La Demoiselle d'honneur
2004 Thriller / Drama / Romance
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Credits
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Summary
Since the death of his father, Philippe Tardieu has been the breadwinner and guardian
angel for his mother Christine and sisters Patricia and Sophie. He is unimpressed
with his mother’s latest boyfriend, Gérard Courtois, and is proven right when the
latter suddenly vanishes from the scene. At Patricia’s wedding, Philippe meets Senta,
a bridesmaid who is some distant relation of the groom. From the moment they meet
Philippe and Senta know they are meant for one another. However, Philippe senses
there is something strange about his new girlfriend. She lives alone in the cellar
of a grand house and seems to have a habit of telling wild lies about how she spends her
time. He hardly knows how to react when Senta asks him to prove his love by killing
someone at random. Reading in the newspaper that a local tramp has been found murdered,
Philippe pretends he was the killer. Senta is delighted by this revelation - so
delighted in fact that the next day she admits to having stabbed Gérard Courtois
to death...
Review
Once again, director Claude Chabrol takes us on a sinister exploration of the darker side
of human nature in another of his taut psychological thrillers. In true Chabrolesque
fashion, the story begins with a seemingly ordinary group of characters living ordinary
lives, with only the subtlest of hints to the destructive forces that will be unleashed
in the course of the ensuing drama. Yet, from the outset one senses something is
wrong. It isn't just horrific wallpaper that screams: "lock me up". Philippe's
behaviour towards his mother has a strong Oedipus undertone. When he speaks to her,
you'd think he was her lover, not her son. And his dislike for his mother's boyfriend
is far more intense than it should be, even allowing for the fact that Gérard is
an odious parvenu of the worst kind.
The truth is that Philippe's normality is barely skin deep. Given the right stimulus, the right set of circumstances, he will assume his true nature, like a moth tearing free from its cocoon. That stimulus is Senta, a strange young woman who, siren-like, lures Philippe away from his comfortable dull life and allows his true nature to emerge, a little at a time. Philippe himself is scarcely conscious of the change he is undergoing, and perhaps mistakes his moments of folly as the mere consequences of an intense amorous infatuation. And so we see one man gradually slip downwards into Hell, a journey from the sane world of ordered normality to a universe of chaos, perversion and moral ambiguity. The transformation is so seamless that at no point do we realise that Philippe has crossed any kind of threshold. The point of the film is that the barrier we think exists between sanity and insanity does not exist. Madness is a land that is open to anyone, and may in fact be the world we already inhabit. No director other than Claude Chabrol manages to evoke the mood of impending moral disintegration and a sense of lurking menace that he does and La Demoiselle d'honneur is by any account one of his most disturbing and atmospheric films. The hauntingly voyeuristic photography and discordant music add a chilling sense of mental derangement that is strangely redolent of German expressionism - portraying a world that appears to be sane on the surface but which, in reality, is actually a frighteningly disordered place, with what we perceive as normality the thinnest of veils to mask a horrible truth. Whilst fans of Chabrol's work will greatly appreciate this film, it has to be said that it is far less effective than some of his earlier thrillers which tread similar ground. In contrast to, say, L'Enfer (1994) and La Cérémonie (1995) (two films which have close similarities with this one), the film seems to be far more preoccupied with style than with dramatic content. The characters are far less well developed and hence far less convincing than they need to be for the drama to have any real impact. This is partly because of weaknesses in the script - Chabrol's depiction of a working class milieu is hackneyed and far from convincing, much less believable than his portrayal of the cosy bourgeois world from which he comes. It is also because the performances don't quite ring true, particularly those of the leads actors. The film requires far stronger presence and depth than either Benoît Magimel or Laura Smet (famously the daughter of Nathalie Baye and Johnny Hallyday) can provide (even if both are actors with considerable talent). Here, Chabrol's reluctance to "direct" his actors works against him and the performances he gets are far from satisfactory. The result is a film that is certainly creepy, but it also feels somewhat flat and humourless, like a bottle of wine that has been left uncorked just a little too long. And yet La Demoiselle d'honneur still manages to be an eminently watchable thriller, a treat for those who share this director's morbid taste for the grimly dark underbelly of human experience. © James Travers 2007
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