Which Maupassant story is this based on?
I haven't watched the film yet but I read articles that this was based on Maupassant's short stories. Wonder which one was it.
shareIt's been more than two years since your post.
Anyway, the movie is loosely based on Maupassant's "La femme de Paul" (1881) and "Le signe" (1886).
ATTENTION! You might not want to read the synopsis of these two short stories if you haven't seen the film.
The first story is about a young man, Paul Baron, whose mistress forsakes him one night for a lesbian encounter, prompting his suicide. "Paul’s Wife" is the literal translation of the title, although, because Paul and Madeleine are umarried lovers, the story has become known in English as "Paul’s Mistress." Maupassant was a troubled man--syphilitic since youth and, as a result, increasingly unbalanced and eventually institutionalized (in 1892) after attempting suicide by cutting his throat; but he was no fool. Madeleine may not be married to Paul, but the point of the title is twofold: Paul’s sense of commitment to Madeleine is already based on his assumption of their spiritual union; and Madeleine, who ends up being comforted by her new lover, at the last feels like a bereaved widow, as though she had been Paul’s wife all along. Irony is the piercing delight of Maupassant at his best, here, the fact that sexual infidelity, given its unhappy consequence, can strengthen the girl’s one-way emotional bond with the deceased even as she seeks solace in someone else’s arms. (The oft-repeated comparison of Maupassant and North Carolina’s O. Henry--William Sidney Porter--is ridiculous. There’s nothing in O. Henry’s stories to match the psychological complexity I have just described. His "ironies" are nothing more than plot twists.)
The slighter "La signe"--"The Signal"--turns on an irony of almost mathematical complacency. A woman notices from her window a prostitute who, from her window, is giving men down in the street the beckoning look that she, Mrs. Respectability, feels compelled to try for herself. This leads to an adulterous encounter whose moral offensiveness, a friend of hers, another "respectable" lady, counsels can be neutralized by using the ill-gotten money to buy the cuckolded spouse a gift.
Source: http://filmsdefrance.com/FDF_Masculin_feminin_rev.html