General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Les Bonnes Femmes

Les Bonnes Femmes (released in English as The Good Girls) is a 1960 black-and-white drama film directed by Claude Chabrol, about four young Parisian shop assistants who work in an appliance store near the Bastille and spend their evenings chasing dreams of love that mostly end in disappointment. Written by Chabrol with Paul Gégauff, photographed by Henri Decaë, and produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim for Paris Film Production and Panitalia, it opened in France on 22 April 1960 and was Chabrol's fourth feature film.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Claude Chabrol; screenplay by Paul Gégauff and Claude Chabrol²
Release	22 April 1960 in French cinemas; 1h44; black and white; France/Italy co-production¹^•⁴
Main cast	Bernadette Lafont (Jane), Stéphane Audran (Ginette), Clotilde Joano (Jacqueline), Lucile Saint-Simon (Rita), Pierre Bertin (the store owner), Mario David (the motorcyclist)³
Key crew	Cinematography Henri Decaë; music Paul Misraki and Pierre Jansen; editing Jacques Gaillard; producers Robert and Raymond Hakim²
Initial reception	Chabrol's first serious public failure; vilified by contemporary critics as an exercise in contempt³
Restoration	Restored to its original version in 2000, through the work of Charles Bitsch, Chabrol's longtime collaborator⁵
Current standing	Rotten Tomatoes 78% (9 reviews); IMDb 7.2/10; AlloCiné spectators 3.2/5 from 201 notes⁶^•⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Jane, Ginette, Jacqueline, and Rita sell household appliances in a small Paris store near the Bastille, waiting impatiently each day for closing time to pursue their modest dreams.¹ Each follows a different path. Jane, engaged to a soldier, spends a night with a pickup artist. Ginette performs evenings as an Italian singer in a seedy music hall. Rita is presented by her fiancé to his parents, grocers, and accepts a mediocre marriage. Jacqueline, who dreams of great love, believes she has found it with a mysterious motorcyclist, played by Mario David, who turns out to be a sadist and strangles her.³^•⁴

The store's owner, Monsieur Belin (Pierre Bertin), embodies a lecherous, paternalistic small-boss type of the period; in one noted scene he sings airs from Carmen in his office to the rhythm of a metronome on his desk.⁸^•¹¹ Chabrol himself appears in a small role as a bather at the swimming pool.¹²

Place in Chabrol's early career

The film belongs to the first burst of the French New Wave, the movement of late-1950s and early-1960s French cinema that rejuvenated the national industry and energized international art film. Chabrol was unusually prolific in this period: within fifteen months, from January 1959 to March 1960, he premiered four features in Paris, Le beau Serge, Les cousins, A double tour, and Les bonnes femmes.⁹ The film was made on a scenario by Paul Gégauff (1922–1983), the writer who collaborated with Chabrol on several early pictures, with Henri Decaë (1915–1987) behind the camera.¹⁰

Style and themes

Chabrol shot the film on the nocturnal streets of Paris, blending eroticism, humor, and suspense in what MUBI's editorial note calls a disquieting, pessimistic critique of patriarchal society.¹³ The Larousse film dictionary describes his approach as a distanced, non-idealizing, almost entomological gaze of a moralist on characters it calls victims of mass society, while still noting warmth and tenderness in the treatment; it calls the result a trap film that holds a revealing mirror up to the audience.³

A feminist analysis in the journal Nouvelles Questions féministes reads the film as the most finished example of a modernist posture built on a male creator's gaze at an alienated feminine, arguing that the women are offered only contemptible Don Juans, a ridiculous petty bourgeois, or a psychopath as choices, and that the film presents the equivalence of woman and alienation as an objective finding.¹⁴ The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it probably Chabrol's most pessimistic work, harping relentlessly on vulgarity, boorishness, and cruelty, culminating in an ambiguous final dancehall sequence.¹⁵

Reception and restoration

The film was a failure on release. Larousse records it as Chabrol's first serious public failure, vilified by critics who saw only a dark exercise in contempt.³ Bernadette Lafont later recalled that the film provoked reactions comparable to those met by Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu, with everyone, right and left alike, finding Les Bonnes Femmes misogynist and reactionary.¹⁶ Chabrol himself considered it one of his best films.¹⁵

The film circulated for decades in a cut version. Larousse gives the running time as 1h45, then 1h32 for the version actually in circulation.³ The original version was reconstructed in 2000, the result of persistent work by Charles Bitsch, the cinematographer favored by New Wave directors and Chabrol's collaborator up to Landru; the cuts were reported back onto the negative so that newly printed copies matched the mutilated film's restoration.⁵

Reputation has since reversed. Sinekatalog's editorial review describes a bitter, ironic portrait that was a flop and is now admired.⁷ The BFI includes it in its list of ten great French New Wave films,¹⁷ and the critic André S. Labarthe, writing in Cahiers du cinéma in 1967, called it not just Chabrol's masterpiece but the high point of the new French cinema as a whole.¹⁵ In July 2025 the distributor Tamasa began a theatrical re-release of restored Chabrol films including Les Bonnes Femmes, presented with the ADRC in partnership with the FEMA and the AFCAE.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026