This outstanding work of impressionist cinema is also an early classic of feminist filmmaking, a fact which may have contributed to its relative obscurity. In exploring the misery of a provincial couple's marriage entirely from the woman's point of view, Dulac's powerful evocation of a psychological state (which in 1923 preceded such well known classics as Murnau's The Last Laugh and Sunrise) has been dismissed by some historians as "excessive." Dulac based the film on a play by André Obey and Denys Amiel, whose "theater of silence"-the theory that the silences surrounding characters speak louder than their words-is here brilliantly transformed into filmic terms. Inanimate objects, gestures, and camera angles convey all the emotion and irony of the seething Madame Beudet's existence, and our conception of her boring, overbearing husband is translated through the lens of her vision.