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Violette Nozière

Violette Nozière

Movie · 1978 · 4 people

Violette Nozière is a 1978 French-Canadian co-production directed by Claude Chabrol, a period biographical and psychological crime drama. It tells a true story from 1933 France, in which an eighteen-year-old girl was accused of poisoning her parents. The screenplay draws on Jean-Marie Fritère's book about the case. The film won Isabelle Huppert the Best Actress award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival; the film itself also took the César for Best Supporting Actress.

The story rests on Violette's two separate lives. By day she seems the daughter of an ordinary family, while at night she builds relationships with much older men and is known in that world as a teenage prostitute. She is accused of poisoning her mother and father in order to claim their inheritance. Isabelle Huppert plays Violette, with Stéphane Audran as her mother Germaine Nozière and Jean Carmet as her father Baptiste Nozière. Lisa Langlois appears as Maddy, and the cast also includes Bernadette Lafont and Fabrice Luchini.

Chabrol wrote the screenplay with Odile Barski and Hervé Bromberger, and the production company was Cinévidéo. Placing the affair within the social climate of its time, Chabrol draws less a conventional crime story than a psychological portrait of a young woman.

DirectorClaude Chabrol
Production companyCinévidéo

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Cast

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Bernadette Lafont Bernadette Lafont Actor · died at 74 Dominique Zardi Actor · died at 79 Henri Attal Henri Attal Actor · died at 67 Jeanne Herviale Jeanne Herviale Actor · died at 80

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Through different eyes

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Claude Chabrol builds a real 1933 French case not as a whodunit but as a character portrait, and that choice is both the film's strength and its difficulty. The narrative centres on the split between Violette's daytime and night-time lives, and weighs a character's inner contradictions rather than racing towards a resolution. That detachment may leave viewers expecting suspense out in the cold at times. But Isabelle Huppert, in the performance that won her Best Actress at Cannes, turns the coolness into a mesmerising ambiguity. Stéphane Audran and Jean Carmet as the parents complete the portrait. Not an easy film to love, but one that keeps you thinking.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

The film is based on the true story of an eighteen-year-old girl accused of poisoning her parents in 1933 France. Chabrol is interested less in the crime itself than in the social climate around it. By day the daughter of an ordinary family, by night a different identity in the world of much older men: Violette's double life invites thought about the domestic pressures of the time, the urge to climb the social ladder and the narrow roles assigned to young women. That the inheritance lies at the heart of the accusation also brings the tension between money and morality into view. Worth seeing for anyone who wants to read a real case as a portrait of an era rather than as sensation.

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