User Reviews

Claude Chabrol made a film before Les bonnes femmes, Les Cousins, which is what made him known as part of the French New Wave (he preceded Truffaut and Godard by a year). But viewing Les bonnes femmes before seeing Les Cousins, I almost feel like this is a director's first film, for a director like Chabrol, as it shows a lot of his concerns as a filmmaker: an observational stance with women, their sexuality and their distance from the opposite sex, the mundane in a bourgeois life, and the Hitchcock angle of danger and the unknown. It's also in line with the other Nouvelle Vague films in the sense that the filmmaker has broken out of any ties to a studio or sets, and everything is out in the streets or on location in places like nightclubs and music halls and swimming pools, and usually with hand-held cameras and (seeming) improvisation with the actors. This is a gritty, on-the-streets Chabrol one isn't used to from seeing films like This Man Must Die and The Butcher.

And yet I don't know if I can say it's as great as the big early films of the period like The 400 Blows and Breathless. Chabrol's film does carry, I'm sure, some personal weight. And he's interested in these girls, their casual life and goings-on, and how so easily one of them can be lured by a mysterious man in a mustache who follows them around in a motorcycle. But it's such a loosely structured film- barely a plot, even less, if you can imagine, than Breathless- that it takes a moment for us to realize something is going on. Which perhaps is part of Chabrol's angle here: like Fellini's film I Vitelloni, we're just watching these four girls in their everyday occurrences, going to a zoo, going to a nightclub and hooking up with two (obnoxious) strangers, going to a music gall where one of the girls is secretly singing and doesn't want to go on for fear of embarrassment of the others seeing her, and just walking around. Or, as well, the complacency of working at a TV store where no one comes in.

We are drawn in to these girls and who they are, however limited they're really shown as full characters (more-so Chabrol is interested, I think, in these girls as 'types' possibly, or in looking at them in a semi-documentary perspective). And metaphor is used from time to time; I'm sure the visit to the zoo, and Chabrol's carefully timed and composed reaction shots of the animals in the cages, is deliberate as to the girls' own self-prison of 20-something frivolity. And there's also the matter, again, of the motorcycle guy, who somehow charms this girl. Actually not somehow, as in this sort of Nouvelle Vague film-world it's precisely the kind of guy a girl would fall for, even one seemingly so uptight as the one he goes after. Seeing how this plays out between them can go one of two ways, and how Chabrol shows it in the last fifteen minutes is totally masterful. There's a sense of the inevitable, but he keeps us uncertain as an audience, which is good. I'm glad I couldn't quite see where the ending would go, though when it came it made sense and was satisfying (it even raised up the worth of the film overall a full notch).

But a masterpiece? Probably not. It's like a breezy fling through a Parisian quarter, on the dark streets and cool nights with beautiful girls and not-so-beautiful but flirty men, and it has some wonderful moments. It just doesn't add up completely into something that makes you want to shake your friend up and say "You MUST watch this!" like 400 Blows, or even The Butcher.

i liked this film. it has an ambigious quality about it, almost paradoxical. it has a feel of a documentary and is observational in nature, yet there is a obvious message or view taken by chabrol and the women in this film. they're doomed objects of desire for men. the women have this elusive quality about them, they're beautiful and somewhat misguided about the men in thier lives. they seem unattainable, yet vulnerable to a ominous unspoken danger that awaits them that is denoted by the music. there's this creepy yet mysterious sounding music that runs through the film when the female characters roam through the streets. and for some reason, all the men in this movie are misogynist jerks! they disrespect these women and believe they're entitled to them. yet, these women flirt with them and passively resist them for most of the film. chabrol lovingly shoots these women and has affection for them, but also sadness at their romantic naivety about the men in their lives that will bring them doom.

The film's English title "The Good Time Girls" capture the essence of the film--four different women, working in a shop, moonlighting as they are not rich, and hoping to find a decent spouse. The shop itself presents the lecherous owner (who "keeps his distance") and an elderly cashier who hides her interest in BDSM (her fetish is a cloth dipped in the blood of a BDSM convict who was guillotined, with an insinuated relationship with a customer who asks her for money and gets it!), a beautiful Stephane Audran (moonlighting as a singer), and the attractive Clotilde Joano. And there is a murder, which hangs in the air without the outcome discussed further--one of the weak points of the over-rated film.

A friend of mine - a film scholar - once said that this film shouldn't work but it does. He was absolutely right. I cannot think of one good reason why this film should be as good as it is. The tone is observational, like many films of the "New Wave," but it lacks the frenetic energy of Godard, or the jaded lyricism of Truffaut. The tone of the film changes drastically at several points, and in any other film this would become a big turn off. But a strand of sincere honesty about the characters and their emotions holds the film together, stronger than any formality.

Let the film take you where it wants you to go, and the experience is wonderful.

Just to prove that portraying males as all-negative is nothing new, see Les Bonnes Femmes: the employer with wandering hands, the drippy suitor, his bossy Dad, the snobbish fiancé, the lurking psycho, the bad-jokes bully-boy and his fatty hanger-on, the absent lad on national service. Every one of them is no good. And yet the four shop-assistants are no better, they exist only for the men. Whatever the fellows throw at them, they're up for it. It's a chilling worldview, with a cynical twist at the end, (plus a tacked-on coda that seems to be from another movie). Along the way, there's some really hammy acting from the girls' employer that clashes badly with the realistic mood, and some longueurs as the girls get bored at work and we get bored right along with them. The young Bernadette Lafont is a joy, but she fades out in Reel Three when the lovely Clotilde Joano comes to the fore. Whatever happened to Clotilde? Her subsequent career was undistinguished, and she died at age 42. This is mostly a watchable slice of Paris life from the late 50s, although the Algerians who caused so much mayhem only a few years later are nowhere to be seen.

Chabrol's career is often seen as moving from the naturalism of his early films to the extreme stylisation of his great mid-period. It's not as simple as that, but in 'Les Bonnes Femmes', Chabrol achieves a balance between the two that he has rarely equalled. The story of four shopgirls, their work and social lives, has all the plotless and poignant banality of realism, while the closing third, with its move from Paris to the country, its seducer-cum-motorbike-riding-devil (reg. no.: 666) talking about the Creator, as little schoolboys called Balthasar pass by; and its closing vision of Hell/Purgatory bespeak a more Cocteau-like world of mythology and religion. But there is Cocteau too in the framing of Jacqueline in the shop window, while Chabrol's filming of treacherous nature later on is uncommonly vivid. Although 'Bonnes' is his least typical film, it is also his most lovable, and seems to get richer with the years.

Les bonnes femmes (1960), directed by Claude Chabrol, was shown in the U.S. with the title The Good Time Girls. The film depicts the lives of four Parisian shopgirls. (I guess now we would call them retail clerks, but in 1960 they were shopgirls.)

The women are all looking for romance, and they do no one any harm, but their lives are not filled with the glamor and excitement that the term "good time girls" evokes. They go to music halls, public swimming pools, and the zoo. They let men cruising by in cars pick them up. They stay out all night and stumble half asleep into work the next day. One of them is pursued and courted by a mysterious motorcyclist.

All four young women are attractive. Three of them went on to have important careers in the French cinema--Bernadette Lafont , Clotilde Joano, and Stéphane Audran. (Audran later married director Chabrol,)

Although Chabrol is a superb director, and the actors are talented, the film just didn't work for me. The young women had vacant lives, they had no aspirations or dreams of something different, and they had a naiveté that was sad rather than charming.

This is a movie worth seeing if you have a particular interest in the French New Wave, in Claude Chabrol, or in the young actors who were not yet major stars. I wouldn't seek it out as casual viewing. We saw it on VHS, and it worked well on the small screen.

The 'overacting of the boss' mentioned in the previous comment is totally intentional! Chabrol is playing around with genres here, exaggerating for effect. He straddles the fence between comedy and tragedy for the entire film, veering this way and that whenever it serves his purpose: to paint an allegory of absurd modern existence through the soul of modern young females. The surreal modern music at the beginning clues you in, and the awesome final scene with the empty, tragic eyes of the girl finding her only happiness when a man asks her to dance brings it all together beautifully. Man! what a great film! I didn't want to leave the theater after watching it twice in a row, but I was too tired. As disappointing as Chabrol's films have been to me over the years, this one was a jackhammer of a surprise. The Hitchcock elements are there but they don't dominate and straitjacket everything else. On a level with "Breathless," "Shoot the Piano Player," yet completely unlike either of them, this film defines the "New Wave" aesthetic, which to this day, some forty years later provides a standard for Tarantino types to strive for. Films like these can only be directed by masters who have the nerve and audacity to bend genres to their whim and speak their ultimate truth through the nature of the medium itself.

The other reviewers cover this film perfectly--particularly the one by DuMonteil. So will just add things that occurred to me.

This film follows the lives of 4 Parisian shop-girls: one wants love one wants money etc...

One problem with this film is there are too many shop-girls to follow. And a couple of them look just alike. The story line skits around and all this confuses you.

It also tries to be funny and isn't--goofy zany and bizarre yes done pretty well but this isn't hard to do. The scene in the restaurant with the motorcycle rider hitting his head on the table went on far too long. Also it took me quite some time to convince myself of what happened at the end.

I also like watching these to see the street scenes and cars from the era of my childhood.

Recommend ?--probably not unless you are like me and like looking at the Deux Chevauxs and Panhards etc...

The film shows a weekend in the lives of four Parisian shop girls, from their Friday night out in the nightclubs of Paris through to a Sunday outing into the countryside. All four dream of escaping their humdrum existence: Ginette (Stephane Audran) is trying to start an alternative career as a music hall singer, Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is engaged to a shop owner, Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is wined and dined by two married businessmen, and Jacqueline (Clothilde Joano) falls in love with a biker who is stalking her. The monotony of the girls' lives is shown as they spend Saturday in the shop just waiting for the moment when they can go home. At the same time Chabrol shows a fascinating portrait of the city at work and at play. The storyline holds the viewer's interest, the acting is excellent (especially Lafont, and despite some terrible overacting from the girl's boss), and the director hints at some of the gruesome shocks of his later films.

'Les bonnes femmes', more than a half century on, is a curious piece of 'nouvelle vague' cinema. Black and white, it lends a sadness to a grey Paris, at a time when France discovers adolescence and and yearnings of the young working class. Claude Chabrol tells the tale of four shop girls looking for love in the wrong places. And yet,Jacqueline, understatedly played by the delicious Clotilde Joano, oddly finds it, despite disappoint, as the camera fades out on the light in her eyes as she dances with an unknown man in a nightclub. The young Stephane Audran and Bernadette LaFont and Lucille Saint Simon are in the cast. Pierre Bertin doesn't quite steal a scene as the lecherous Monsieur Balin. And we see a Paris that is no more; a Paris prey to plastic bombs and terrorist attacks in a France entering its ninth year of war in Algeria.

I watched this movie by a coincidence zapping around, and I couldn't stop watching. The movie was made 4 years before I was born, but I like to see old films of this kind. And of course, the French movies of any year, always casting beautiful actresses. The story is simple, and moves very slowly forward. But maybe this is a realistic portrait of young parisiennes in 1960. It's sure gives me some feeling of the nightlife in Paris then. Clotilde Joano is "Jacqueline", who faces a tragic ending in this movie. I have tried to find out some more about this classic and beautiful actor, but the internet contains very little information beside her biography, and that she was Swiss, and died in 1974. If anyone can give me some more information about her, I would appreciate it. If you are going to see an black and white European movie this weekend, I can recommend Les Bonnes Femmes.

Chabrol,although labeled "Nouvelle Vague" has never forgotten to tell a story.It has made him the heir of a long tradition of the psychological French thriller (Clouzot,Duvivier,Decoin).Even his earlier efforts ("Le Beau Serge" "A Double Tour" "Les Cousins" ) had painstaking well-constructed screenplays .But "Les Bonnes Femmes " gives way beneath the weaknesses of the Nouvelle Vague and succumbs to their vices:a vague story,ponderous jokes,mediocre performances (mainly the male ones)and a lot of padding.At a pinch,one can save Clotilde Joano's character and the terrible fate which lays in store for her.But the main reason why you would watch this non-Chabrolesque film is Stephane Audran's presence: she would be his star when he peaked in the 1968-1973 years.The films he made then were his very own and had nothing to do with the N.V. fortunately.

A film by the first Chabrol, very different from his deliberate and soberly planned detective stories of the seventies and in line with the first nouvelle vague: brash, fresh, arrogantly groundbreaking, but often gratuitous and capricious pyrotechnics, making indiscriminate use of all the film resources available.

To do this, it benefits from the magnificent cinematography of Henri Decae, who played a decisive role in many of the films of the first stage of the nouvelle vague (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, Les 400 coups, or Le beau Serge by Chabrol himself).

Naturally many magnificent scenes in the streets of Paris, especially at night; some nouvelle vague eroticism, rather brainless young ladies who spend their time flirting, pouting, waddling and pronouncing the consonants in capricious tones, buffoonish and irritating male characters, and an innovative and at times enormously interesting sense of rhythm.

The most interesting thing is the modern feminist tone that shows a group of young women without possibilities or a future, at the mercy of abusive men (even criminals) who use them without regard.

There are scenes of a strong symbolic character, others that are a display of staging, many are dead times of variable interest. The scenes of the girls getting bored in the store (in clear correspondence with the caged animals in the zoo) are the most brilliant of the film.

The problem is that the film lacks rhythm, many of the plot lines are not interesting, the comedy character is at times crude, and many scenes are just bad jokes. Naturally there is much in it of the supposed virtues of the nouvelle vague, of that "anything goes, if it turns out spontaneously", which makes the results of its great authors so irregular.

Another problem is that it can frustrate the viewer's expectations, who expect a policeman and find an unclassifiable comedy. As always in Chabrol, during the first hour hardly anything happens, but in this case it's not like much happens in the rest of the film either.

In the cast, two of the actresses stand out: Stephane Audran is the one who takes the role with the greatest brilliance, and she is absolutely magnificent. Bernadette Laffont is beautiful, but her role once again doesn't allow her to shine beyond the sexy and provocative young lady.

A film of enormous interest, which serves to remind us of Chabrol's participation in the nouvelle vague (whose most famous and recognizable films are later and of a markedly different and more cerebral style).