In Chabrol's Une partie de plaisir (1975), the main character is played by the writer Paul Gégauff. Gégauff plays a troubled and domineering husband, his (de facto) wife is played by his real-life first wife Danièle Gégauff. In the movie he kills her by kicking her head in a graveyard; in real life they were already divorced by this time ... their real daughter also plays their daughter in the movie. In real life Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second wife on Christmas Eve 1983, at the age of 61. Chabrol and Gégauff worked together on fourteen films.
In the film at one point Gégauff's character drives in the night and stands outside the house he and his de facto wife and daughter lived in and rented, the house his grandmother had lived in and the house he was born in ... after disturbing the calm balance of his family life in that house, they packed and left and the family fell apart. After marrying another woman he drives at night to stand outside the house, recalling a line in Flaubert: "comme quelqu’un de ruiné qui regarde, à travers les carreaux, des gens attablés dans son ancienne maison." ... "like a ruined man gazing in, through the window, at the people dining in his old house." (Penguin Classics, p.40)
Gégauff takes his new wife back to the opening "idyllic" scene of the movie, re-enacting the scene with putting a small crab on a fishing hook, the girl catching a fish, a foghorn blowing eerily. This attempt to recreate an old vivid memory is repeated in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), but the Chabrol scene is more profound, more moving and more disturbing.
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