User Reviews

Despite its deceptively calm exterior, "The Flower Of Evil" is probably one of Claude Chabrol's most ambitious movies: he tackles a wide range of topics here, including marital infidelity (plus the thought of it), (possible) incest, the joy of happy memories and the pain of sad ones, the burden of guilt, political ethics, and history repeating itself to an almost supernatural degree. However, the script (which he co-wrote) is a bit too muddled; I've watched this film twice now and I probably still couldn't draw an error-free family tree for these characters if I had to. The exact nature of the relationship between Benoit Magimel's and Melanie Doutey's characters remains puzzling to the end (are they cousins? Half-siblings? Step-siblings?); nonetheless, their first intimate scenes together are highly erotic (Doutey is amazingly beautiful). The film is splendidly acted all around, especially by Suzanne Flon as Aunt Line. **1/2 out of 4.

We are the eyes of the camera, moving from the dark shadows of trees, across a gravel driveway, through the entrance of a large house, past an open door where a maid is setting out dishes on a table, up the stairs and past a room where a young woman is sitting on the floor, clasping her knees, down the hallway and into a bedroom, then past the corpse on the floor to focus on his hand grasping the coverlet. All the while we hear a cheap, romantic song coming from a radio somewhere in the house...

A memory / comes to you in your dreams / but it is not what it seems / and haunts you for eternity.

A memory / makes you believe he has never gone / that there's no need to grieve / and that the past lives on.

The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) is an almost elegiac Claude Chabrol movie that starts with a dead man and finishes with our understanding of how he came to be dead. In 101 minutes between these two points we find ourselves in the lives of a family whose secrets seem to repeat themselves. This isn't so much a mystery as a parable of inevitability. It also is a movie of deliberate story-telling. It takes its time as we observe the Charpin-Vasseur family. What a family it is. Chabrol once again opens the window to let the stale air of the French grande bourgeoisie out of the room. You may need a family chart to keep things straight at first, and one is provided as an extra on the DVD as well as in an insert.

Anne Charpin-Vasseur (Nathalie Baye) is running for the office of mayor. She is married to Gerard Vasseur (Bernard Le Coq). They married after their spouses, who had been having an affair with each other, were killed in a crash. Anne has a daughter from that first marriage, Michele Charpin-Vasseur (Melanie Doutey). Gerard has a son from his first marriage, Francois Vasseur (Benoit Magimel). Francois has been in America for three years and has just returned. The family lives in a fine country home with Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon). Anne is in for a nasty surprise when an anonymous letter accuses her publicly of being from a family whose members were Nazi collaborators, informers, unethical about they ways they made their money, and a family with a taste for brother-sister incest. Of course, it's all true. Francois and Michele, within a day of his return, not exactly a brother and sister but at least as close as cousins, have become lovers, aided by Aunt Line. She, in fact, in her youth was suspected of having killed her father, the collaborator, who sent his son, Line's brother, to his death when the young man joined the Resistance. You can see how a family chart can come in handy.

For the length of this movie we observe the family...the drive of Anne to be elected mayor, the womanizing of her husband who is always charming, the disdain of Francois for his father, the times Aunt Line can drift into a momentary reverie when we share with her the voices from her past. And that's largely what happens, slowly and deliberately, bit by bit, as we patch pieces together until, an hour and twenty minutes into the film, we encounter a woman hitting a man with a vase, two women dragging him up the stairs and into a bedroom, and one of the women taking his hand to twist the fingers into the coverlet. "I feel as if I am doing things backward," says one of the women. We realize that, with her life, she is. When she tries to comfort the other, she can only hold the other woman's face in her hands and say, "Oh, my dear, time doesn't matter. You'll see. Life is one perpetual present."

I found the movie to be a fine example of Chabrol's craftsmanship and storytelling. As often with Chabrol, it's the women who dominate the story. Nathalie Baye and, particularly, Suzanne Flon, provide the energy and the calm that make the movie work. Flon, 85 when she made the movie, gives us an almost fragile Aunt Michelina, a woman who has seen and done many things in her life, and who has in the present so many echoes of her past. If Baye tends to dominate the first half of the movie, Flon serves up the second half on a platter for us.

This is the kind of movie that some will say, "Nothing happens." They'd be wrong.

This is a pleasant film by Claude Chabrol, nothing like the forbidding title "La Fleur du Mal" would suggest. I say pleasant in that there is nothing gross or ugly about it or really shocking, and it ends in a way that most viewers would find agreeable. There is some dark suggestion of family evil and a kind of playful non-incest and some skeletons in the closet from the Nazi occupation and one dead man at the end, but otherwise this is almost a comedy.

It is not, however, in my opinion his best work, but is very representative. My favorite Chabrol film is Une affaire de femmes (1988) starring Isabelle Huppert and Francois Cluzet. I also liked La Cérémonie (1995) featuring Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert and Jacqueline Bisset. Both of these are much darker works than The Flower of Evil.

As in many Chabrol films this starts slowly but manages to be interesting thanks to some veracious color and characterization blended with a hint of the tension to come. And then, also characteristic of Chabrol, there is a interesting finish.

Nathalie Baye plays Anne Charpin-Vasseur, who in her fifties decides to run for mayor. Her philandering husband Gérard (Bernard Le Coq) is not pleased. Benoit Magimel plays the prodigal son Francois Vasseur, just home after four years in the US, while Melanie Doutey plays his non-biological sister Michele. Francois apparently ran away to the States to cool his growing attraction to Michele (to her disappointment). Now on his return their love blooms.

This is very much approved of by Aunt Line (played wonderfully well with spry energy by Suzanne Flon who was 85 years old when the film was made). Their affair reminds her of her youth, a mixed blessing since she lived through some horrors.

The main plot concerns the opposition that Anne is getting as she runs for mayor. A leaflet accusing the family of collaboration with the Nazis during WWII is distributed that threatens to derail her campaign.

See this for one of France's great ladies of both film and the theater, Suzanne Flon, who died last year after a career than spanned five decades.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

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.

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.

Baudelaire wrote about the many flowers of evil that enchant and destroy men and women, but director Chabrol picks only one from this pernicious garden -- the intergenerational betrayal that afflicts an upper-middle class French family. Just as Aunt Line's husband betrayed the French resistance to help the Nazis, so does the present father and husband of this household betray his wife's political ambitions (he's the author of the scurrilous tract that slanders her and her family, and personally betrays her through his adulterous affairs). Yet this tense and elegant thriller is never didactic or judgemental: its wry and sometimes boisterous sense of humor, typically Chabrol and very Gallic, is just one of many tones that this splendid director wields. Acted with great mastery by, especially, Suzanne Flon (as Aunt Line) and Benoit Magimal as her hunky grandson, this is one flower of evil that delights the eye and ear of sentient moviegoers.