High-Power Potion

Therese tells a wicked tale wrought from Franc,ois Mauriac's 1927 novel Therese Desqueyroux and tells it in old-fashioned cinematic style. It is literate, formal, filmed with impeccable taste. It captures the dark spirit of Mauriac's novel almost too perfectly. Best of all, in Emmanuele Riva (star of Hiroshima, Mon Amour) it has a vivid Therese, that young woman so desperate to escape "the slow, sure, horrible suffocation of provincial life" that she poisons her husband.

Bernard survives, however. He even lies to save her, and as Therese rides home from court to try to tell him why she did it, her unhappy history is reviewed in flashbacks. Here, the prose narrative becomes a burdensome, bookish device, but Director Georges Franju finds visual poetry in sharp contrasts between the gentle Bordeaux countryside and the taut, terrible stillness of Therese's face. Actress Riva never fails him. On her wedding day, "the wild force seething inside," she stands in church like someone paralyzed by news of disaster. Her disaster is Bernard--superbly played by Philippe Noiret as a prudish bourgeois lout whose only concerns are family pride and the valuable pine trees on his estate at Argelouse. Living with him, Therese sees no way out until the day he falls ill from an accidental overdose of a medicine containing arsenic. She begins to get ideas.

Does Bernard forgive her? Never. In a final scene flickering with pathos, he breaks down and asks: "Was it because you hated me? You couldn't stand me?" Half-mockingly, Therese replies: "It was because of your pines ... I wanted them for myself. Perhaps it was to see a glimmer of uncertainty in your eyes." Author Mauriac, who wrote the dialogue for this first screen adaptation of his work, supplies no simple answer. A connoisseur of human corruption, he peoples his novels with characters sidetracked by evil in their blind search for God. On film, Therese seems likely to find salvation with a one-way ticket to Paris. But her story still casts a spell.

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