The Breach (film)

Hélène Régnier's (Audran) mentally ill husband Charles (Drouot) injures their son, Michel, in a violent rage. Hélène beats Charles to the floor with a frying pan, flees and starts divorce proceedings. Charles moves back in with his wealthy and manipulative parents, who never approved of his marriage and are determined to secure custody of Michel. While the boy is recovering in a local hospital, Hélène moves to a boarding house nearby. The Régniers hire Paul Thomas (Cassel), an impoverished family acquaintance, to find damaging material on Hélène to help them secure custody. Paul moves into the boarding house and, with the help of his girlfriend Sonia (Rouvel), plots to ruin Hélène's reputation.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times:

La Rupture, with a screenplay adapted by Chabrol from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong, has so many beautiful things in it that I'm tempted to suspect some terrible weakness in myself, rather than the film, for the feeling of depressed impatience it left. Perhaps not... There is also another problem with the frame of the film: the disadvantages and indignities are piled so thickly on the poor heroine that one knows early that the film is obliged to offer her vindication. Otherwise it has no shape. That her vindication is achieved at a high price isn't surprising or touching enough to transform the melodrama of La Rupture into tragedy.[4]

Dave Kerr of The Chicago Reader:

One of the key films of the 70s, La Rupture is Claude Chabrol's most audacious experiment with narrative form — a modernist reworking of the melodrama (1970)... The “rupture” of the title belongs to the narrative, which begins with clear black/white, good/evil distinctions and then gradually self-destructs, breaking down into increasingly elliptical and imponderable fragments. Highly recommended.[5]

• The Breach at IMDb
• The Breach at AllMovie