A women’s affair: the true story that inspired Claude Chabrol’s film
In 1988, Isabelle Huppert and Marie Trintignant left their mark on French cinema with this drama on abortion. It was rebroadcast at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Veil Law, which decriminalized it precisely on January 17, 1975.
It took ten years for Claude Chabrol film again Isabelle Huppert after the success of Violette Nozière, which earned the young actress the Cannes laurels in 78. This Women’s businessto be seen again on France 5 this Friday evening, takes up this same idea of the emancipatory quest of a woman ready to do anything to escape her class. Also with Marie Trintignantwho had told in First his collaboration with the filmmaker, four years before Betty.
Chabrol-Huppert, happy connections
In 1988, Claude Chabrol was interested in “A women’s affair”in other words, abortion. To address this still sensitive subject, ten years after its legalization in France, the filmmaker chooses to put into images a true story, told in a book by Fancis Szpiner.
That of Marie-Louise Giraud, a “angel maker” guillotined by the Vichy regime in 1943.
On screen, it is Isabelle Huppert who takes on his features. She is Marie, a mother of two, struggling to make ends meet while her husband is a prisoner in Germany. One day, she helps her neighbor have an abortion. Very quickly, local women spread the word and asked him for help to put an end to unwanted pregnancies. An activity which turns out to be profitable and which changes Marie’s life… until her loss.
Marie-Louise, who inspired the character of Marie in Claude Chabrol, lives in Normandy, in Cherbourg, when the Second World War begins. When her husband returns from Germany, injured and unable to work, she must provide for the entire family. They live hard. Everything changes in the summer of 1940. She comes to the aid of a neighbor, Gisèle, who is trying to have an abortion. When she receives an expensive phonograph from her, Marie-Louise decides to offer her services for payment.
In two years, she allegedly performed 25 abortions, most of them on prostitutes from whom she rented rooms. If abortion was a crime when she started her activity, it becomes “crime against state security” in February 1942. The Vichy regime provided for the death penalty for “angel makers”.
In October 1942, an anonymous letter denounced its practices. Tried a few months after her arrest, she was finally guillotined in July 1943. Only Marshal Pétain could have pardoned her, which he refused.
Thirty years later, it was the tragic story of Marie-Louise Giraud that inspired Simone Veil. In 2014, in the book “Men remember it too”she said that at the end of the 1950s, when she worked in the prison administration, the affair still haunted many secretaries. A case “which had deeply traumatized them”.
In 2021, the film The Event brought this important social subject back to the heart of discussions. Here is an extract from our review of this work, which completes A women’s affair while strongly differentiating from it:
“At the exit of The Eventher autobiographical novel where Annie Ernaux recounted her journey to have a clandestine abortion in France in the sixties, the author explained that she wanted to resist “with lyricism and anger. » By adapting said prose, Audrey Diwan therefore saw before her, an a priori marked path on which her steps had to somehow respect a cadence, a mood. To the lyricism, the director therefore responds with an (almost) square image which imprisons a being that the camera follows closely. “There had to be constraint for there to be an issue. »once affirmed Chabrol scrutinizing Huppert, maker of angels, between four very tight walls in his Women’s businessa film opposite this one. In Audrey Diwan, the off-camera serves as a threat, the frame becoming a sanctuary where the heroine – deemed impure by an era – protects herself, fights and stands ready. Right especially. The off-screen, invisible by nature, prevents the exhibition of a reconstructed era and adds by subtraction an additional timelessness (the fight continues). As for the ” anger “, the mere fact of seeing Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei, an event in her own right!) go to the end of her fight with the apprehensions of a queen and an equally sovereign calm is the expression of an underground rage whose vibrations fracture the world.”
Audrey Diwan’s Event was released in the USA in the midst of a challenge to abortion
