Too Wise Wives

In a sun-drenched California manor where every lace curtain seems to inhale the scent of suspicion, two marriages tilt on the axis of rumor. Marie, brittle as Limoges yet hungry for corroboration that her once-devoted David still craves her, spirals into a surveillance ballet: reading perfume in coat pockets, timing the hush between doorbell and footfall, translating every silence into infidelity. Across the hedge, her childhood confidante–now rival–Adèle, serenely carnal in her Mona Lisa half-smile, rekindles a long-smoldering ember with David under the alibi of neighborly concern. The film watches watchfulness itself: telephone cords become serpents, staticky gramophone records echo like confessions, and a single forgotten glove on a settee mutates into a hieroglyph of betrayal. Lois Weber’s camera, a ghostly third wife, glides through keyholes and vanity mirrors, catching characters as they rehearse smiles they will later use as evidence in the court of domestic warfare. The climax is not a showdown but a slow dawning: the realization that jealousy is a mirror whose cracks reveal more of the beholder than the beheld. When the husbands finally speak their fears aloud, the words land like dropped crystal—irreparable, glittering, strangely beautiful.