May 1968. As France’s Fifth Republic shook, radical director Jean-Denis Bonan divided his time in the Paris streets between filming protests and the fictional hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. A Woman Kills lay unfinished and forgotten till 2010, a rough-edged film maudit from a tumultuous time.
Hélène Picard, “a runaway…[with] a penchant for homosexuality and violence”, is executed for the serial murder of prostitutes, yet the killings by a woman seem to continue. Her executioner Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin) meanwhile creepily romances beautiful policewoman Solange (Solange Pradel, pictured below), till his own guilt is revealed.
Vogueish alienation and distortion abound, as radio bulletins and Daniel Laloux’s Brechtian chansons punctuate the soundtrack, and Gérard De Battista’s handheld black-and-white camera adds to a satiric documentary style (Bonan started by working on newsreels). Bernard Vitet, a free jazz musician later in French proggers Gong, provides giddy slithers of strings, setting the stormy atmospheric weather. Bonan mixes German Expressionist shadows with jarring nouvelle vague edits, interspersed with long takes, such as Guilbeau’s silent, sensually engrossed transformation into the “female” killer. Merlin’s somnambulist pace dictated the scene’s mesmeric strangeness.
Eroticism shades into sadism, as women are sympathetically fetishised in artful nude sequences, and a sex scene is filmed beneath mattress springs (a la Russ Meyer, Kat Ellinger and Virginie Sélavy’s commentary notes). Guilbeau’s gender transgression joined a 1968 Hollywood trend for sometimes cross-dressing, post-Psycho killers led by The Boston Strangler, The Detective and No Way To Treat a Lady, the commentary observes. Here it makes him an outsider and existential anti-hero, though weight is also given to his victims.
Paris is seen from giddily high overhead, in foggy Pigalle neon or primordial stone alleys, till the final, madly protracted police hunt for Guilbeau through a city of rubbish and rubble. You can’t help but be aware of the police assaults on state-shaking protests happening nearby, as if just out of shot. A Woman Kills’ timeline mirrors May ‘68’s climax, with its hunt starting on May 24, as De Gaulle triggered the last, fatal battle between protestors and police.
Guilbeau ends burnt and bloody, bra showing, with half his wig and face melted. Cornered by Solange, he declares: “I’m not an animal. I’m not a man. I have no place on this earth…I’m an open wound. My mother did this to me. I wasn’t allowed to be a man.” In response, Solange is the woman who kills.
A Woman Kills is a raw underground emission, contraband smuggled back from May ’68. It was buried after no market was found for a film which wasn’t sexy or thrilling enough, a late nouvelle vague entry made as the wave even crashed for Godard, who veered into agitprop.
This Blu-ray debut’s extras include On the Margins: The Cursed Films of Jean-Denis Bonan, a newly updated 2015 doc which interviews the director and key collaborators, and Bonan’s early shorts, including Sadness of the Anthropophagi (1966), in which capitalist society is satirised with a chic shit-eating café, and Bonan’s leering outsider sings a scatological sex rant. Starting as his career sadly continued, it was banned everywhere.
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