The tone of the opening [of Chabrol's Violette Nozière], detailing Violette's stealthy nocturnal departure from the scene of the crime, is that of a thriller, mesmerisingly Hitchcockian in its camera style (and possibly one may detect a specific echo of the start of I Confess, a film Chabrol especially admired). Flashbacks ensue, summoning up Violette's double life between the claustrophobic pseudo-gentility of her parents' working-class apartment and the ritual exhibitionism of the bar-room hangers-on in the Quartier Latin, and between the dowdily well-scrubbed schoolgirl of her parents' wishes and the carmine-lipped voluptuary of her forays into amateur prostitution with a succession of callow students.

Intriguing as these revelations are, however, the inconsequentiality of their assembly is far removed from the thriller's rigorous patterning of events, and the film's unbalancing oddity of construction is emphasised by the fact that the flashbacks continue at random beyond the point—rather...