Inheriting the throne from Stéphane Audran, Isabelle Huppert became Chabrol’s muse for the next several years beginning with this film. Here she plays Marie Latour with startling nuance in this adaptation of a true story that took place during 1940s German-occupied France. After successfully helping a neighbor who has botched an attempt at abortion, Marie enters into a new business enterprise with icily pragmatic opportunism. Many facets of her thriving operation mirror the hypocrisy and ambivalent morality of the time – Marie remaining indifferent, if oblivious, to questions of either depravity or the Nazi threat. When her husband returns broken from the war, Marie finds him a job as a spy for the Germans and takes a lover for herself. With signature resistance to judgment, political stance, or trite commentary, Chabrol horrifically and humanely examines the unexamined life up to its bitter end. – BG