Claude Chabrol makes the same film several times a year. The film is as confident and precise as ever but, as the French say, deja vu.

Its characters have ignoble goals, its plot is a sorry mixture of the shocking and the facetious, and its author seems to have mislaid most of his sense of small-town drama in an exhibition of metropolitan knowingness and boulevard melodrama.

Pure Chabrol.

Among Chabrol's better films, despite, or because of, its simplemindedness... Actually, what makes the film interesting, over and above the sheer technical expertise, is its evocation of physical passion.