Chabrol, detached but perceptive, takes one of his coolest looks at the instability of human nature in Les Biches, a film which could have been made as an emotional drama but which Chabrol prefers to treat as a suave and objective tragedy with disquieting undercurrents. While the flow of the work is exceptionally smooth, provoking the mind rather than the nerve-ends, and is therefore unusual enough to be set apart from conventional cinema, it still has allegiance to filmic precepts. (pp. 40-1)

For neither of the women [Frédérique and Why] is sympathy invited: to neither is compassion denied. But the aspect is clinical, the visuals serene and uninvolved. The locale shifts early from Paris to St Tropez, bland in winter sunshine…. And the formality of technique is subtle, amounting to one of the cinema's nearest approximations to ballet. The movements of figures, individually and also in...