High Heels (1981)

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Claude Chabrol delves in to the slapstick in HIGH HEELS, a black comedy starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Mia Farrow. Fast-talking and ultra-confident Doctor Paul claims that he loves the moral beauty of ugly women and challenges his colleagues to join him in the pursuit of homely women. When he meets… More Claude Chabrol delves in to the slapstick in HIGH HEELS, a black comedy starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Mia Farrow. Fast-talking and ultra-confident Doctor Paul claims that he loves the moral beauty of ugly women and challenges his colleagues to join him in the pursuit of homely women. When he meets plain, buck-toothed, leg-braced Christine (Mia Farrow) on vacation in Tunisia, his falls head over heels. However, his staunch beliefs in moral beauty crumble upon meeting Christine's beautiful sister, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage to a numbskull. The swaggering doctor concocts a scheme in which he drugs Christine every night as he kills each of her sisters' various suitors and husbands and in the meantime woos her himself. Paced like a modern, sex-drenched version of the keystone cops, Chabrol's HIGH HEELS pits Belmondo's arrogance against Farrow's sly and self-effacing comedic charm and in the process creates a darkly comedic and slightly hysterical farce, unlike any other film in the director's oeuvre.