SYNOPSICS
La fleur du mal (2003) is a French movie. Claude Chabrol has directed this movie. Nathalie Baye,Benoît Magimel,Suzanne Flon,Mélanie Doutey are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2003. La fleur du mal (2003) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.
Anne runs for re-election to the town council, shepherded by Matthieu, her fellow candidate and campaign manager. Her husband, Gérard, a businessman and philanderer, hates the campaign and feels vindication when a nasty leaflet circulates about their family history. His son, François, just back from the U.S., is in love with his step-sister Michèle, and she with him, although something is amiss besides their being cousins. Watching it all is their elderly Aunt Line, who has her own haunting memories. A death in World War II and a death on election night collapse time in the perpetual present and bring unexpected expiation. There's a lot to celebrate.
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La fleur du mal (2003) Reviews
Good French Family Drama
This is a 100% French movie possibly not ever intended for American viewers. However, being the francophile that I am, I dug up "Flower of Evil" at my local library and proceeded to view it with much anticipation. Nathalie Baye is one of my favorite French actresses. The story moves along a little slow but the mood of the film is enticing and it leads you to believe that something dark is lurking just beneath the surface. That dark stuff emerges later on in various subplots while the entire plot does thicken up a bit with good tension. I felt a bit let down when it came time for a climax but I wouldn't dismiss this film because of that, I really enjoyed the superb acting, fine character development, and otherwise gripping story, a characteristic of many French dramas. Maybe some of the subtlety was just lost on me, but I liked the fact that you're never sure who's good or bad, but you end up feeling for each character. "La Fleur du Mal" is a film for serious film watchers and/or students of acting or drama, and not for mindless entertainment.
Family Secrets!
"La Fleur du Mal" (Flower of Evil) unfolded like a multi-layered nineteenth-century novel. There was a plot involving politics, a plot involving romance, and the deep family secrets that appear to have afflicted the characters in a multi-generational curse. One of the characters even refers to their lives as the equivalent of a novel by Emile Zola. I appreciated the rich psychological levels of the characters and the fine performances under the direction of Claude Chabrol. The character of Aunt Line as played by Suzanne Flon was especially moving. There were effective emotional moments involving reverie and interior monologue that conveyed great depth of feeling. In American films, we would have been given generic "flashback" scenes. In the more subtle European film-making style, the performer conveyed the past through emotional expression. Like so many of the great nineteenth-century novels where everyone seems to be marrying his or her cousin, so too in "La Fleur du Mal" one of the plot lines focuses on a young man and woman deeply in love, who realize that their bloodlines are too close for comfort. Some of the film's most intense scenes are those in which the couple seeks to understand their complex family ties. Interestingly, this eclectic film is not without dark humor, including a truly bizarre sequence related to an accidental murder. Stylistically, this is a film experience with lush cinematography of the contemporary Bordeaux region, filled with sensitive compositional choices and careful set-ups. If the characters had been outfitted in nineteenth-century costumes, this really could have been a Zola novel.
Actually the flower is not so evil
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!)
A classical Chabrol film about the nature of crime
This is a classical Chabrol film about the nature of crime. Chabrol gives major importance to the relationships in a family. The family is a normal family at first sight. But as the film proceeds we learn that there were betrayals, crimes and a murder in the family history. The grandfather has collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation and has informed against his son and caused his death. Aunt Line was trialed for killing his father and found not guilty. Now Anne is the candidate for mayor and his husband Gerard is uneasy about his wife's political career and he seems to do everything to prevent her being elected as mayor. Love and crime are both inherits from one generation to the other. The woman characters of La Fleur du Mal are very interesting. They are strong, intelligent and giving. "Sooner or later one must pay for his/her crime" is one of the themes of the movie.
Another Bourgeois Crime
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.