty days encased behind glass amusing one another with trivial intrigue and imagined drama. At night, they become superficial entertainment for a steady stream of male spectators. Waiting for a truly virtuous hero to make his entrance, the women fall prey to the conventional, romantic dreams their storefront displays advertise. For Rita, this could be her upper-class fiancé; for Jacqueline, her enigmatic admirer on the motorcycle. As mysteries start to unfold, the women more often find themselves faced with macabre perversion rather than the love each desires. – BG