Thérèse Desqueyroux is one of those rare films that, two decades before A Question of Silence, silently assumes the gap between woman's and man's experience. Thérèse has tried to poison her husband-we needn't ask why. Rather than face the family scandal of prison, her husband places her under house arrest and forbids her to see her children. Thérèse is finally packed off to Paris, freed by the contempt in which she is held. "Even before she is literally imprisoned by her relatives, Thérèse (Emmanuele Riva) is trapped: by the narrow confines of her class and provincial society, by the oppressive monotony of the pine forests, and by her own inability to communicate the confused, passionate emotions that torment her. Her only release lies in destruction....For Franju, Thérèse is a victim, one of the outsiders whom society cannot accommodate and therefore persecutes or destroys-the fate of many of his protagonists." (Philip Kemp)