Sex and Violence
by
Josh Timmermann

You would think that enough films, over the years, have skewed and satirized the bourgeoisie, with varying degrees of success, that there is virtually no new insight to be had, nothing of any real interest left to say on the matter, and that, at this point, one’s bound to be flogging a dead horse.

While this may or not to be true, Claude Chabrol’s The Flower of Evil sets its gaze obliquely on the French privileged class in an attempt to once again expose them as being shallow and hypocritical. Chabrol doesn’t really tread any new territory here, but what makes his film quite a terrific delight is its central dichotomy of tongue-in-cheek venom and an ostensible, if sometimes suppressed, affection for its characters.

In this story of a well-to-do French family (with no shortage of skeletons in its closet), the characters are decidedly stock, but the performances are so uniformly first-rate that this ends up something of a moot point. The actors are playing roles intended to be ciphers, but they inhabit them so fully that they’re ultimately too multi-dimensional for the film to work purely as satire. Especially remarkable are Nathalie Baye as an ambitious woman campaigning in a political election, The Piano Teacher’s Benoît Magimel as her stepson just returned home from Chicago (allowing for plenty of amusing jabs at American culture), and the utterly gorgeous Mélanie Doutey as the daughter of Baye’s character and Magimel’s stepsister and love interest.

The film is consistently clever and even rather poignant as a light meditation on historical reoccurrence, with a crime committed by a younger member of the family mirroring another in the family’s shady past. Still, however enjoyable, The Flower of Evil is certainly no Rules of the Game. It is instead yet another fine variation on Les Liaisons Dangerouses, closest in tone to Cruel Intentions, albeit considerably more cinematically sophisticated and relocated back to France.

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are, to be sure, quite singular among modern filmmakers. Nonetheless, their work calls to mind that of other great auteurs, while at the same time diverging radically from them in other notable respects. Their films share a grainy rawness with the Dogma movement, but completely lack von Trier’s flair for audacious religious iconography, opting instead for subtler signs of spirituality. Bresson is perhaps their most obvious forebear, but the perpetual motion in Dardenne films is a far cry from Bresson’s transcendental stasis. The Dardenne brothers’ preference for organic minimalism and audience interaction is reminiscent of Kiarostami, but their films are driven more by proletarian furor than Kiarostami’s universalist humanism. Like Hou, the Dardennes have a clear affinity for long single-take scenes, though theirs is a far less stylized mise-en-scene, with the weight on their characters stemming less from history than oppressive Dovstoyevskian burdens. They are, thus, in a class unto themselves, making films both simple and rigorous, distanced and jarringly intimate, harrowing and life-affirming.

The Palme d’Or-winning Rosetta remains my favorite Dardenne film, but their latest effort, The Son, is no less powerful, and disputably a masterpiece as well. The film focuses on Olivier (Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet), a lonely, divorced man working as a carpentry instructor at a center for juvenile delinquents. His life, which, aside from his work, seems to have virtually ended after his son was murdered (a tragedy that presumably resulted in his divorce), is thrown into a state of psychological tumult when he is asked to take on as an apprentice the boy who, five years earlier, killed Olivier’s son. Without knowing exactly why, Olivier decides, much to his ex-wife’s bewildered disgust, to allow the boy, Francis, into his carpentry class. From there, Olivier is saddled with one seriously complicated existential dilemma; the film’s examination of his actions and decisions ultimately serves as much as an ambiguous morality play as it does an intense character study.

The Dardenne brothers’ appropriately shaky handheld camera achieves an interesting sort of POV subjectivity as we peer frequently at The Son’s bleak world from over Olivier’s bulky shoulder. The most stunning example of its use comes in the film’s exhausting final act, as wrenching as Mystic River’s cross-cut climax, replete with a distinctively naturalistic suspense no less riveting for its lack of conventional cinematic gimmicks. In the end, The Son functions as a sort of anti-In the Bedroom, a truly cathartic testament to the power of human forgiveness.

It’s only half-true that Claire Denis might be the most superficial world-class director working today. She’s undeniably fascinated by -- even obsessed with -- physical appearances, but that’s merely the starting point for her signature approach. She works, slowly but surely, from the outside in, eventually achieving a higher level of empathy with her characters than nearly any other contemporary filmmaker.

Sensual is not an adjective I usually tend to throw around, but that’s certainly the first word that comes to mind when watching Denis’s Friday Night, an apparently faithful adaptation of a first-person novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim. The film languorously follows two strangers, Laure (Valérie Lemercier) and Jean (Vincent Lindon), through the seductive motions of a one-night affair. The palpable erotic chemistry surging between the two of them is matched and complemented by Agnès Godard’s breathtakingly luminous cinematography, even more tactile and hypnotic than her work in Beau Travail.

Denis relies as heavily on Laure’s point-of-view in portraying her film’s ephemeral relationship as the Dardennes’ do on Olivier’s in The Son, though both films wisely opt against any voice-over narration. The further we travel with Laure toward the titular night’s end, the greater our understanding becomes of the logic that compels her actions; a woman that appears, at first, to be something of an enigma opens up for us not through any Big Oscar-Moment Epiphany but instead through the assuredly graceful deployment of Denis’s cinematic language. Just as Chabrol’s "satire" ends up too vibrantly human to have much bite to it, and the Dardenne brothers’ "revenge film" eschews the violence its portentous pacing leads us to expect, Denis’s erotic fantasy is surprisingly modest, resisting voyeuristic leering, and, somehow, its ellipses prove as sexy as everything else about it.

©2003 Josh Timmermann
CineScene