Review: Fleur du mal, La (2003)
Robin Clifford
Three generations of the Charpin-Vasseur family reside
in the family manor in the Bordeaux region of France.
Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon) is the first generation
matriarch. Her niece, Anne (Nathalie Baye), and her
husband, Gerard (Bernard Le Coq) make up the second
gen. Michele (Melaney Doutey), Anne's daughter from
her first marriage, and Francois (Benoit Magimel), the
returning prodigal son of Gerard's earlier marriage,
make up the third. This bourgeoisie household appears
perfectly normal but there is a dark, secret past of
betrayal, Nazi collaboration and murder in Claude
Chabrol's 50th film, "The Flower of Evil."
Francois is coming home after practicing law in the
United States for the past four years. Gerard picks
him up at the airport and, except for his father's
lucrative pharmacy and medical laboratory, things are
pretty much the same in town. The young man learns,
much to Gerard's dismay, that his stepmother, Anne, is
preparing to run for mayor. When they arrive at Aunt
Line's home, the family's residence, Francois is
reunited with his stepsister, Michele. He left, he
tells her at a private moment, because he was getting
too close to her.
Anne, in her campaign, is battling both an indifferent
constituency and a scandalous flyer that was
circulated to discredit her candidacy with rumors of
her mother murdering her Nazi collaborator father many
decades ago. The father, it seems, was responsible for
the death of his son, a member of the Resistance and
Line's beloved brother.
Gerard, who despises his wife's mayoral run, is the
prime suspect of Michele and Francois as the source of
the malicious flyers. Gerard, it seems, uses his
laboratory to engage in extramarital affairs with his
female patients but still resents Anne's political
extracurricular activities. As election day draws to
an end, tragedy strikes in the Charpin-Vasseur home
but it turns out to be a newfound freedom for Line.
The curtain draws to a close on Anne's victory party.
Chabrol breaks his film up into three parts, with the
mayoral campaign, the scandal and the tragedy the
pieces of this multi-generational domestic drama. The
handsome family, exceedingly normal on the surface,
harbors a dark past that has haunted Aunt Line since
her father's murder. Line was accused and acquitted of
the crime but has kept something locked deep within
for these many, many years. This haunting rears its
head in the form of the flyer that may have been the
work of Gerard.
Helmer Chabrol handles all this intrigue, even the
final crime, in an almost airy, even whimsical manner.
With the exception of Suzanne Flon (who gives a
complex and appealing performance as Aunt Line) all of
the characters are two-dimension, likable, but without
substance. This keeps "The Flower of Evil" from
attaining the sinister undercurrent that he achieved
in "Merci pour le chocolat" with Isabelle Huppert. The
slightness of Chabrol's latest work, for all its
machinations of murder and scandal, keeps it from
being much more than an OK effort by the master.
I give it a B-.
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X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1214903
X-RT-TitleID: 1126204
X-RT-SourceID: 386
X-RT-AuthorID: 1488
X-RT-RatingText: B-