Les Biches, a clearing of the decks for Chabrol, ushered in six years of great filmmaking.

A rich businesswoman (Stéphane Audran) takes a homeless street artist (Jacqueline Sassard) under her wing, and initiates a twisted and deadly ménage-a-trois when her protégée's affair with an architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant) threatens the status quo. Such is Claude Chabrol's mastery at this sort of thing that he is able to reveal latent malice and emotional turbulence without ever once resorting to histrionics, and to create an intoxicating, erotically charged atmosphere without ever resorting to sexual explicitness. Although there's a palpable sense of impending tragedy throughout, I found the climactic 'Epilogue' oddly unsatisfying, lacking the sound, psychological underpinning of "Le Boucher", for example. Both of the female leads are fantastic; Trintignant avoids playing the stereotypical, sleazy seducer, but his character is comparatively underdeveloped and lacks depth. Jean Rabier's photography and Pierre Jansen's score are both outstanding.