Nightcap (2002)

Why so much hype?

Simply Perfect

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

In Lausanne, the aspirant pianist Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis) has lunch with her mother Louise Pollet (Brigitte Catillon), her boyfriend Axel (Mathieu Simonet) and his mother. Jeanne leans that when she was born, a nurse had mistakenly told to the prominent pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc) that she would be his daughter. André has just remarried his first wife, the heiress of a Swiss chocolate factory Marie-Claire "Mika" Muller (Isabelle Huppert) and they live in Lausanne with André's second marriage son Guillaume Polonski (Rodolphe Pauly). Out of the blue, Jeanne visits André and he offers to give piano classes to help her in her examination. Jeanne becomes closer to André and visits him every day; sooner she discovers that Mika might be drugging her stepson with Rohypnol. Further, she might have killed André's second wife Lisbeth."Merci pour le Chocolat" is another ambiguous film by Claude Chabrol about evilness, alienation and manipulation. Isabelle Huppert, who is one of Chabrol's favorite's actresses, performs a wicked lady. The essence of her evil is not explained, but she is capable to drug and kill her best friend and incapable to love or donate to help children. Jeanne Pollet is manipulative and greedy, and uses the incident in the maternity hospital to get closer to André. When she sees the photo of Lisbeth in the bedroom, she returns to the pianos room where André is and puts her hands on her face exactly the same way Lisbeth did. André Polonski is alienated and lives his life in the world of music, and doping to sleep and ignoring to see what Mika did to Lisbeth. They live a hypocrite life with Guillaume, who does not have any objective in life.This film is not among the best works of Claude Chabrol, but anyway it is entertaining. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Teia de Chocolate" ("The Chocolate Cobweb")

I rented this movie, hoping that this would lead to something interesting. It started out a bit dubious already with swapped children, which would have been fine with Shakespeare but in more modern-day technology is not very plausible. And then it leads out to the various plots of possible fathers, suspicious deaths and incidents, and a woman who poisons people through her hot chocolate (Huppert). It sounds rather ludicrous, like it should make for a very good comedic story or something of the sort. It bored me to tears. I sat there and sat there, while the film moved at a glacial pace through those plots, and while inconsistencies popped up. And there were even some implausible cases--how very convenient that the girl who suspected Mika (Huppert) put drugs into the hot chocolate had a boyfriend working in the lab in her mother's place! That was the one big thing that irritated me; the rest I was too bored to notice, and I haven't seen this movie for a few months since. Huppert was about the only redeeming value, as the rest of the actors are conventional, have no chemistry, boring, and quite frankly did the whole movie in for me. Huppert played Mika quite well though--a seemingly normal woman, but underneath that facade you just know that something's wrong, even though what she does is hardly suspicious at first. And as usual, Huppert uses micro-gestures to convey the creepiness and twistedness of Mika well, although I feel like Huppert was delivering for something, only that thing never arrived. If you like implausible plots, a glacial pace (but I've seen and liked "Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days", which moves rather slowly; don't mistake me for hyperactive or with ADD), and just sheer boringness, this is the movie for you. I am sorry if my opinion seems blatantly wrong, but this movie was just not up to my taste or standards. 5/10.

It is a suspenseful film, never boring, kind of seductive. It's major flaw is the lack of chemistry between the Huppert-Dutronc couple. There is no way of taking this couple seriously, even as a dysfunctional pair: she is just too robotic and cruel and their communication (or lack therof) is never convincing.

Anna Mouglalis is HOT. And she's the main character. So why doesn't her name appear on the DVD box along with Jacques Dutronc and Isabelle Huppert? Don't they have enough already?I've seen other pictures of her on the Net and she doesn't look exactly like Liv Tyler, but in this movie, the way her hair is done and her lipstick applied, they could be twins separated at birth.Oh, and what about the movie?Well, I saw it with four other people. In keeping with the theme of the movie, which has a lot to do with hot chocolate and getting a good night's sleep, two of the four fell asleep after the first twenty minutes or so. The other person and I (both Francophiles, and I now a convinced Mouglalis-o-phile), managed to watch the whole thing, which wasn't easy, because, well....the acting kind of sucked, the people were all boring and unlikable, and the plot was salvaged from the reject bins behind the office where they write Murder, She Wrote, episodes of Columbo, and those Masterpiece Theater episodes set in the 1920's. Boring boring boring. And contrived. And unbelievable. Too many coincidences, and once you see the movie, you'll find it hard to believe that main character A married main character B, and you'll find it hard to believe that main character A, a driven over-achiever who surely must be exhausted with all the work he does, would have troubles sleeping and would have such little sex drive that he would want to get into a permanent hookup with main character B, whom he's been with before and didn't like the first time. That is, there is not enough shown about his character to make these choices even remotely plausible.But to know who A and B are, you'll have to go see the movie. So go see it, and have a good time!