"In Wedding in Blood Chabrol creates so taut a paradox between the tragic and the comic that the film becomes a dazzling expression of absurdist philosophy, eloquent and profound. (He) returns to one of his favorite environments, a charming-looking but actually dour and stifling French provincial town. Stéphane Audran is the beautiful but bored wife of the deputy mayor...Michel Piccoli is a quietly long-suffering man with a chronically ill wife. (T)heir mutual attraction is positively cataclysmic....Eventually they begin to feel the constraint of their respective spouses. What to do...? Daringly, Chabrol invites us to laugh at the frenzied behavior of his desperate lovers while inviting increasing compassion for them and their predicament. Beyond this, he moves us with his acute awareness of the perverse cruelties of fate and, in the film's final exchange of dialogue-a master stroke-shows us just how barbaric society can be in destroying imagination and morality."-Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times