The strongest asset of "Les Bonnes Femmes" are the Femmes themselves: four talented French actresses, each with her own distinctive acting style, two were familiar to me (Audran and Lafont - few actresses epitomize better the spirit of that era in French cinema), the other two unfamiliar (Joano and Saint-Simon). Claude Chabrol adopts a free-form / slice-of-life narrative style here, and sometimes it comes across as beautiful spontaneity (the sequence at the zoo); more often, however, it comes across as pure shapelessness (the pool scene goes on for an excruciatingly long time). And the ugly, cynical (not to mention dumbfounding) ending puts the final nail in the coffin. ** out of 4.
Review of The Good Time Girls
