There is a lot to be appreciated in Claude Chabrol's "Violette": perhaps above anything else, his refusal to make it easy on the audience by taking sides pro or against the title character. The world is not black and white, and during the course of this film you'll probably find your "sympathies" (if that's the right word) frequently shifting and your thoughts reversed. I also liked Charbol's games with time and space, and the acting is spot-on (it can be argued that Isabelle Huppert - 25 years old at the time, and quite sexy if I may add! - never quite looks like the teenager that she's supposed to be playing, but her sometimes criticized "aloofness" is clearly an essential part of the character). On the other hand, the film lacks the usual visual opulence of Chabrol's work (logical, since we're dealing with a middle-class family here), and it runs too long at over two hours; sometimes it feels like it's going around in circles. I personally think that Chabrol's other 1978 film (which shares some thematic similarities with this one), "Blood Relatives", is superior. **1/2 out of 4.
Review of Violette
