When Lise's car bumps Antoine's bike, they recognize each other from a brief fling 20 years before while at the Sorbonne. He's now a professor of Greek; she's loathe to tell him she's a police inspector. A call interrupts their first dinner date: a Deputy of the National Assembly has been murdered. She has a suspect, another Deputy, and must track him while deflecting Antoine's eye from her vocation. All roads in the inquiry lead to Christine Vallier, the dead Deputy's mistress, a beguiling 22-year-old whose mother ran the Assembly's snack bar. When more deputies die and Antoine learns Lise's identity, she must act quickly solve the crime and save her future.
Acting
Noiret and Girardot's decades-later chemistry still crackles
Writing
De Broca weaponizes French manners against themselves
Costume
Lise's undercover wardrobe is its own character
Director
Philippe de Broca
Annie Girardot
Lise Tanquerelle
Philippe Noiret
Antoine Lemercier
Catherine Alric
Christine Vallier
Hubert Deschamps
Charmille
Paulette Dubost
Mother
Roger Dumas
Marcel Guérin, l'inspecteur
Raymond Gérôme
Head of Criminal Division
Guy Marchand
Beretti
Simone Renant
Suzanne
Georges Wilson
Alexandre Mignonac
Monique Tarbès
Bathroom attendant
Henri Czarniak
L'inspecteur Cascard
Maurice Illouz
L'inspecteur Picot
Georges Riquier
Professeur Pelletier
David Gabison
Le doyen Levergue
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
De Broca made this during France's post-1968 comedies boom, where mocking bourgeois institutions was national sport. The Assembly murders play like wish fulfillment.
Girardot and Noiret had starred together in 1962's "Le Vieil Homme et l'Enfant"; their comfortable intimacy here is earned, not scripted.
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