Story of Women

Claude Chabrol's Story of Women (French: Une affaire de femmes) won Isabelle Huppert the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival in 1988, and the 1988 prize did much to cement one of the most consequential screen careers in France. The film also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film in 1990 and was France's submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Chabrol adapted the screenplay with Colo Tavernier from Francis Szpiner's book of the same name, an account of the real case of Marie-Louise Giraud, a woman the Vichy regime pursued in 1943 for performing illegal abortions. It was made during the long peak 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, and the cinematographer is Jean Rabier, Chabrol's regular collaborator since the 1960s. The film is often taught in courses on how cinema has represented Vichy France, alongside Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity and Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien. The legal history it draws on, the use of capital punishment under Vichy abortion law, re-entered French public debate in the years just before the law was fully reformed by the Veil legislation, and feminist legal scholars have returned to the case again and again.