Le Chat

In this anaemic adaptation of a characteristically sour and sweaty Simenon novel, a long-married couple is sucked into a triangular sado-masochistic relationship with a cat, on which the husband lavishes the suffocatingly possessive affection he once devoted to his once-beautiful, now alcoholically bloated, spouse. Simenon, however, invested her eventual killing of the pet with all the neurotic squalor of a crime passionnel; here, given the mutual malignity of Gabin and Signoret, one simply wonders how the cat managed to survive so long.