VIOLETTE NOZIERE

VIOLETTE NOZIÈRE (1978)─Is a French crime film directed by Claude Chabrol adapted for the screen from a novel by Jean-Marie Fitère and starring Isabelle Huppert. The film, is based on a true French murder case in 1934, Violette Nozière is a fourteen-year-old French school girl who secretly works as a prostitute while living with her unsuspecting parents. 

     Rebelling against her mean spirited and petty petit-bourgeois parents, her father Baptiste (Jean Carmet)  and mother Germaine (Stéphane Audran). Violette falls in love with a spendthrift young man Émile (Jean Dalmain).  Émile’s careless and wanton spending habits eventually cause Violette to hand over increasing amounts of money from her prostitution earnings soon she resorts to stealing from her parents to support her lover.

     After contracting syphilis from sex with multiple partners, Violette's double life is scandalously discovered.  She conspires to poison her parents ostensibly to get her hands on their money. She plies them with glasses of barbiturate-laced “medication,” which she claims has been prescribed to them by the family doctor; her father dies, her mother barely survives.

   Overnight, Violette’s  lurid act of “double parricide” became the most sensational crime of the French interwar era—At trial, her defense claimed her father raped her. All to no avail, the verdict of the court was guilty, the sentence, death by guillotine. Violette’s sentence is eventually commuted.

     The film was entered into the main competition at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where Isabelle Huppert won the award for best actress.  VIOLETTE NOZIÈRE represents one of my great "lost" quest movies of the seventies.  Just twenty years-old in 1978, I found myself thoroughly  in awe of Isabelle Huppert's smoldering sexuality. Her Frenchness alone made her seem very exotic and the very fact that I had never seen Violette, elevated the film at least in my own mind to virtual mystical status. Hard to find, the film is now available on Netflix.

Violette Nozière *** ½