Do you think Christine is a bitch ?

anyone ?

No.

I first saw this movie over 40 years ago, have seen it many times since, and just watched it on blu-ray, beautiful. I love the character of Christine. She actually should have been played by a much younger actress (Nora Gregor was in her late 30s but Christine should be at most 25), but there is something even more pathetic about a somewhat older woman being so naive and idealistic.

As Octave says at one point, "tout le monde a ses raisons"--everybody has his motives, and also his rationales, for acting the way he or she does. She is a woman who just found out her marriage is a sham. She has never been in love and she wants to feel what it is.

Christine was married to Robert, probably without being in love with him but because he was a good man who would be a good husband (money, freedom, affection). For him, she is to some extent a trophy, the perfect wife and hostess. Now she finds out that he has a mistress, and in fact has been seeing this woman since before the marriage. What should she do? She wants to find a real lover, a man whom she could love and who would love her, and elope in a storm of passion. She wants to wipe Robert out of her life.

First she pretends to the mistress that she knew about it all along and it's OK with her, which is what good aristocratic French wives do. Then she gets drunk and tries seducing St. Aubin, who is probably not willing to take advantage of her in that condition (or maybe she's not drunk enough to go through with it); so much for gentlemen. Andre Jurieux shows up, the hero who is so much in love with her, and so she tries him; turns out he will not run away with her--he won't even take her in his arms. He wants to (1) fight Robert and (2) talk over the situation with Robert to be sure her future is secure and there is no scandal. So much for heroes--what they care about is other men. With Octave, she realizes that he might actually love her and need her--that she could do something for him, the way she thought she did for Jurieux. She would not be just a trophy; he sees her for herself.

The story is based somewhat on an 18th-century French play, and it also belongs to a whole world of stories about how young women fall in love, such as Mozart's opera "Cosi fan tutte" ("Women all do it"--two sisters who are in love with their boyfriends fall in love with a new pair of boyfriends--who are the original boyfriends in disguise).

No I didn't. The other post provides a good summary regarding her character in the film. Like many of the bourgeois characters she seems out of touch with herself, as well as life.

A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.

Yeah right thank you guys

The question is okay, the word 'b...' not. watch the movie carefully, and you notice that she is none. She is hapless, can be spiteful, and mostly indecisive. I *think* she'd made a better figure if she was. I understand Renoir didn't even want her to have that - relative - standing, to be at least consciously able to play her cards. She is, sorry, rather an 'animal'.

In the course of a few hours she declares to be in love with at least three different men, so the b-word is rather accurate here; that or she is mentally extremely unstable. However that doesn´t make her worse than her illoyal husband, her promiscuous maid or the whole social group whose immorality is so clearly depicted.

what happens when men write female characters.