Story of Women

Claude Chabrol's Story of Women (French: Une affaire de femmes) earned Isabelle Huppert the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival in 1988 — her second Volpi after the 1988 prize itself, which is widely cited as the cementing recognition of one of the most consequential French screen careers. The film also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film in 1990 and was selected as France's submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.

The screenplay is adapted by Chabrol with Colo Tavernier from the book of the same name by Francis Szpiner, which dramatised the real case of Marie-Louise Giraud — one of the last women guillotined in France, executed in 1943 by the Vichy regime for performing illegal abortions. The film was made during the long peak period of Chabrol's collaborations with Huppert, which had begun with Violette Nozière (1978) and would continue through Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995) and beyond.

François Cluzet plays opposite Huppert. Cinematography is by Jean Rabier, Chabrol's regular collaborator since the 1960s. The film is now widely taught in courses on the cinematic representation of Vichy France, alongside Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity and Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien. The legal-historical material the film draws on — the use of capital punishment under Vichy abortion law — re-entered French public discourse in the years immediately preceding the law's full reform under the Veil legislation; the case has been studied repeatedly in feminist legal scholarship.