In a villa outside Aix-en-Provence, a family is loudly disintegrating, ostensibly over the issue of Papa's gorgeous Italian mistress, Léda. The worse for Madame (but great for p.o.v.), Léda lives within view, in a house of color-saturated modernism as opposed to the Mediterranean-gothic of the emotionally trapped family. The grown children take their parents' opposite sides, unhelpfully. Meanwhile, a frisky, lascivious Jean-Paul Belmondo (as Laszlo Kovacs, in a dry run for Breathless) is like the family dog (bad dog!), licking everybody the wrong way, and finally saving the day. One can hear Chabrol, after his New Wave rite of passage, saying, Now, let's have some fun! Léda is a murder mystery whose pleasures are found in its excesses-those of the characters, and those of the camera. Both are voyeurs, both are exhibitionists. This might be considered Chabrol's first, perhaps one true, Hitchcock homage, were it not that, in 1959, it anticipates Psycho (1960) in theme, and almost coincides with Vertigo (1958), its visual sibling. (JB)