One of the more interesting unknown films of the sixties was this 1968 feature by France’s Jean-Denis Bonan. A filmmaker with a handful of society-bashing shorts to his credit, Bonan’s filmography included the notorious SADNESS OF THE ANTHROPOPHAGI/Tristesse des Anthropophages (1966), which was banned in its native land. All of Bonan’s subversive proclivities were transferred intact to A WOMAN KILLS (LA FEMME BOURREAU), suggesting Bonan could have gone on to become as distinct a filmmaker as Dario Argento or Jean Rollin (a longtime Bonan colleague, FYI, who played a supporting role in this film). That wasn’t to be, unfortunately, as A WOMAN KILLS remains Bonan’s only feature.
This truncated career was due to the fact that A WOMAN KILLS failed to find a distributor. The film languished in obscurity until 2010, when the author/filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bastid exhibited it at the Paris cinematheque. There followed a 2015 DVD release in Bonan’s native France, and in 2023 an NTSC formatted Blu-ray, courtesy of Radiance.
The Italian giallo thrillers of the seventies and DRESSED TO KILL (1980) are directly foreshadowed in A WOMAN KILLS’ narrative, which commences with Louis Guilb (Claude Merlin), a state-appointed executioner prone to apprehension and paranoia, pondering a series of killings. The victims are all young women, and Helene Picard, a lesbian troublemaker, is caught and executed–but then a new set of murders, seemingly patterned on those of Picard, commence. That Louis is the killer isn’t actually revealed until the third act, but his culpability is made clear in the oddness and perversity of his relationship with the statuesque civil servant Solange (Solange Pradel, of Jean Rollin’s RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE), and the fact that (as is revealed early on) Louis’ mother used to dress him in girl’s clothing, a preference he carried into adulthood.
This is all captured via gorgeously rendered black and white visuals, with freewheeling yet artful handheld camerawork that falls somewhere between Jean-Luc Godard and Mario Bava. That combination feels appropriate to a film whose many quirky touches include an outrageously discordant jazz-tinged score that incorporates songs whose lyrics obliquely comment on the action (“Paris/Muffles the screams/Of a girl whose throat is being slit/Beneath a truck cover”), documentary-style man-on-the-street interviews about the killings, a sex scene viewed from underneath a metallic cot, much gratuitous gore and quite a few voyeuristic scenes of women undressing that could have been lifted directly from a Russ Meyer flick.
More to the point, Bonan is partial to genre-hopping, delivering a film that can be classified as mystery, erotic thriller, Godardian art film and exploitation, and held together by newsreel-styled narration by Bernard Letrou that insists on elucidating the plot points and character histories. It’s all a bit uneven and malformed, showing that the then-26 year old Bonan hadn’t entirely matured as a filmmaker, but his visual flair is undeniable.
Vital Statistics
A WOMAN KILLS (LA FEMME BOURREAU)
Luna Park
Director/Screenwriter: Jean-Denis Bonan
Producers: Jean-Denis Bonan, Anatole Dauman
Cinematography: Gerard de Battista
Editing: Mireille Aramovici
Cast: Claude Merlin, Solange Pradel, Myriam Mezieres, Jackie Raynal, Catherine Deville, Vely Begard, Alain-Yves Beaujour, Annie Merlin, Agnes Bonan, Paul Bonan, Bernard Bonan, Serge Moati, Jean Rollin, Yves Tollini, Danielle Letellier, Thomas Letellier, Bernard Letrou