Written and Directed by Jean-Denis Bonan (Océaniques - Des idées des hommes des oeuvres TV Series 1987–1992). The Cinematographer was Gérard de Battista (Clémentine Tango (1982)). Music was by Bernard Vitet.
Here's a French New Wave Film that couldn't find a distributor. It was shot and then shelved for over 40 years. It was one of those films that had no big name stars and it had the qualities of what we here in the US see as Transitional Noir the blend of genres.
In the US during 1950s Hollywood was loosing their audiences to competition with TV. Previously the pool of dark themes and subject matter that Noir forged into stylish films, were held in check by a voluntary Motion Picture Production Code. Think of Hollywood productions under the Code as having a guardrail of violence on one side and a guardrail of sex and taboo subjects on the other. When the Big Studios began to get serious competition from television, they needed an edge to get butts out of the living rooms and into the theaters they began to no longer enforce the code and to explore more previously banned subject matter. The independent producers in competition with the Hollywood Studios tried to out do them by being the avaunt guard of exploiting the new freedoms. The legal challenges of, and ever changing benchmarks to the obscenity laws and the old taboo themes weakened the bulwarks of the pool and that arbitrary "dam" holding back all creativity burst out with predictable results.
So those Film Noir that went too far over the line depicting violence started getting classified as Horror, Thriller (even though they were just say, showing the effects of a gunshot wound, or dealing with weird serial killers, maniacs, and psychotics, etc.). Those that went too far depicting sexual, drug, torture, etc., situations were being lumped into or classed as various Exploitation flicks, (even though they are relatively tame comparably to today's films). The the noir-ish films that dealt with everything else, except Crime, concerning the human condition were labeled Dramas and Suspense. Those that tried new techniques, lenses, etc., were labeled Experimental. These Film Noir we label the Transitional Noir.
La femme bourreau aka A Woman Kills sat on the shelves until it was restored and released in 2010.
The film stars Claude Merlin as Louis Guilbeau, Solange Pradel as Solange Lebas. Myriam Mézières as Suzy l'assistante, Jackie Raynal as Angèle Catherine Deville as Brigitte Alain-Yves Beaujour as Le père Jourbeau, Velly Beguard as Cathy (as Vély Bégard) Bernard Letrou as Le narrateur (V.O. voice) Agnès Bonan as La femme interviewée (female interviewee) , Paul Bonan as L'homme interviewé, Bernard Bonan as L'étudiant interviewé, Serge Moati as L'inspecteur Moati, Jean-Denis Bonan as Un flic (a cop) and Jean Rollin as Un flic (a cop).
It's easy to read the subtext of this one. A woman searches the draws of a sort of highboy, We don't know what she is searching for until we see her pull out a knife.
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Then we get a disorienting cut to a careening scramble down a narrow alley that ends in a dark passageway to a door.
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Then a strange man / priest / sky pilot, lit from behind giving him a spiritual look is saying words. This is followed by a cell window seen from the outside. Then we see a heavy, serious looking door with a big lock. A man shrouded in shadow is on one side of it. It is a door that looks quite permanent. It's apparently the Petite Roquette prison in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, on the rue de la Roquette.
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It was an execution. The man is the executioner is Louis Guilbeau. A civil service employee who looks about thirty years old. He got the job serving in Algeria during the war.
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| Claude Merlin as Louis Guilbeau |
The death sentence was carried out on a woman Hélène Picard a serial killer of prostitutes. That was her last moments passing before our eyes. Her victims were all women of the night, but various voice overs inform us that the killings continued after the execution. The state executed the wrong person.
So this Louis, our professional executioner, requests a leave from the job. He's cracking up. He too walks narrow corridors and we hear him telling a police investigator Solange Lebas that he is getting death threats in the mail. Whether by design, or the result of the film never being polished and released to theaters, we never see her, or hear her answer him in that sequence.
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Louis then tells Solange that he made it up because he wanted to meet her. They have an affair and of course it all goes Noirsville as we get a succession of the serial killer prostitute victims paraded before us.
Noirsville
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| Solange Pradel as Solange Lebas |
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It's a film that all Aficio-Noir-dos and Noir-istas should check out. It's an interesting mix that because of it's low budget, tries to create a narrative of a mad man with various rough drafts and seemingly incomplete pieces that lend themselves to your own personal interpretations. Example, was it originally going for one thing but had to settle for something else, but there's enough of the original there for speculation.
It is also a time capsule for late 1960's Paris and Belleville especially around the Place des Fêtes that was (like L.A.'s Bunker Hill, and New York City's lower Eastside tenements and along Third Ave) torn down and renovated.
It reminds me of low budget American Exploitation and Grindhouse flicks from the 1960s. 7/10
"A word on the music, to finish, which alternates instrumental free-jazz pieces composed by Bernard Vitet and songs performed by actor Daniel Laloux. Offbeat texts which are reminiscent of those of Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem from the same period. A surprising mixture which reinforces our idea that The Executioner Woman is definitely an atypical work which truly deserved a second birth." (Psychovision by Flint)
?Once again, the story of The Executioner's Woman is the story of an escape. The flight of a man chased by the police, in a prosaic way, the flight of a man harassed by his ghosts more simply. Navigating between surrealism and German expressionism, tinged with an elegant eroticism, The Executioner's Woman is a film that is worth the detour because it is a beautiful trace of what can happen when we decide to get off the well-trodden path of storytelling. too linear. For allowing us to discover this strange filmmaker, we can only warmly thank the Luna Park Films team." (Par Marc BOUSQUET)
"Fortunately, we no longer need to ask permission from censors, at least not about Bonan’s films. He’s a textbook example of what critics call a cineaste maudit, those cursed and damned filmmakers who find a coterie of defenders while others shun or dismiss them. They work in the margins and may feel freer for it."
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