Diabolique

Waters and the spaces that contain them are sites of mysteries both enticing and repulsive in Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques). The film’s opening credits appear and dissolve over the unquiet surface of a pool veiled in scum. Later, a bathtub becomes an instrument of murder, and that neglected pool an improvised sepulchre, enveloping human remains when full, resembling an open grave when drained. The very sight of it transformed into an empty cavity causes a woman to faint. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” someone says by way of explanation.

Beguilingly misanthropic, Diabolique (1955) was the high-water mark of Wages of Fear director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s commercial and critical success. Liberally adapted from the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac—the duo who also authored the source material for Hitchcock’s equally morbid Vertigo—Diabolique, set in a dreary provincial boy’s school, concerns the killing of the sadistic, miserly headmaster Michel (Paul Meurisse) by his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s spouse), daughter of a wealthy Venezuelan family and the school’s financial benefactor, and Nicole (Simone Signoret), one of the school’s teachers and Michel’s lover, a status no one bothers to hide. Their world is already poisonous: the staff is largely uninterested in, or simply cruel to, the students, the salads are spoiled, and the fish is rotten—which doesn’t dissuade Michel from forcing Christina to eat it in an appallingly unforgettable scene of humiliation. Someone mentions that it’s important to take holidays because “the body needs to eliminate its toxins,” yet it’s difficult to imagine how long a holiday one would require to flush out all the toxic sludge, both literal and figurative, that might accumulate in one’s body while inhabiting this place.

The murder seems to go off without a hitch, until Michel’s body, stashed in a large basket (rhymes with casket) and deposited in the school’s pool, fails to stay put. There’s a secret, malevolent force at work that may or may not be supernatural—and the film’s final scene maintains this ambiguity even after it seems to have been resolved. The ongoing failure to secure knowledge of the corpse’s whereabouts grinds away at both women’s psyches, most notably that of Christina, the more guilt-ridden of the two. Clouzot’s meticulous approach to suspense, notably devoid of scoring, depended greatly on his leads to map out the incremental twists in the narrative. Signoret is characteristically confident and evasive, her resolute coolness recalling Lauren Bacall’s best performances from the previous decade. Though less experienced than her co-stars, Madame Clouzot is just as superb, imbuing Christina with a distinctive fragility that reveals itself only gradually, building up to a climactic scene that encloses the actress in a Lewton-esque chamber of shadows and dread, and capitalizes beautifully on her arresting eyes and physical rigidity. In a tragic case of life imitating art, Clouzot shared her character’s precarious heart condition, which resulted in her death five years after this film’s completion.