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Violette Nozire
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Wikipedia article
'Violette Nozire' is a 1978 French crime film directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Isabelle Huppert and Stphane Audran. The film, based on a true French murder case in 1933, is about an eighteen-year-old girl named Violette and her encounters with a number of older men. The film had a total of 1,074,507 admissions in France.
Plot
Violette Nozire (Isabelle Huppert) is a French teen in the 1930s who secretly works as a prostitute while living with her unsuspecting parents, father Baptiste Nozire (Jean Carmet) and mother Germaine Nozire (Stphane Audran). Rebelling against her "mean and petty" petit-bourgeois parents, she falls in love with a spendthrift young man, whom she virtually supports with thefts from her parents as well as her prostitution earnings.
Meanwhile, her parents are informed by Violette's doctor that she has syphilis. Violette manages to half-persuade her suspicious mother and indulgent father that she has somehow inherited the disease from them. On this pretext, she tricks them into taking "medicine" that is actually poison, killing her father; her mother, however, survives, and Violette is arrested and charged with murder. She defends herself by alleging that her father had molested her; Chabrol's abrupt use of flashbacks makes it uncertain whether Violette is simply lying or telling a half-truth. She is convicted of murder and sentenced to die by guillotine, but a voiceover at the end tells us that her sentence was commuted by degrees to the point that she ultimately left prison, married, and had five children.
Cast
*Isabelle Huppert as Violette Nozire
*Jean Carmet as Baptiste Nozire
*Stphane Audran as Germaine Nozire
*Jean-Franois Garreaud as Jean Dabin
*Zoe Chauveau as Zoe the Maid
*Jean-Pierre Coffe as Dr. Deron
*Jean Dalmain as Mr. Emile
*Guy Hoffman as the Judge
*Henri-Jacques Huet as Commissioner Guilleaume
*Bernadette Lafont as Violette's Cellmate
*Bernard Lajarrige as Andre De Pinguet
*Bernard Alane as Pinguet's Son
*Lisa Langlois as Maddy
*Fabrice Luchini as Camus
*Dominique Zardi as Boy in Cafe
Awards and nominations
The film was entered into the main competition at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where Isabelle Huppert won the award for Best Actress. At the Csar Awards, Stphane Audran was awarded Best Supporting Actress. The film was also nominated in three other categories: Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert), Best Music (Pierre Jansen) and Best Production Design (Jacques Brizzio).
'The New York Times' placed the film on its 'Best 1000 Movies Ever' list.[https://web.archive.org/web/20080612032429/https://www.nytimes.com/ref/movies/1000best.html The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.] 'The New York Times' via Internet Archive. Published April 29, 2003. Retrieved June 12, 2008.
See also
* Isabelle Huppert on screen and stage
References
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