A WOMAN KILLS (aka La Femme Bourreau) *** France 1968 Dir: Jean-Denis Bonan. 70 mins
It is a crying shame that A WOMAN KILLS or to give it its original French title La femme Bourreau is only finding audiences in the 21st Century. As you may or may not know this film, despite its excellent quality as a cinema piece of its time, sadly never found distribution until 2014. Now of course there are many films out there that struggle to find distribution for many reasons but A WOMAN KILLS distribution issues were probably political based. In the late 1960s France was going through a series of Labour strikes and add in students protests, the country was being turned upside down. From an outside perspective the streets of France was not the sophisticated place it portrayed it be in cinema. This film also doesn’t fit well in the French New Wave cinema of the time instead it sits more in the experimental side of movies, so instead sat unwanted and unseen for years until Luna Park Films gave it the restoration treatment.
Now Radiance Films have put A WOMAN KILLS out on Blu-ray for a wider audience to see and it is a film that has to be seen to truly appreciate its daring quality. The setting is Paris, France in the 1960s a time where change was happening worldwide but for the people of France a killer stalked the streets. A prostitute known as Hélène Picard is sentenced to death for several horrific murders and on 22nd March 1968 she is finally executed by the executioner Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin). The people of France breathe a sigh of relief but its only a short reprieve as the murders start up again. Could the wrong person have been executed or is it a copycat killer?
An investigation is a launched with police woman Solange Lebas (Solange Pradel) placed in charge to find the truth and hopefully the culprit of this new string of murders. With only a few clues which mostly point to a woman potentially being behind the murders there are few clues to work out who it is. While the investigation goes on Solange begins an affair with Louis which as we soon will discover will muddy the waters of her investigation when it is revealed who the killer they are looking for is.
Putting aside any controversy that Director had Jean-Denis Bonan had gained from his earlier short films and producer Anatole Dauman’s (HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR) (1959) and (THE BEAST) (1975) own controversy, A WOMAN KILLS quite possibly could have been hailed as a masterpiece in its time. As history tells us this didn’t happen, but Jean-Denis Bonan’s clever writing alongside his experimental style of filmmaking manages to blend several genres into a 70 minute movie which by any standards is no easy task. It is part romance, thriller, police procedural all the while making a comment on France of the time without fully saying it. Is it obvious who the killer is from the start? Sure but don’t let that distract you from what is a film that thankfully has been lovingly restored and brought back out of the vaults for a whole new audience to give it the love it much rightfully deserves.
Review by Peter ‘Witchfinder‘ Hopkins