True story of the last woman to be guillotined in France, a cottage-industry abortionist who performed the "service" twenty-three times during the Second World War. The subject almost screams with a Zola-esque squalor (the commonplace dreams of a singing career, the prostitute housemate, the collaborationist lover), but Claude Chabrol stifles this with his noncommittal and noninflammatory manner: cautious, circumspect, matter-of-fact as to the how-to details, a little emotionally constipated. Fastidiously well made though it is, the movie never really grabs you, and it totally lets go at the end by taking a very long time over the inevitable and the invariable: the cutting of the condemned's hair, the walk to the scaffold -- all that. With Isabelle Huppert and Marie Trintignant. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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