Lessons from Les Diaboliques

I have always been fascinated by classic film as I have expressed on the discussion board,

Casablanca is one of the films which reminds me of French culture. This led me to the thought of

finding a classic film instead of a modern film for this assignment which is why I decided to

watch “Les Diaboliques” from 1955.

From the beginning of the film, I noticed that French people have contractions in their

speech similarly to how we speak English. For example, an English speaker would say “I

wanna” instead of saying “I want to”. Typically, this wouldn’t be covered in elementary French,

as becoming more familiar with the formal language rather than the slang is common practice.

Despite that, there are a lot of words which I recognized from the course, some of which are:

“soir” for evening, “faire” to do, “nager” to swim, “merci” for thank you and “ecouter” to listen.

I also recognized some basic phrases such as: “beaucoup facile” for too easy and “au revoir

monsieur” for goodbye sir. However, I did come across a scene where a gentleman stated “seul”

for having “just one” drink, which I found interesting as “seul” means alone or by oneself.

In terms of storytelling, the film was fantastic, it was one of those films that kept me on

the edge of my seat, because there was no clear indication of how the film was going to end. This

is a key attribute of classic films, where in which the narrative of the film has multiple layers

which seems to be simple on the surface, but complex on the inside. In comparison to American

films at the time, there are similar elements of crime-noir themes, however, Les Diaboliques

emitted an eeriness which gave off a horror theme rather than a thriller theme. Both cultures

emphasize the importance of status and wealth, which is very prominent in this film as the main

characters are rich and those around them are subordinates which follow what they say. This is
also evident in the scene where one of the mistress’ tenants was her principal in high school,

which also conveys the contrast of power dynamic between age and wealth.

Overall, I enjoyed this film and observed a lot from a French grammatical point of view,

and plot-based point of view. I would highly recommend watching Les Diaboliques as there are

elements which we learned about throughout this semester, as well as life lessons which are

important in life regarding relationships and whom you trust.