Set in Occupied France, Claude Chabrol's 1988 film, Une affaire de femmes (Story of Women), is based upon the story of Marie-Louise Giraud, an amateur abortionist who was tried, convicted and guillotined in 1943 for committing ‘crimes against the State’. In other words, for ‘depriving the country of its children’, thereby impeding national futures when it was women's ‘vital’ role under Vichy's aggressively pro-natalist and familialist social order to ensure them. Incarnating the spectre of ‘death in the shape of a woman, femininity as deadly’, to invoke Jacqueline Rose's memorable phrase, the female abortionist was in lethal contradiction not only, it seemed, to women's naturalised association with the principle of ‘life’, but also to the State's own sovereign authority over ‘life-death’ decision making. Having presided over thousands of arrests, deaths and deportations by 1943 – including, as a character in Une affaire will acknowledge, all ‘the Jewish children sent [from France] to Germany’ – the Vichy government was exercising this authority with deadly effect.

In Chabrol's film, Isabelle Huppert plays Marie Latour, a working-class mother of two small children who is struggling to survive, indeed struggling to live and thrive beyond mere survival, amidst conditions of economic precarity, material scarcity, the demands of domestic drudgery and the oppressive dictates of Vichy rule. In the film's opening sequences, Marie is weighed down, recalling, in her embodied posture, the knotted etymological roots of labour, from the Latin, labo, a ‘burden under which one totters’ and, relatedly, lassitude, lassus, the one ‘who bends, who falls forward’, who posturally inclines. Subsumed beneath layers of tattered clothing, with stooped shoulders and a hasty, shuffling tread, Marie is introduced to us determinedly foraging for nettles on an exposed Cherbourg clifftop, impatiently berating her son, Pierrot – ‘Quit whining!’ – when he is stung. Soon after, we encounter her again, encumbered but staunchly, doggedly resilient, as she struggles to manoeuvre her sobbing daughter, Mouche, and a sack of potatoes, up the stairs to their tiny, sparsely furnished apartment. Surrounded by a pervasive, repressive poverty, Marie exists within a ‘zone of temporality marked by ongoingness, getting by, and living on’, an impression reinforced by the camera's extended, unwavering focus on her repetitively effortful movements.