Bluebeard

Paris, the First World War era. Henri Désiré Landru – mild-mannered, meticulous, balding – places matrimonial advertisements in the newspapers and receives replies from lonely widows and spinsters. He is attentive, persuasive, and utterly without sentiment. Claude Chabrol's film follows Landru through a series of courtships, each woman believing herself on the threshold of a new life, each one stepping willingly into an arrangement that serves only one party. Charles Denner plays the man with a bureaucrat's precision, betraying nothing.

The film moves across the several women who enter Landru's orbit – among them the dignified Mme Buisson, played by Michèle Morgan; the more calculating Mme Héon of Danielle Darrieux; and Fernande Segret, played by Stéphane Audran, who comes closest to occupying a genuine place in Landru's affections. Yet affection, in Chabrol's reading, is simply another instrument of control. The domestic spaces Landru inhabits – rented villas, provincial gardens, a country house with a stove that smokes – accumulate as evidence, though the film refuses to stage the crimes directly. What disappears, disappears offscreen.

Chabrol frames the Landru case not as a horror story but as a social autopsy. The women are not fools; they are women whose circumstances – poverty, widowhood, wartime dislocation – have left them with limited choices. The film belongs to a strain of European noir that locates criminal behavior inside the institutions of bourgeois life rather than against them. Its cool, ironic distance from its subject places it alongside Chabrol's broader body of work while remaining legible as a meditation on predation, complicity, and the domestic as crime scene.