La Demoiselle d’honneur (2004) - film review

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...

Once again, director Claude Chabrol takes us on a nervewracking excursion into the darker side of human nature in another of his taut psychological thrillers.   In true Chabrolian fashion, the story begins with a seemingly ordinary group of characters living ordinary lives, with only the subtlest of markers 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 the horrific wallpaper that warns of impending disaster.  Philippe’s behaviour towards his mother has a strong hint of Oedipal possession.  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 and malignant 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 for nothing more than amorous infatuation.   And so we see one man gradually slip downwards into Hell, a journey from the sane world of order and lower middle class respectability to a chaotic universe ruled by perverse desires 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 normality and abnormality, 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.

La Demoiselle d’honneur is by easily one of Claude Chabrol’s most disturbing and atmospheric films.  The hauntingly voyeuristic photography and discordant music add to the chilling sense of mental derangement which propels the narrative to its inevitably grim conclusion.  Whilst fans of Chabrol’s work will greatly appreciate this film, which contains strong echoes of his greatest works, it is somewhat less effective than the thrillers which have earned him his reputation as France’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock.  The characters are not as well developed as in previous Chabrol films and this weakens the impact of the denouement greatly.  The film requires a stronger presence than either Benoît Magimel or Laura Smet (famously the daughter of Nathalie Baye and Johnny Hallyday) can provide, even if both are actors have considerable talent.  The result is a film that, whilst technically well-crafted and beautifully atmospheric, feels a little lacking in substance. Despite this, La Demoiselle d’honneur still manages to be an eminently watchable thriller-drama, a treat for those who share Claude Chabrol’s morbid fascination with the dark underbelly of human experience.

© James Travers 2007

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