Paris, the summer of 1968. A tumultuous time in French history, with situationists, students and striking workers bringing the capital to a standstill and threatening to change the country, and possibly the world, forever more. Revolution was in the air and its effects inevitably impacted art at the time. Cinematically, we can cite examples of key nouvelle vague filmmakers like Godard and Truffaut being influenced by the civil disobedience and economic hiatus that gripped Paris for two months in ’68 and, if such leading proponents as those felt the effects, you can be sure that artists and filmmakers operating at the lower end of the scale also took their inspiration. One such director was Jean-Denis Bonan, a Tunisian-born filmmaker and contemporary of vampiric horror and fantasy director Jean Rollin. Unfortunately for Bonan, the low-budget movie he shot among the back streets and rooftops of the shut-down Paris that summer failed to arouse the interest of distributors and it was left to gather dust on a shelf for decades. It wasn’t until 2010 that the film was dusted down, salvaged and given its official debut care of Cinémathèque Française and now, thanks to Radiance Films, A Woman Kills receives its Blu-ray premiere (in the USA).
A Woman Kills opens with a series of news reports concerning Hélène Picard, a sex worker recently executed for the murders of several of her fellow working girls. Before Paris can breathe a sigh of relief, however, the serial killings recommence and a reign of terror resumes its grip upon the capital. Are these murders the work of a copycat, or did the police wrongly execute Picard and allowed the real culprit to go free? As the investigation gathers pace, Picard’s executioner Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin) develops a relationship with Solange (Solange Pradel, star of Jean Rollin’s 1968 film The Rape of the Vampire), the police officer assigned to the case, and it isn’t long before Solange starts looking for answers closer to home.
It isn’t going to be much of a spoiler to say this, as A Woman Kills is a somewhat glaringly obvious whodunnit, but you have been warned…
I think it would be fair to call the low-budget filmmaker an exploitation director too. In its most complimentary terms, it is evinced in the opportunity-seizing, on-the-hoof location filming that is remarkably striking.
A Woman Kills is a film in which a deeply troubled, psychologically damaged man dresses up as a woman to commit a series of grisly murders. As a character, Guilbeau spends the movie agonising over death and viewing life as little more than a string of traumas and violent acts before such violence will inevitably subsume him. As such, he’s your typical existential figure in French New Wave, but Bonan turns to Hollywood and to films like Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho to make him a character whose abusive childhood has led to him becoming a transsexual or a gender non-conforming character. Though made eight years after Hitchcock’s classic, A Woman Kills receives its release in another kind of tumultuous time, one that is particularly difficult for trans people and how they are perceived in society and the media. In the fifty-five years that have followed since Bonan made his film, the depiction of transgender people as a danger to society, and specifically to women in general, has become a damaging and offensive stereotype that is repeatedly held up in transphobic quarters as a truth. As great a film as Psycho is, it is movies like it and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) and Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) to name but a few that have perpetuated a damaging trope that society continues to struggle to address. Viewed now, A Woman Kills can only be seen in terms of that argument and its decision to depict its antagonist to be so psychotically flawed because of their gender crisis that they repeatedly commit murder against women cannot be allowed to fly the same way it might have done if it received an audience in 1968. It pains me to say it, but you have to wonder if the opportunity to see the light of day now was a wise one.
The issue is that this portrayal of trans people has been repeated so often that it reinforces a stereotype that has been created and mined to demonise and discriminate against this minority. It’s a dangerous myth that plays into the hands of trans aggressors and those who choose to fan the flames of the so-called ‘culture wars’ for their own ends because the reality is that transgender people are far more likely to be the victim of violence, not the perpetrator. JK Rowling can point to the same handful of incidents time and again on Twitter and be applauded by her echo chamber of hate (hey, sounds like one of her book titles, doesn’t it? Harry Potter and the Echo Chamber of Hate), but the fact remains that trans people in England and Wales were victims of crime in the year to March 2020 at twice the rate of cisgender people (at 28% and14% respectively), according to the Office for National Statistics and these figures correlate with what is happening in other countries too. Given that 40% of trans people who contributed to the 2015 US Transgender Survey revealed that they have attempted to take their own lives (nearly nine times the attempted suicide rate in the wider US population) these negative and inaccurate portrayals of transgender lives need to stop.
Away from its latent controversy, A Woman Kills is a curious hybrid of a movie. Its leanings towards the nouvelle vague are blatant, as Bonan foregoes a traditional narrative in favour of an elliptical, scrappily atmospheric collage, shooting Guilbeau’s improper breakfast chat concerning the different means of execution with Solange through the hanging fronds of a potted plant, breaking off for a jazzy score of existentialist warblings that reflect the action on screen from Bernard Vitet, or depicting the violence with a dry voice-over narration of a police or press report. There’s clearly a degree of hero worship that Bonan feels towards Godard at his most excursive, but in the less capable and inexperienced hands of Bonan, this feels pretentious enough to induce either a deep sleep or a frustrated migraine (and actually to be fair you can say the same of Godard’s ‘challenging’ works). I think it would be fair to call the low-budget filmmaker an exploitation director too. In its most complimentary terms, it is evinced in the opportunity-seizing, on-the-hoof location filming that is remarkably striking. In less complimentary terms it is indicated in the many examples of the ‘male gaze’, the repeated disrobing of a number of female performers (often concluding in violence) and examples of upskirting, are other factors to consider this film problematic today. For those looking to create a Venn diagram of where A Woman Kills’ arty and exploitative styles meet (hey, you might be, I dunno) then look no further than Bonan’s decision to shoot a long, protracted sex scene from beneath deeply painful looking bare mattress springs.
This Radiance release features a 2K restoration of the film from the original 16mm elements, and – unavailable to this writer – an audio commentary from critics Kat Ellinger and Virginie Sélavy (the latter of whom also provides an intro to the film) a new documentary looking at Bonan’s career, several of his short films and a trailer, along with an extensive limited edition booklet featuring new writing from several critics.
A WOMAN KILLS (1968) IS OUT NOW ON RADIANCE FILMS (USA) BLU-RAY
Mark’s Archive: A Woman Kills (1968)
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