Director Claude Chabrol is the French version of Hitchcock. His movies are always full of bad persons, or at least with someone with bad intentions and cruel motives. In Une affaire de femmes, we find actress Isabelle Hupert taking care of her two children while waiting for her husband to come back from war. The year is 1945, and half of France is under German control. She finds a way of making some money in these difficult war times: she performs abortions in her house! Not only that, she makes friends with a prostitute, to whom she will rent one room in her house. In that way, the prostitute has a place to “work”, while Isabelle charges for the rental. All this happens without telling her husband, who one day returns from war, nor to her children.
The suspense elements will keep you guessing what will happen to Isabelle, because at the end her husband discovers what she does and calls the police. At that time, such “moral crimes”, as the abortion, were punished with the death penalty. This film could not find a US distributor. The subjects the movies deals with were, and are still quite controversial in the States. When it finally opened in USA, thanks to the French producer who came and opened a distribution agency himself, the movie was a huge success.
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