Bob Taylor The three films that Chabrol has made with a script by Caroline Eliacheff are some of the most soporific duds you'll ever see. La Cérémonie was pretty incoherent and dull, despite the splatter-fest at the end, Merci pour le chocolat wasted Isabelle Huppert's and Jacques Dutronc's considerable talents,and here is the latest--a mish-mash of incest, wartime collaboration scandals, and political satire (are municipal candidates really this cynical?). Chabrol still can't get away from savagely ripping into a bourgeoisie that gets feebler with every passing year.I watched Nathalie Baye closely; she never broke out of a tired cynicism displayed with pursed mouth--in other words, she phoned in her performance. Benoit Magimel and Mélanie Doutey were fresh and very appealing as the young lovers, and Bernard Le Coq showed me once more that he is one of France's best actors. Suzanne Flon as Tante Line provided all the touching moments in the picture.

MartinHafer I have seen quite a few Claude Chabrol films. A few I have loved, but with so many others, it seems like the director is following a script with great ideas that just seems to miss the mark. In effect, these are decent films that just don't quite hit their stride. Maybe others have had similar reactions.Part of the reason I was left a bit cold about the film is the weirdness of the family's sexual dynamics. Perhaps it's not thought of the same way in French culture, but I know that the two lovers in the story would NOT be accepted in the USA. Think about it--they are step-brother and step-sister who are making love. This is odd, but morally it's not so bad. BUT, they are also first cousins! This is just too weird and I don't think the plot needed this as a distraction. Just having them be "steps" should have been fine--the cousins thing was just unnecessary and icky. And, the family apparently approved of this and it was some sort of weird family tradition. Ewwww.The other problem was that although I liked what transpired between the father and step-daughter near the very end, it seems like the film stopped too quickly--like the resolution of the film was never decided. This isn't a horrible thing--as some ambiguity could be okay, but I know many who see this will be left a little cold. Plus, at times, the characters were just too cold and uninteresting.Now, as far as the acting goes it was generally fine and I liked the main story ideas. I loved the performance and characterization of Aunt Line--her story was GREAT. Also, having a son who has no feeling for his father and step-siblings falling in love are all good topics for a film. With a small re-write, this movie could have gotten an 8 or 9.

honeybearrecords Incest that isn't incest is also a theme in Chabrol's latest "La Fleur Du Mal". A brother and a sister, who are engaged in a physical relationship, are siblings due to a marriage and not blood. Again, guilt is so far removed that even their parents had always hoped they would become a couple.The film starts with the brother returning from a four-year stint in the states. He is picked up by his father who seems to be an affable and simple guy. His stepmother is a local politician who comes across as grossly ambitious pushing her family to the side with the characters vaguely implying at some infidelity with her running mate. His sister, it seems, is attracted to him while he rejects her.But all this is half-truth as slowly unravels in this light mystery about upper middle class decadence and what they think is communication. There is the mystery in the foreground, in public discussion, about the family's relationship to Nazi collaborators in the past. There is a secondary mystery out of the public eye that becomes the most important about the father, his own motives, and how they grow closer and closer to the family.Chabrol's influence from Baudelaire, well as a fan of both, I don't really get it. I see this movie, like some of Chabrol's other critiques of the petit-bourgeois, more of an alternate reality that I'm not privy to. It's socialism of the privileged, and it's intriguingly perverse. The incest is safe while alluring. The murder is secondary and unresolved by the films end. The film closes with credits running during a party while a corpse waits unacknowledged. What will become of the characters ends up being unimportant.In many ways, this is Chabrol at his most sophisticated. The need to move between audience-aimed actions is replaced by built-up realism. The dialog is smart and the uneven story progression seems especially real. He's sacrificed his scathing wit to allow for the characters to organically develop at the limitations of their own wisdom.Part of the original nouvelle vogue and as important historically as Truffaut and Godard, this is just one part of a larger body of work matching that of Eric Rohmer and Stephen Frears.

thefan-2 I gather from this movie that the French are a great deal touchier about their family histories than we are here in the US. They're easy to ridicule on this point, and the writers seem to be having great fun doing it.I also gather that French politicians are practically identical to their American counterparts: witness the doddering soon-to-be-ex-mayor, who appears not to have uttered a sincere word in his entire life, beaming and exclaiming "Wonderful people!" on learning that the person whose hand he's shaking has just returned from the US. (The "anti-Americanism" that others have complained about in this movie is mostly on that level. Catch it if you can.)For me, the movie weakens when it tries to be serious about the various murders and incestuous relationships in the family's past. The young half-siblings who fall into bed together save those parts from sinking the movie altogether. Definitely worth a rental or two.