The Story of Women
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL


     This morning I want to alert you to a film of particular
interest to feminists,  Claude Chabrol's magnificent "The Story of
Women."  Despite its brilliance, some people probably won't want
to see this film because of its devastating subject matter.  If
you go to the movies for light entertainment, this is not for
you.  In "The Story of Women" the film medium is used to probe the
depths of human suffering, weakness, and desire and the effects
on lives lived within structures of extreme oppression.

    The film is the story of a real woman, Marie Latour, who
lived in a small French seaside town during World War II, and who
was the last woman executed in France on the guillotine.  Her
crime?  Performing abortions.  It's something she more or less
happened into by helping out neighbors who got pregnant, some by
German soldiers, during a time when the French men were in
prisoner of war camps or had been sent to Germany to work.  Her
own husband returns from such a camp, but cannot keep a job and
the money she earns from performing abortions allows her to feed
her children and move to a better place to live.  In a truly
brilliant performance, Isabelle Huppert shows us clearly how greed
and ambition, not compassion and sisterhood, begin to take over
as her motivating forces.  She branches out into renting first
one spare room and then another to prostitute friends, to make
more money; she hires an assistant; she takes a lover who has
Gestapo connections and gets her special privileges; she begins
singing lessons and dreams of a career after the war as a singer.
While she is always a loving mother to her children, she is in a
loveless marriage and refuses to have sex with her husband.  It
is he who, after finding her is bed with her lover, turns her in
to the police for performing abortions.  In life as in films
under patriarchy to transgress the law of the Fathers is to
require punishment.  Perhaps at some other time she would have
gotten off with a fine or a short prison sentence.  But the Vichy
government was preaching the "restoration of morality" and they
needed to make an example of someone.  So Marie Latour was moved
from the provincial courts to Paris and was tried, convicted and
guillotined.

    The portrayal of this woman and her story in the film,
through the flash-back narration of her now grown son, is
strangely distant and removed.  The film does not sentimentalize.
All of the characters are multidimensional, neither heros nor
villains but just people with their needs and desires, joy and
desperation, their hurt and their revenge.  Hollywood would have
turned this material into a "weepy."  In Chabrol's hands one sits
horrified as the story unfolds, but without the emotional
identification with Marie Latour that would make us weep for her.
Nor does the film moralize, instead it raises moral dilemma after
moral dilemma which continue to haunt us long after we have left
the theater.  Because the film doesn't try to manipulate your
moral position, I suspect that there is room for a wide variety
of readings of this film, depending on your own sexual/political
views.  A pro-lifer might see it as showing that Marie Latour had
gotten her just reward, for example.  For feminists, it is a
vivid reminder, at a time when many people seem anxious to
criminalize abortion, that the mind set that sent Marie Latour to
the guillotine is very much still with us and needs to be opposed
with all our strength.

    For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
Women and Film.