The Flower of Evil (2003)

Fresh and Exciting

Boring

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I think a little familiarity with T.S Eliot's play The Family Reunion, from which Chabrol undoubtedly draws and also with Burnt Norton is necessary to fully appreciate the film. The notion that the past is not really past at all, but a part of the relentless present is the driving force of the film. The footfalls of the past echo in memory, almost in Bergsonian duree. The protagonist coming back home after quite a number of years, skeletons out of the closet, clandestine and forbidden love affairs are archetypes that is at the deep structure of the film. At the core there is a dialogue between the past and the future, in the eternal present.

This movie starts by playing a little trick on the audience, showing first the exterior of a luxurious estate, a maid setting the dinner table, followed by a slow penning camera creeping up the stair evoking a Hitchcock-ish atmosphere. All the while with an elegant mezzo (I think) solo in the background, the camera progresses to reveal a young woman crouching at the corner of a room upstairs, apparently in great distress and, finally, the dead body of a well attired man in a pool of blood.But that is not what the movie is about. I would not go so far to say that the murder we have been shown, which happened two generations before the time of the present-day story, is a red herring. There is some relevance but it certainly does not carry as much weigh as the attention paid to it by the movie may suggest. The final "revelation" is neither compelling nor convincing, and not even as meaningful as (I'm just picking one from the top of my head) the one in "A door on the floor".Director Charbrol's latest work is yet another jab at the French middle class. The target appears to be hypocrisy, primarily through the couple that is on the surface a widower and a widow finding happiness again, together. It doesn't take long to see what sort of shallow politician Anne (Nathalie Baye) is. Gerard (Bernard Le Coq) starts out getting a little sympathy as the somewhat neglected husband, but becomes increasingly despicable every minute as we find out more and more about him.Much brighter is the relationship of their respective offspring Francois (Benoit Magimel) and Michelle (Melanie Doutey), brother and sister only through marriage of their respective parents but not by blood. Their romance is depicted as a perfectly normal sweet love story and the pair simply looks beautiful together. Last but nor least of the key characters is elderly Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon) who carries her own secret, the importance of which, however, has been exaggerated. The elements of "mock" incest and somber family history cast a faint shadow of Ibsen's "Ghosts" but the link is only superficial. The innuendo of incest in the earlier generation however is wickedly subtle.This movie is best enjoyed as a light satire with excellent acting and beautiful filming.

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.

Claude Chabrol must have been very uninspired when he decided to bring this boring number to the screen. It doesn't help that he and Caroline Eliacheff must have been speaking a different language. One wonders if they thought they had a movie out of the material they assembled together. This is at best a poor French soap opera with no sense of direction.Better luck next time M. Chabrol.