Les Biches (1968)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Memorable, crazy movie

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Stéphane Audran died last march 27, 2018. She was the fetish actress of director Claude Chabrol, and his wife since 1964. As an homage to her, I reviewed this movie again today.Stéphane Audran was awarded the Best Actress prize of 1968 in the Berlin Film Festival, for this movie. The film was cut in different markets from the original 104 minutes to 99, 97 (in USA for a PG rated VHS 1980 release), and even 88 minutes.«After seven years of rather paltry stuff, Claude Chabrol re-established his reputation with this elegantly enacted, cool, callous, and witty bisexual ménage-à-trois. It was also the first film in which Stéphane Audran (Mrs. Chabrol since 1964) was given a role worthy of her subtle expressiveness.» - Bloomsbury's Video Guide.«This movie "proves that you can make a very sexy movie with practically no nude or copulation scenes. Yet the underlying sex drive is steamy and erotic.» - The X-Rated Videotape Guide, vol. II.«1967 was the year of lesbianism in French cinema. Two films were turned with just a few months between them: "Les biches" by Claude Chabrol, with an original script, and "La Religieuse" by Jacques Rivette, upon Diderot's novel. Chabrol admits: "It was explosive for it's time. For the first time you were seeing a girl «taking» another girl... Be it the scene of the bathtub, or Stéphane's stripping, I never photographed below the navel: I always cut right in time! After all, both my does fell in love with a boy, and the most rich «won» him, what, as far as I saw it, was more immoral than a special relationship. Besides, to tell you the truth, lesbianism doesn't attract me; it only interests me as an abnormality. If a woman wants to have children, that is not the best way to achieve it..."» - Chabrol cited by Frank Deeth, "Sapho c'qui faut! Quand les biches envahissent l'écran", in "Le Crapouillot", nº 23, December 1972.The original title sends a complex message. "Les biches" (French for female doe, the sweet animal a girl is drawing on the pavement when we first meet her character) is also French slang for "girls" in the way the British used to refer to young women as "birds", and the Americans as "chicks" or "foxes", with no derogatory intention. The Portuguese title (when the lesbian word was taboo), "As Rivais" erases the essential subject of the story, emphasizing the threesome of the story. The American title, "Bad Girls" adds an ethical judgement on the two women's behaviour that is far from what we are told about their characters. Claude Chabrol was an upper-middle-class man, a bourgeois, and though he did not subscribe to the leftist agendas current in France in the 1960s, he was a permanent critic of the upper classes hypocrisy and disdain for the others. Some reviewers have pointed that the end of the movie represents the victory of the rich girl over the poor girl in their dispute for the man - therefore representing the usual, realistic triumph of the rich and powerful. Having seen many of Chabrol's films, I agree that in this one he was sending that message too, that we mostly missed for the blatant dare of showing, with taste but explicitly, love among women.

I can't help but think of this movie as a send up of the famous Abbott and Costello routine: Who's on First. The odd naming of the female character, 'Why,' who scores with the architect before her mentor is a perfect start. Why's on first, and the What makes it all the way home. The picture is ambiguous to a fault. Event the title is ambiguous. Did the film maker mean Bad Girls, baby deer, bitches, or just us girls. If it were not for the beauty of the female leads, the gorgeous setting of St. Tropez, the movie would be a total bore, about characters who can't show you who they are because they don't know themselves. The most I could make of it is that it's about a control freak who runs a menagerie of people for her amusement to fill an unfulfilled life until one day one of the wild animals gets lose to put an end to the zoo. The secondary characters, supposedly two amusing gay men, were so annoying that it stretches the imagination to see how the zoo keeper would have them around. Let's write it off as a travelogue of a hot spot on the Riviera.

With "les biches" ,Chabrol entered his second and most fruitful period:the first one encompassed such classics as "les cousins" and "à double tour" but his formula began to wear thin in the mid -sixties with failures like "l'oeil du malin" "Marie-Chantal contre le docteur Kah" and the abysmal "le scandale".Stephane Audran ,his then-wife starred in all these movies (roughly 1968-1973)bar two ("la decade prodigieuse" and "docteur popaul") and their spellbinding mysterious atmosphere owes a lot to her."Les biches " has not worn that much well though:at the time ,lesbians were not so common in the movies ,and of course they always had a bad end -see also Mark Rydell's "the fox" or William Wyler's "the children's hour"for that matter-.What remains today is not much :only the scene showing Jacqueline Sassard's trying to become the woman she loves by taking her clothes ,her jewels ,her make-up and her voice is still impressive today;what remains falls into the trap of triteness:the man who comes between the two girls ,the chic bourgeois life in Saint-Tropez under the snow,the two would be comic reliefs -who are not funny at all-...."Les biches" is a must for Chabrol 's fans because it inaugurates his golden era ,which would give such classics as "la femme infidèle" or "le boucher".But the others can easily do without it.

The first time I saw this movie I liked it. The second time I thought Ho hum, the third time (OK I am practicing my French and I remembered this as a movie with a pretty clear sound track) I loved it.It starts slow, a bit weird, but the intensity between the women works as the scene plays out and really starts to cook when they get to St. Tropez, but Frédérique is just too spoiled to know a good thing when she sees it and blows it.Chabrol shows us just how stupid we can be when we don't know what we are doing, or just how much in love we are and how much stupider we get when jealousy sets in.Stéphane Audran is just so cold and yet so vulnerable.This one may get a fourth viewing yet, putting it in league with Chabrol's Le Boucher (One of THE BEST ever) and Casablanca.