"La fleur du mal"

« La fleur du mal » : excursion to Chabrol’s land. 

Some films are  slices of life, Hitchcock’s were slices of cake.  

Chabrol’s « La fleur du mal » -The flower of evil ; (2002)- is a full meal : oysters, « filets de lamproie » -lamprey- or sole, « gigot », « tarte » ; whisky, white wine and brandy. 

Film opens on a long, masterly tracking shot : we enter a large manor house, pass by a dining room where the table is being set, walk upstairs ; a young woman is crying in a room, a man’s corpse is lying next door ; a sentimental standard of the 1930’s or 1940’s plays in the background. 

Cut to an Air France plane. 

François (Benoit Magimel), early twenties, is coming home from Chicago where he was studying. He is welcomed by his father, Gérard (Bernard Le Coq), who drives him back to the family home in a small town near Bordeaux. 

The car parks in front of a manor house, which we recognise from the opening shot. A remake of the opening shot takes us inside, but goes no further than the dining room.  

The table is set for the return of the family son and for Chabrol to spin his web. 

We are introduced to lovely elderly Tante Line (Suzanne Flon), equally lovely but much younger Michèle (Mélanie Doutey), finally to smart and elegant Anne (Nathalie Baye). 

We are delighted : all these people seem endearing and charming : the ideal upper-middle class French family. Except that François calls Anne « Belle Maman » - Stepmum- rather than « Maman » -Mum- and his relationship with Michèle seems more intimate than would become brother-sister love. 

The recomposed - but how ?- family sits for lunch. François’s return is cause for celebration : white cloth, silverware, crystal glasses. Tante Line has arranged it all with the help of Marthe, the housekeeper ; she has also cooked François’s favourite dish,  « lamproie », plus a « tarte » ; his father contributes a bottle of excellent white wine to the occasion.  

Like in the car between François and his father, there is a good deal of idle talk ; Gérard  proffers « clichés » about the US and their food habits, but his son warns him : « Les Américains sont moins cons qu’ils veulent le paraître » -Americans are less dumb than they wish to seem. 

Viewers beware : when clichés are uttered in a Chabrol film, they do not inform us about the director’s own thoughts, but about the character who states them.  

Likewise, idle talk, harmless comments, private jokes and obscure remarks need to be closely monitored : we do not want to fall too easily for the characters’ winning charm  

As he waited for his son at the airport, Gérard parked on a « disabled only » space : he had tricked his way to an official badge for the right to do so. 

Despite Gérard’s constant smile, some tension seemed to build up between father and son in the car. 

A chemist -like Chabrol’s own father-, Gérard hinted, when pointing to his new store and adjacent pathology laboratory to his son, that he had cut a few administrative corners to build them. 

A lot of additional information is effortlessly and playfully passed to us around the table.  

As she jokingly scolds Gérard for telling François there will be « lamproie » for lunch, Tante Line says with her sweetest smile : « Tu sais bien qu’ici, tout est un secret » - You know full well everything here is a secret. 

Anne is running for the local elections against her husband’s better advice. The more they smile at each other, the more they seem tense. 

The family moves to the winter garden for coffee. Anne’s campaign organiser, Lartigue -first name Matthieu, like Chabrol’s son who composed the film musical score, but the part is played by his brother, Thomas- pays a visit. He is upset by an unsigned political tract ; Anne reads it aloud : the tract stirs the mud in the troubled and troubling past of the Charpin-Vasseur family. 

Pierre Charpin, a collaborationist, was murdered at the end of WW2 ; rumour accused his daughter, Tante Line, who was cleared in court. 

The Charpin-Vasseur family faced other unfortunate dramas. The latest occurred a little over twenty years ago : Anne‘s husband and Gérard‘s wife died together in an accident ; then, as the tract puts it, « the widow married the widower ». 

For Gérard, the tract is additional evidence that Anne should stay away from politics ; for his wife, mere gossip and more reason to fight. 

Introduction is over. The film can now unfold the plot and sub-plots of a, very likely, excellent script -to know for sure, one need read it- by Caroline Eliacheff, Louise Lambrichs and Chabrol, with an appealing mix of understated elegance and ruthless efficiency. 

« La fleur du mal » is a wonderfully entertaining viewer’s guide to « us et coutumes » -way of life- of French bourgeoisie in the Bordeaux region : strongly suggested screening material for any potential visitor to Gironde. 

Film is detail perfect, from Tante Line’s gardening straw hat to her battered, decades old « 2-CV »,  from the beautiful ivy -or is it vine ?- covered family mansion, its gravel path and flower beds,  the Pilat -home, for trivia amateurs, to France highest sand dune- beach house down to the ugliness and cheapness of the new chemist’s store and pathology laboratory, the bareness of Anne’s campaign headquarters... 

This is a film of rituals, many of them related to food, all the more evocative for reminding French viewers of similar occasions in their own life : the coming home lunch, Sundays formal dress and traditional « gigot » -leg of lamb-, the casual dinner of oysters and sole at a friendly Pilat inn, morning coffee and croissants in the veranda overlooking the sandy beach, Tante Line rushing to make the dishes as soon as she arrives at the beach house.  

Chabrol’s characters show a sensual appreciation of all the earthly pleasures to which their material  well-being entitles them : for one hundred minutes, the Charpin-Vasseur invite us to share a « bourgeois art de vivre » honed for generations, which they practise without a hint of self-consciousness, like they would carry a  second skin. 

Despite the dirty family laundry exposed in the heinous -and no doubt libellous- tract, they seem so nice and unaffected, particularly Tante Line and the young ones, that we cannot resent their privileged position and gladly accept both that they deserve it and their invitation. 

To add to our viewing pleasure, this idyllic background is matched by a constant streak of irony, if not cynicism. Ann‘s and her campaign organiser’s visit to a social housing unit is an anthology piece : as Matthieu Lartigue wryly comments, « to be late for the visit of a low rent estate is the mortal sin of political campaigning » ; Chabrol portrays his working class characters with the same sharpness and accuracy as his « bourgeois », without a trace of caricature or patronising. 

Each scene in the film elicits the same small smile usually displayed by Chabrol in life and Bernard Le Coq on screen : a womaniser -another ritual, perhaps less harmless-, Gérard is above all a master of « social hypocrisy », who welcomes Lartigue with open arms seconds after saying how much he loathes him.  

In that instance, the director surely approves of his character : Chabrol is a confessed admirer of all the petty lies that make social -and family- life endurable and daily keep us from going at each other’s throats. 

He may feel differently about what lurks far below the lying smiles, the beautiful house, the elegance and perfect taste of its inhabitants, among the deeply buried family secrets and taboos : true evil, waiting patiently to bloom again... 

« La fleur du mal » is not a masterpiece, or of the intimate kind, like a small Dutch canvas painting the interior of a bourgeois home : deceptively low key and flawless. Chabrol’s film achieves all that it sets out to do and even exceeds its promises. Amazing by contemporary cinema standards, it is Chabrol’s fiftieth film.  

After fifty films, Chabrol is a master craftsman : self confident enough to underplay his hand. His is bourgeois filmmaking of the highest order : understated, like his characters ; nothing obvious or showy, a constant light touch.  

Fully committed to his story, he nevertheless takes a step backward so that his sharp eye and critical mind can observe it and his characters at a slight distance and leaves enough space in the frame to allow -and suggest- us to act likewise.  

A great director is also a great coach ; in fifty films, Chabrol has learnt to surround himself with a devoted and talented  team. « La fleur du mal » moves forward with quiet fluidity : director, crew, actors share a common vision. 

The picture is wonderfully cast : no character or actor stands out ; as its poster suggests, it is a film of equals. Same is true among technical departments : cinematography, sound, sets, music... All the facets of filmmaking are harmoniously balanced. 

Chabrol is a fair master, but this is a family film, on and off screen. His two sons deserve special mention. Matthieu Chabrol’s musical score is as insinuating as his father’s camera work ; never redundant, it evokes Bernard Herrmann’s compositions for Hitchcock films. As to Thomas Chabrol’s Lartigue, it is close to cynical perfection. 

After fifty movies, Chabrol’s lust for filmmaking is impressive : « La fleur du mal » is anything but a run-of-the-mill work. 

It is also lust, displayed by tipsy Gérard for his stepdaughter Michèle, which causes history to stutter and « La fleur du mal » to bloom again. 

For one moment, it looks like the film may end with an unbecoming bang but, when drama strikes, Chabrol keeps his cool self : rather than stirring up a fire, he smothers the flames with Tante Line’s expert support and soothing voice.  

The film ends less than it fades away into unresolved ambiguity : the Charpin-Vasseurs have just entered a new cycle in their troubled history. 

In a surrealist and mute closing sequence, social hypocrisy and pure evil converge to celebrate a murder. 

As the end credits roll, questions rise to mind... 

Have we not been tricked ? masterly misled to watch only the film lighter side ? Have we candidly fallen for the charming smiles of Tante Line and Michèle ? François’s aloof good looks ? 

What have we truly seen on screen ? An ordinary upper-middle class French family, plagued with recurring bad luck and gossip, to which we have readily identified ? Or something much more sinister : an amiable, modern-day bourgeois version of the Greek Atrides ? 

Two families, the Charpins and the Vasseurs, whose irrepressible lust for each other has created an incestuous and murderous clan ? 

In its typical understated way, as if by accident, the film has unlocked many doors which we are free to push or not. In good « bourgeois » tradition, much is left unsaid : « you know full well everything here is a secret ».  

One has been -supposedly ?- unveiled to us, how many more is it up to us to discover? The film ends ; a new, critical screening starts, in our heads.      

When Anne’s husband and Gérard’s wife died in the same accident, how « intimate » was their relationship ? If it were « intimate », for how long had it been ?  

Vice versa : at the time of the accident, what was the true relationship of their widow and widower, and future husband and wife ? 

Film provides no birth details for François and Michèle, but the timing of their mother’s and father’s deaths as well as their apparent age suggest dark suspicions : whose son and daughter are they really ? Could they be half-brother and -sister, born of the same father ? 

Have the Charpin-Vasseurs an uncanny talent to hide their family scandals under the rugs of their beautiful house ? Did their charming manners blind us with the director’s and screenwriters’ active help ? 

After Gérard sexually harasses his stepdaughter -if she is nothing more to him-, is his death really one more unfortunate accident ? Is what we think we have witnessed on screen the truth ? 

Gérard’s death is too timely and propitious not to be fully investigated : in the course of the film, he has progressively alienated himself from the rest of the family, which seemed ready to reject him by unanimous -if possibly untold- agreement. 

Anne had good reason to resent her husband : he opposed her political ambitions and cheated her -though she did not know or pretended not to know. 

François confessed to Michèle he had left for Chicago in good part to be rid of his father. He calls him a « salaud » -son of a bitch-, but no rational cause is given for  his dislike -hatred ?-. 

Long before the harassment scene, Michèle too has admitted to not liking Gérard. Again, no explanation is offered for her feeling : has Gérard harassed her before or is her mistrust purely instinctive and through no fault of his ? 

Michèle and François suspect that Gérard has written the unsigned political tract ;  again, no hard fact fuels such speculation. 

As to Tante Line, she listens and observes in apparent neutrality : she does not badmouth Gérard but never utters a word in his defence. 

Back to the original question : is Gérard’s welcome and final removal really accidental ? Here too, no hard fact, but a suspicion : Gérard’s death was less an accident than the performance of one more ritual, in a film replete with them. 

Possibly the oldest ritual of all, neither French nor « bourgeois ». According to René Girard, all civilisations were based on it until the advent of Christianity : a human sacrifice, the killing of the scapegoat, whose individual « sins » were believed to be the cause of the community’s misfortunes and whose death would restore the clan, tribe,  city, state... to its original order. 

Is it ultimately what « La fleur du mal » is about and shows us ? that we cannot see only because we refuse to, as René Girard claims mankind has for ages ? 

What is in a title ? 

Is « La fleur du mal » a reminiscence of Baudelaire’s nearly eponymous book of poetry : « Les fleurs du mal » ? Of Orson Welles’s « Touch of evil » ? 

Is it rather nothing but an abstract reference to the seductive powers of evil and its ability to create poisonous beauty ? 

Or shall we look towards the very real and pretty flower-beds which surround the family house and to which lovely Tante Line tends with so much care ?  

And, beyond the flower-beds, shall we take a very close look at Tante Line herself, as she confesses to killing her father and hints at an incestuous relationship -acted out or not ?- with her brother ? 

Is she the actual  « flower of evil », the original black hole from which stemmed all family misfortunes ? 

If so, her tender relationship with the younger generation is nothing but evil lovingly and successfully grooming its next incarnation : as Michèle kills Gérard, Tante Line transfers her own « sins », i.e. family « doom », onto her shoulders, with François’s active support. 

In such revisionist light, Gérard is only the fall guy ; a petty womaniser and social hypocrite, a self-indulgent picture of bourgeois moral shortcomings, he never has his chance : his small time, small town misdemeanours are not match for true evil. 

Sandwiched between the elder and younger ones, the adult generation of Gérard and Anne, fully focused on her political campaign, like us, sees nothing coming, as « the flower of evil » is passed over from Tante Line’s parchment-like face to Michèle’s radiant youth, with the guarantee to bloom again : human sacrifices offer only temporary respite, they need to be endlessly re-enacted ; one day, the family shall expel a new scapegoat. 

The film surrealist ending then makes perfect sense as the collective celebration of the immediate short term positive effects of the scapegoat’s killing : Anne is successfully elected and family harmony restored. 

What is it, if not a happy end ?