The few articles I've read on this film all commented on how Hitchcockian and film noir it was, with its deliberately lush cinematography and female star, Sylvie Vartan, who is styled just like Kim Novak in Vertigo; there's also a lot of nods to The Paradine Case.
However the film, or rather story and play, it rips off shamelessly, is The Letter - right from the opening sequence of Vartan shooting a man dead and then claiming rape; only here the filmmaker cunningly reduces suspense (yes I am being ironic) by showing clearly that she's lying because she sets about ripping up her clothes with an accomplice. She has a trusting, doting husband - played by Michel Piccoli who you might recognise even if you're only a casual viewer of French cinema (like me) because he was in Belle de Jour - who then sets about hiring a lawyer, Tcheky Karyo, who then discovers she's a good time girl in love with the man she shot... but that doesn't stop him from falling in love with her anyway. There's even the "reveal" that the dead man had another lover, the lover having an incriminating piece of evidence which they use to blackmail.
Writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau is a renowned dirty old perv of world cinema and this movie is no exception - lots of scenes of hot young women lying naked adoring their elderly lover, elongated scenes of female hookers lounging about in a room making out.
For a while I went with this - for all it's shameless uncredited copyright infringement of Somerset Maugham, that's not a bad story - but it was just too silly and over the top.
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