During the month of August 2000, it felt like one couldn’t watch television for 10 minutes without seeing a commercial for the film COYOTE UGLY. These advertisements showed us girls who dressed up in provocative costumes, danced on top of a bar, poured water all over each other, and entertained the gawking male customers with their antics. Even though the film was presumably based on real girls who work in a real bar, one couldn’t help but get the feeling that the girls and their various shenanigans had been brought to a fever pitch. The things they did seemed to be TOO mischievious to be real, and even the way the characters were introduced in the commercials (“the Boss”, “the Flame”, “the Dreamer”, etc.) made the film (which I’ve not seen, so forgive me if I’m merely being presumptuous, though I understand I’m not far off) seem like pure fantasy.

Now consider Claude Chabrol’s 40-year-old masterpiece LES BONNES FEMMES (which I saw for the first time around the time of COYOTE UGLY's release, which would explain my comparison). Like COYOTE UGLY, it centers around the lives of a group of young lovelies who work together. It shows the ways in which they interact and have fun, and how they are objectified by the men who they encounter. However, unlike Coyote Ugly, these girls seem to have been plucked from the real world, rather than created in a genetic laboratory on the backlot of a Hollywood studio. They cannot be quite so easily pigeonholed as their multiplex-invading counterparts.

Much of the action in LES BONNES FEMMES centers around an electrical-appliance boutique in Paris, at which the four femmes of the title are employed, but we mainly get to know them through their interactions outside of work. Jane (“not Jeanne”, she insists), played by Bernadette Lafont, is flirtatious and sexually frank, and is seen early in the film walking home from one date and getting picked up by another man. Rita (Lucille Saint-Simon) is engaged to be married but still enjoys the company of her friends, as well as taking the opportunity to torment the store’s delivery boy. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) shares an apartment with Jane and also works in the store, but also relishes the times that she doesn’t have to spend with her co-workers.

The new girl in the shop is named Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano). Although she tags along with Jane early in the film when she is picked up, what Jacqueline really seeks is true love. She is more shy and serious than her co-workers, but is at heart an innocent. She is asked out by several men near the beginning of the film, but finds that she is falling in love with a man with a motorcycle who has been following her. As some have said, the difference between actively pursuing a girl and stalking her lies in the mind of the girl being followed, and Jacqueline interprets the man’s intentions as being purely noble. (More on this later).

One of the many interesting aspects of the film is the way the girls attempt to break free of their place of employment. Theirs are dead-end jobs (indeed, the store doesn’t seem to get many customers), and each has figured out a way to deal with this reality. Jane seems to regard her employment as a necessary evil, working as little as possible and then enjoying herself as much as possible when not working. Rita passes the time by thinking of and talking about her fiancée, who loves her but tries to inflict culture upon her so she’ll be more acceptable to his parents. Ginette refuses to go out with the other girls in the evenings, but this is not necessarily because she dislikes them as much as it is due to her other job, singing in a music hall. And Jacqueline waits for the time when the man on the motorcycle will approach her and take her away from her go-nowhere life.

There is a great sequence near the center of the film, when Rita’s fiancée takes Rita, Jane, and Jacqueline to a music hall. In the wings, we see Ginette looking out into the audience with the great deal of anxiety, because she knows her co-workers are in attendance, and because she is embarrassed to sing in front of them because she knows she’ll be hassled by the girls at work the next day. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time onstage, I know the feeling that a performer gets when some people he or she spends a lot of time with are watching. You might have given the very same performance twenty times before that night, but the people you know who are in the audience make this show different, and because a performer wants nothing more than to make every performance feel exactly the same, this is unnerving. After a great deal of fretting, Ginette goes out onstage in disguise and sings (quite well, actually), but is recognized anyway. After her song, she runs down to her dressing room and slams the door behind her before her co-workers can find her.

Near the end of the film, the story begins to shift towards Jacqueline and her motorcyclist. When two men start giving her and the other girls a hard time at a public pool, he comes to their rescue, then introduces himself to Jacqueline. It’s love, it seems, and in the next scene (the next morning, most likely) we see Jacqueline and the man (whose name is André) riding the motorcycle into the country. They stop at a restaurant, and while they eat André begins to joke around and ends up going a bit too far. It’s an awkward moment, but Jacqueline hardly seems to notice, she’s so dumbfounded at her good luck. The audience starts to get signs that André might be more than what he seems, such as when he tells her, in a more romantic moment, how much he loves her neck. “It’s so long and slender”, he adds. From that point on, their story gets grimmer and grimmer, until the audience’s worst fears are realized, and Jacqueline ends up dead.

It is to Chabrol’s credit as a director that the darker elements of the story don’t feel out of place. Looking at the film from the perspective of today’s society, Jacqueline’s death would almost be expected, since André’s active pursuit of her gives us the impression that he’s a stalker. However, her untimely end is no less shocking. We see how idealistic she is, how romantic and in love with the idea of being in love, and we want nothing more than to see her happy.

Chabrol has genuine affection for all four girls, and realizes that their youthfulness gives them license to have fun and to seek happiness for themselves. Because of the low-skill, low-pay nature of their job, they have more freedom to do what they want, and aren’t held back by their responsibility to their work, families, and the like. The scenes where the girls interact feel similar to the early scenes in his 1996 films LA CÉRÉMONIE that feature Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert, simply enjoying each other’s company completely unself-consciously.

All four of the main performances are excellent, and it’s sort of a shame that the actresses aren’t better-known today. Bernadette Lafont, so playful and fun, starred in Jean Eustache’s masterpiece LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN about a dozen years after this film, and Stéphane Audran has had a long career in French film (especially in further collaborations with Chabrol), but Lucille Saint-Simon and Clotilde Joano, who are just as good, have seemingly moved on to other professions. This seems to echo what the film is saying about the arbitrariness of life, that sometimes a decision might seem to lead to one thing, but instead leads to something entirely different, and it’s almost impossible to tell what exactly is going to happen until it actually does.

The final scene of LES BONNES FEMMES was a bit of a head-scratcher for me the first time I saw the film, but I think I understand it more now. In this scene, a sad-eyed girl we haven’t seen before sits alone next to a dance floor. She is approached by a man, who takes her out to the dance floor. The disco ball spins and casts light down on the dancers, and slowly a sweet smile spreads across the girl’s face. What Chabrol seems to be saying here is that moments of happiness in our youth are fleeting, but that they must be enjoyed while they’re occurring. We don’t know what has happened to the girl before, or what will happen to her, or even who the man is, but none of that is important. What is truly important is her smile.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV