THE BRIDESMAID (La Demoiselle D'Honneur)

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
First Run Features
Grade: B
Directed by: Claude Chabrol
Written by: Pierre Leccia, Claude Chabrol, novel by Ruth
Rendell
Cast: Benoit Magimel, Laura Smet, Aurore Clement, Bernard Le
Coq, Solene Bouton, Anna Mihalcea, Michel Duchaussoy,
Suzanne Flon, Eric Seigne, Pierre-Francois Dumeniaud,
Philippe Duclos, Thomas Chabrol
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 7/12/06
Opens: August 4, 2006

If you heard about a guy who sleeps with a bust–no, not that kind, but that of a fake-antique statue named Flora–you’d think he’s eccentric as all get-out. But Philippe Tardieu (Benoit Magimel) is the most stable guy in his bourgeois family. He’s the only fellow who doesn’t “want out,” the sort that director Claude Chabrol might consider unusual–since Chabrol is no friend of bourgeois life and, in an interview in the press notes, states that he thinks marriage is an “atrocious” custom. Chabrol has dabbled in thrillers like my own favorite, “La Ceremonie” (about some lower-class pals who resent the wealth of a household in which one of them works as a maid). With “The Bridesmaid,” the great French director adapts a novel by a major English writer, Ruth Rendell (“The Rottweiler,” “Thirteen Steps Down”), to peer into the minds of two people who are overcome with passion for each other. The otherwise stable Philiippe, who holds a respectable, middle-class job as a remodel contractor for well-to-do homeowners, winds up trapped by his own lust for a woman who is out of her shrunken skull.

Both the man and the woman are living with their mothers, but the home that Philippe (Benoit Magimel) inhabits seems superficially A-OK. His mother, Christine (Aurore Clement). is carrying on a late romance with a 50-year-old man who drives a Jag, Gerard Courtois (Bernard Le Coq) and presents him with the gift of the female head that had graced her garden. Philippe’s sister, Sophie (Solene Bouton) has married a strange-looking man, presumably to exit from the Tardieu household, while Sophie’s kid sister, Patricia (Anna Mihalcea), who sports a nose-ring and who repeatedly states that she does not give a damn about what anyone else is doing, will be picked up for shoplifting.

During Sophie’s wedding, one of her bridesmaids, Stephanie “Senta” Bellange (Laura Smet), follows Philippe home, declaring that she has spent her entire life hoping to meet a fellow like him. The two are overcome by passion so strong that Philippe resists the urge to bolt when his new lover tells him that there are four things one must do to be considered a worthy member of the human race: to plant a tree, to write a poem, to make love to someone of the same sex, and to kill someone. Almost needless to say, Senta will act on her own mandate, killing someone to prove her love while Philippe, hoping that the test of love would be nothing more than sipping champagne from his woman’s slipper, must seriously consider taking Senta up on her dare.

Mysterious things go on during the progress of the tale, the most enigmatic being the presence of the female head outside Gerard’s new home, which the fickle Gerard has taken without providing his new address to Philippe’s mom. Even odder, Philippe steals the statue and takes it home to bed with him. Too bad Senta could not be satisfied to demand that her new boyfriend simply sleep with this Flora.

Humor is not Chabrol’s strong point here, though Senta amuses us with one of her lies: that she performed a movie role with John Malkovich, a scene that ended up on the cutting-room floor–not because she did not meet her director’s expectations, but that Malkovich found working with her made him nervous.

Eduardo Serra photographs Senta’s basement digs as though to say that passion cares little for sour physical surroundings. A slow-paced “Bridesmaid” realizes one of Chabrol’s signature forms: to examine shifts of character in human relations. Philippe, played exquisitely by Magimel, is taken by Senta’s passion for him, but in returning the lust of an unhinged woman, he becomes demented himself, a solid citizen who may have thrown away his life because he is thinking not with his mind but with a lower portion of his anatomy.

Not Rated. 110 minutes © 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online