'The Story of Women' (NR)

Claude Chabrol's "Story of Women" stays rigorously within itself. It's a concentrated, disciplined, dry work about a woman in a small French village near Dieppe who, during the Occupation, begins to perform abortions, at first merely to help a friend, then later as a business venture.

Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is a humorless, dourly practical woman who, while her husband is serving at the front, supports herself, her son and her daughter by taking in knitting. The conditions of Marie's life are miserable. Her apartment is cramped and squalid, food is scarce and supplies even more so. She drags through day after day without even the smallest pleasure or the slightest hope of change.

Her fate takes a drastic turn, though, when she discovers a neighbor trying to prompt a miscarriage by sitting in a mustard bath. Though she barely knows a thing about it, Marie disdainfully volunteers to help, primarily because the other woman is so inept.

After this first procedure, her name finds its way to other women, but it's not until she befriends a prostitute named Lucie (Marie Trintignant), who promises to send more customers her way, that she begins her business on a more serious basis. By this time Marie's husband, Paul (Francois Cluzet), has returned, but because he doesn't fit into her plans, Marie rejects him. At one point she even offers her housekeeper extra money if she will sleep with him.

The work Huppert does here is tough and unstinting. She makes absolutely no excuses for this woman, and no appeals for pity. Marie is not an easy character to embrace; her misery is a daunting, aggressive, angry force. And her resentments -- against life and against men -- are layered deep, like scar tissue under scar tissue. Nevertheless, Huppert forges in us an empathy for this woman, if by no other method than by entering so completely into her suffering.

Though the film's subject matter is inflammatory, Chabrol's approach is precise and unsensational. And he refuses to fudge on the complexities of his subject or make facile moral distinctions. He gives us the circumstances of Marie's life, her loveless marriage, her poverty, her unrealistic longing to be a singer and to live a glamorous life, and shows us, without judgment, how they all contribute to the choices she makes. The film doesn't endorse Marie's actions, because Chabrol is enough of an artist to know that it's not his job to make endorsements. Still, the movie has a distinct feminist sensibility, if only to the extent that it concerns itself so thoroughly with the lives of women. In particular, Chabrol and his writing partner, Colo Tavernier O'Hagan (who based the story on real events), are interested in the feminine underground that grows up around the need for abortions, a need that, because of the war, is greater than ever. In this black market of abortions and prostitution, Marie is a wily entrepreneur, looking for ways to minimize overhead and maximize profits. She's a businesswoman, tough and unsentimental and inured to the deeper implications of her practice -- a perfect capitalist.

As a result, Marie's business flourishes and expands. Realizing that the maid's quarters in her flat are available, she invites her prostitute friend to make professional use of it -- for a cut of the action, of course. Then a second room is set up and another partnership begun. All the while, Marie is beginning to live as she had always dreamed. Able to afford luxuries, she develops a taste for champagne and extravagant clothes and drunken afternoon parties with her abusive young lover and her circle of prostitute friends. She even takes singing lessons.

When her husband comes home early one afternoon, finding her in bed, intertwined with her lover, he writes an anonymous note to the authorities, detailing her illegal activities and causing her arrest.

For the remainder of the film, we watch the progress of Marie's trial as the state lays out the charges that, ultimately, take her to the guillotine. (Marie Lunet was, in fact, one of the last women to be put to death in France.)

Despite its ambitious title, "Story of Women" does not expand to its full metaphorical height. It remains one woman's story, intelligent and efficient and moving. Not a spectacular work of imagination, but in its own stern fashion, a penetrating one.

Story of Women is unrated