WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

sol- Having located the man who his wife is having an affair with through a private investigator, a well-to-do Frenchmen pays the man an amicable visit in this slow burn thriller from Claude Chabrol. While the film ends on a strong note with a nicely ambiguous final shot, an emphasis on 'slow' really is required as the entire first half-hour moves sluggishly along until the point when husband and lover finally meet. The precious few minutes that the pair share together are unquestionably the strongest in the film with lots of tension and uncertainty in the air as the husband wins the lover's confidence by pretending that he has an open marriage. This intensity peaks as he listens to the lover talk about how gentle and loving his wife is, enlightening him to a side of his wife that he clearly has not seen for a while. The immediate aftermath of their meeting together is pretty riveting too, but following that the film again loses tension and slows down in its final third, never again achieving the excellence of the husband-lover meeting scene. The film almost feels a bit long in a way, but then on the same account, not quite enough time is dedicated to fleshing out whether love, lust or otherwise existed between the two adulterers. Michel Bouquet's towering lead performance goes a long way to keep the film afloat though. Same goes for Chabrol's fluid camera movements, Pierre Jansen's atmospheric score and the rather novel premise of husband and lover meeting on amicable terms. It is such a great idea that is no surprise to learn that the film has been remade no less than three times to date.

Claudio Carvalho In Versailles, the upper class Hélène (Stéphane Audran) and Charles Desvallees (Michel Bouquet) live a boring and detached life in their comfortable house, and their only common interest is their beloved son Michel. Every other day, Hélène commutes to Paris and Charles suspects that she might be cheating on him. He hires a private eye and a couple of days later, his suspicion is confirmed and the investigator tells that Hélène is having a love affair with the writer Victor Pégala (Maurice Ronet) and delivers a picture of her lover with his address to him. Charles visits Victor in his apartment in Paris and introduces himself as Hélène's husband, and lures him telling that he has an agreement with his wife that tells details of her encounters. Out of the blue, Charles hits Victor's head with a statue and kills him. Then he dumps the body in a dirty lake and comes back home. Sooner, detectives Duval (Michel Duchaussoy) and Gobet (Guy Marly) interview Hélène explaining that Victor is missing and her name is in her address book. When Hélène finds the picture of Victor in the pocket of Charles's jacket, she destroys the evidence and learns that her husband loves her. But the police inspectors are coming to their house again to talk to Charles. "La Femme Infidèle" a.k.a. "The Unfaithful Wife", is another magnificent thriller by the master of suspense Claude Chabrol. The story of a couple with a routine life lacking passion and sex that is revitalized by the adultery of the wife and the murder of her lover by her husband is sort of ironical and tragic. The open conclusion is left to the interpretation of the viewer and is also a trademark of Chabrol. In 2002, Adrian Lyne remade this film without the ambiguity of the original film and including an inexistent moral dilemma, as the usual pitiful practice of Hollywood industry. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): Not Available

cribyn44 I only managed to get just past the point of the husband's murder of his wife's lover before switching off because it was far too late to continue with this dulling example of so-called French "intellectual chic" of the 1960s. Some examples back then were so bad - "deep intellectual musing" over just a cup of coffee or glass of wine etc. Here, we fell about laughing about two things. One, whenever the husband's vivacious and flirty mini-skirted secretary made her far too infrequent flighty appearances on screen - that really brought the screen to life. Two, which had us both laughing out loud: the scene where the husband bounds up the body of the murdered lover, struggles the whole time he is dragging it out of the latter's ground floor flat to push it with difficulty into the boot of his car, in broad daylight and right opposite an apartment block with windows (a previous scene had shown a window cleaner at the apartment block) - and yet, and yet, not a single car passes by the whole time. Nor, however much one tries to find them on screen, can a single human being be seen. And this is presumably in the morning or afternoon of a busy Parisian day in the suburb of Neuilly. What a lucky tourist it would be to find such peace and quiet anywhere today in modern day Paris. And yet again, another pretentious French film from the 1960s.

Alice Liddel 'The Unfaithful Wife' is really about a faithful husband, who will kill to save his marriage. This kind of fidelity is a chilling exercise of power - the film's many point-of-view shots are mostly his - with adultery a rebellion, a bid for freedom that must be crushed. It's not enough that Charles uncovers his wife's lover, he must sit on the bed they make love on, drink the same drink...Chabrol's most perfect film, where character inertia is expressed in blatant artifice, both in the home and in 'nature'; where a materialist filming of materialists conceals an austere spirituality, embodied in those Fateful policemen. Like his namesake Bovary, Charles sleeps when his exquisitely beautiful wife offers herself to him. He deserves what he gets.