MOVIE · 1923

The Smiling Madame Beudet

Drama45 min

Trapped in a loveless marriage, Madame Beudet begins to imagine a way out by devising a scheme to be rid of her husband. Germaine Dermoz is Madame Beudet, an intelligent woman worn down by the routines and humiliations of home, while Alexandre Arquillière’s Monsieur Beudet dominates the household with vanity and crude jokes. Made in 1923, this French silent drama stays close to her point of view, turning a bourgeois marriage into a tense portrait of resentment, fantasy, and rebellion inside the walls of an ordinary home.