La Truite (1984)

Joseph Losey’s penultimate feature, the under-rated La Truite (1982), revisits the themes of his 1963 films, The Servant and The Damned. Personal relationships are viewed as power struggles and the bourgeoisie as an elegant, affluent moral and emotional wasteland. Centering on a struggling, suppressed woman harkens back to Losey's 1973 adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House. 

The titular trout points two ways. It obviously refers to the men whom the coastal French trout-farmer Frederique (Isabelle Huppert) baits with sexual tease and chastely exploits. The scene where she milks the fish anticipates how she will milk the two businessmen, Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski) and Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and eventually even their dignified Japanese boss Daigo (Isao Yamagata). She all the while remains true and protective to her gay, ailing husband Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser), who in the last scene himself drifts back and forth behind her like a fish, as he nominally runs the lavish Japanese trout farm Daigo has funded for her. 

But the title is not Les truites but La Truite. That points to Frederique, who swims upstream, against the currents of class prejudice and male power, to transcend her unpromising roots. Her success is hollow, however, as she ultimately admits, for there can be no pride in how she managed to succeed. In baiting and catching the men she has also trapped herself.   

Frederique and Galuchat initially live off his wealthy male lover. They appear to con the businessmen into a big loss at bowling (!), cashing in on Rambert’s immediate attraction to Frederique. His wife Lou (Jeanne Moreau) painfully condones his affairs. Like the older woman Frederique meets (who’s made love 33,000 times, with an accountant’s abandon) and like both Saint-Genis’ androgynous girlfriend and his geisha, the women feel forced to use their sexuality to survive in the male power structure. The men can buy and discard any woman they chose -- but Frederique has since girlhood resolved to milk the men of their money without selling herself. In the bowling alley Frederique always wears an iconic t-shirt. The front reads Peut-etre, the back Jamais. When you see her coming you think, Maybe you can get her; when she goes you know it was always Never. 

But sustaining her physical chastity does not mean she has preserved any purity of soul. Hence the hollowness of her success. Saint-Genis’s confession -- He can’t love anyone because he can never feel generous -- speaks for most of the other characters as well. The main exception is Lou, who is finally released from loving her wayward husband -- so he kills her.