31 Years, 31 Screams: #3 Diabolique
Posted by J.D. Dunn on 10.29.2005
The Great Suspense Film That Shocked the World... And Became A Classic.
Diabolique (1955) D:Henri-George Clouzot W:H.G. Clouzot, Jerome Geronimi, Rene Masson, Frederic Grendel (from a novel by Thomas Narcejac & Pierre Boileau) Starring:Vera Clouzot, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel MPAA: [NR] Runtime:116m.
The Film: (***Contains some spoilers***)
We open at the Delassalle School for Boys. The head of the school, Michel Delassalle (the appropriately sleazy Meurisse) is a real cheapskate. Using the kind of money-saving tactics one would expect to find parodied on "The Simpsons." His wife Christina, the true owner of the school, is terrified of him. His mistress Nicole is has a much stronger will, but he beats her too.
Of course, everyone at the school knows about the affair -- even the boys. That doesn't keep Christina and Nicole from being friends. In fact, Nicole is really all Christina has. They even take time out from scolding young Patard for scribbling on the school walls to plot Michel's death. Christina, a devout Catholic, was unable to obtain a divorce. However, she so despises her life with Michel that she's willing to trade an eternity of hell in the next life for a little peace in this one.
That night, Michel humiliates Christina at dinner, forcing her to eat day-old fish in front of the boys as "an example." Christina is angry that he buys the school's fish from a crooked fishmonger with her money. After all, it's her money and her school, she should be able to run it without tyranny. When no one is around, Michel corners and rapes his wife. Offscreen, of course. Even in France this is still 1955.
The next morning, Christina sneaks out of their bedroom and joins Nicole. They head out to Nicole's house in Niort before anyone wakes up. Later that morning, the boys all leave for vacation. Michel learns from the gatekeeper that his two lovers have left him...together.
Not that everything is all roses between Nicole and Christina, because it isn't. Christina is disgusted that Nicole would sleep with her husband. Nicole blithely dismisses her judgments, saying that Michel would often wish for Christina's death. Apparently, he wanted to wait until Christina's bad heart gave out and finished her off for good. Then, he and Nicole could run the school together. That was before the beatings, of course.
Nicole and Christina set up in Nicole's little apartment downstairs. Christina is worried that Nicole's tenants Les Harbouxes will ruin the plan, but Nicole says they're part of the plan. Nicole makes Christina call Michel and demand a divorce. Christina begrudgingly does so and tells him that she's keeping the school. Enraged, Michel catches the next train to Niort.
Nicole returns from the store with a waterproof tablecloth, a bottle of booze, and a strong sedative. She spikes the whiskey as Christina begins to have second thoughts. After all, an eternity of hell is a long time. The anger and hatred she feels for him seems to steel her, though. Nicole tells her that it will all be over soon.
How wrong she is.
Nicole goes up to the Harbouxes to listen to a radio quiz show (and give herself an alibi). Christina stares apprehensively at the bottle as Michel's footsteps approach on the cobblestone streets. She invites him in, shrinking away from him. He scolds her for humiliating him. After all, what would it look like for a man to be forced into chasing after his wife.
Christina bluffs and tells Michel that her lawyer assures her tha she can get a divorce even without his consent. He calls her bluff, attempting to call the lawyer. She is forced to admit she has no lawyer. The law is on his side. He doesn't want a scandal, and the price of a divorce would be too great. Besides, no parent is going to let a divorcee teach their kids. With this, Christina's resolve begins to break down. He talks about all the things he did for her, all the sacrifices he made. He says that Nicole has been setting the two of them up against each other.
She breaks down completely, ready to go back with him. That is until he attempts to take a drink of the spiked whiskey. She grabs at it, trying to stop him and spills it all over his gray Prince of Wales suit. He slaps her around and tells her to go get a towel and dry him off as he finishes another glass. She even offers to pour it for him. Even though he's getting drousy, he has yet another glass of whiskey. Christina lays him back onto the bed and takes his shoes off as he passes out.
Nicole sneaks back in through the back and starts running water into the tub. When she's satisfied that Michel is out, she tells Christina to grab his shoes and help her carry him into the bathroom. The sound of running water disturbs M. Harboux from his quiz show in a nice bit of comic relief.
As they are carrying Michel to the tub, he wakes up. Nicole has to shove his head underwater. She tells Christina to get the large bronze statue sitting on the mantle so they can weigh him down overnight. Christina carries it in but the strain of the situation is too much. She experiences a palpitation and has to lay down. Nicole does the rest, weighing Michel down into the water with the bronze and covering him with the tablecloth. Upstairs, M. Harboux prepares a complaint letter about the loud, running water, thus sealing their alibi airtight.
Michel's body is wrapped in the tablecloth and placed inside a wicker trunk. As M. Harboux is helping Nicole take the trunk to the car, the binding on the top breaks off and they are nearly exposed. Nicole, thinking quickly, binds the lid before the Harbouxes get suspicious. They are nearly done in again when a drunken soldier accosts them at a gas station and tries to stow away in the back of their car.
That night, they arrive back at the school. The gatekeeper lets them in, and they pretend to be surprised that M. Delassalle is gone. In the dark of night, they unload the wicker trunk and dump the body into the filthy swimming pool. After that, it's just a matter of waiting for the body to float to the surface so it will be ruled an accident.
Or so they think.
A few days later, the body is still under the murky water. That doesn't stop the boys and the faculty from gossiping about his whereabouts. He is quite the ladies man, after all. As Christina is leading the boys in the conjugation of their verbs, she spies the groundskeeper trying to get something out of the pool. For a moment, she has hope. Unfortunately, it's just a piece of cloth or paper that he easily skims out.
The suspense is killing Christina. She wants to drain the pool, but Nicole says that will be like signing a confession. Nicole says that if the body doesn't surface the next day, she'll find a way to have the pool drained.
When the body still hasn't surfaced, Nicole waits for the boys to kick a ball into the pool during recess. She tosses her keys to one of the boys for him to go get the skimmer, but she purposely leaves her throw short so the keys go right into the pool. One of the boys dives in after them but all he comes up with is M. Delassalle's lighter. He says he couldn't see anything else down there because of the filth. Nicole proposes that they drain the pool.
An hour later, as Christina is drilling into the boys the properties of a hexagon, M. Plantiveau has drained the pool. Christina runs out to look because surely Plantiveau should have seen the body by now. When she arrives at the pool's edge, what she sees is shocking - so shocking, in fact, that Christina faints dead away. The pool is empty. The body is nowhere to be found.
Christina's doctor arrives to check up on her. He warns Nicole not to let her experience any shocks or high stress. Nicole tells Christina that she has searched high and low for the body. She thinks someone must have come in after them and fished the body out of the pool. It's the only natural explanation. Christina turns on Nicole, saying she was a fool to go along with her plot in the first place. Plantiveau interrupts their discussion by bringing back some dry-cleaning -- Michel's Prince of Wales suit!
Nicole and Christina head to the dry-cleaners to inquire just who would have brought the suit in, since it was on a corpse buried under fifteen feet of water. The dry-cleaner describes him as a tall, thin man with dark hair, matching Michel's description. She also tells Christina that the delivery boy forgot something that was in the pocket -- a key to a hotel room.
Christina takes the key, marked for the Eden Hotel. She looks around his room before being startled by the housekeeper. He tells her that M. Delassalle never comes in this early. In fact, his bed is always made. He wonders if Delassalle comes in at all.
Nicole begins to wonder if he was really dead. Christina tells her that Nicole should know, since she was the one that killed him. Nicole reminds her that both of them were involved. She dares Christina to go to the police. Christina is about to call her bluff before Nicole stops her.
The next morning, Nicole finds a newspaper article about a body found in the Seine River. It matches Michel's description as well. Christina goes to the morgue, hoping to be able to identify Michel's body. Unfortunately, it's not him. Not only that, but retired Detective Fichet (Vanel), who was sitting in the morgue office, takes an interest in her husband's case. Although the body wasn't Michel, he reasons that she must be worried that he's dead or else she wouldn't have come. He offers to help her find Michel.
Fichet begins to question the school staff. Plantiveau doesn't think Michel could have drowned. He was an excellent swimmer. Fichet thinks maybe Michel went off with another woman. Christina offers to pay him off in order to get rid of him, but he says he will stay on the case until he finds Michel.
Later that day, as Nicole and Christina are taking a walk, they come across a young boy named Moinet. He's pulling up weeds on the grounds. When they ask him why he's doing such a thing, he answers that he broke a window and M. Delassalle punished him. Nicole slaps him for lying, but the boy insists that he saw M. Delassalle!
The stress continues to wear on Christina. A specialist comes to see her and tells her that she overdid it. He confines her to her bed and tells her to get some rest, but secretly he tells his colleague that he just didn't want her to die in his clinic.
Moinet is excused from his punishment for "lying" about seeing the principal in order to take the school photo. The photographer quickly snaps a photo of the boys in front of the school and takes it into the back of his truck to develop it. As Nicole is looking it over, she finds something horrifying. It appears that Michel was looking out from the school window as they were taking the photograph. Or is it a cloud? Nicole takes it to show Christina under the view of a magnifying glass. The face is shrouded in shadows, but it certainly looks like him.
Nicole tells Christina that she can't take it anymore. She's leaving the school, leaving Christina alone. That night, Christina awakens from a nightmare to find Fichet sitting at her bedside. She confesses that she murdered Michel, but he tells her she'll wake up in the morning acquitted. Fichet interrogates the boys about finding the lighter in the pool and examines the wicker trunk in the attic.
Later that night, as everyone else is asleep, a dark figure roams the halls of the Delassalle School for Boys. Christina awakens to light cascading across her face from the rooms in the opposite wing. When she looks out her window, she sees a silhouette passing behind each window. Is it the silhouette of Michel! She exits her room and shouts, "Who is it?" down the corridor. Of course, there is no answer, only footsteps.
As she approaches the office, she hears someone banging away on a typewriter. The door drifts open, but there is no one sitting in the chair. The only things there are Michel's gloves and his hat. When she looks at the piece of paper in the typewriter it simply reads, "Michel Delassalle" over and over again. Then, the lights go out.
Christina screams and runs the length of the corridor back to her bathroom. She splashes some cold water on her face, but it's not enough to brace her for the shock that is to come. As she turns around, what she sees
ah, ah, ah. That would be telling. And Director Clouzot explicitly instructs all who see the film not to spoil it for the rest. Let's just say it's widely considered one of the most frightening scenes in film history and leave it at that.
Fade to black.
Interesting Note: Vera Clouzot (the wife of the director) died of a heart attack 5 years after playing Christina.
Interesting Note #2: Director Henri-Georges Clouzot was banned from working in France for a short period because he worked for Continental Films during the Nazi occupation of France.
The 411: A story so unsettling that Hitchcock himself heavily pursued the rights to the script only to find that Clouzot had already secured them mere hours earlier. Authors Narcejac and Boileau wanted to work with Hitch so badly, they penned a story called "D'Entre Les Morts," which eventually became one of Hitchcock's greatest masterpieces -- "Vertigo." Hitchcock revered Clouzot as a rival to the title "Master of Suspense," so much so that he rushed a little film called "Psycho" into production to counter "Diabolique." It's hard to imagine even Hitchcock doing any better with this story. Clouzot builds an impending sense of dread with each and every scene. By the time we get to the denouement, our hearts are pounding almost as hard as our heroine's. It's a classic piece of horror storytelling that can't be missed if you're a genre fan.
Of course, everyone at the school knows about the affair -- even the boys. That doesn't keep Christina and Nicole from being friends. In fact, Nicole is really all Christina has. They even take time out from scolding young Patard for scribbling on the school walls to plot Michel's death. Christina, a devout Catholic, was unable to obtain a divorce. However, she so despises her life with Michel that she's willing to trade an eternity of hell in the next life for a little peace in this one.
Not that everything is all roses between Nicole and Christina, because it isn't. Christina is disgusted that Nicole would sleep with her husband. Nicole blithely dismisses her judgments, saying that Michel would often wish for Christina's death. Apparently, he wanted to wait until Christina's bad heart gave out and finished her off for good. Then, he and Nicole could run the school together. That was before the beatings, of course.
Nicole goes up to the Harbouxes to listen to a radio quiz show (and give herself an alibi). Christina stares apprehensively at the bottle as Michel's footsteps approach on the cobblestone streets. She invites him in, shrinking away from him. He scolds her for humiliating him. After all, what would it look like for a man to be forced into chasing after his wife.
