"The Flower of Evil"
Three generations of the Charpin-Vasseur family reside in the family manor in the Bordeaux region of France. Aunt Line (Suzanne Flon) is the first generation matriarch. Her niece, Anne (Nathalie Baye), and her husband, Gerard (Bernard Le Coq) make up the second gen. Michele (Melaney Doutey), Anne's daughter from her first marriage, and Francois (Benoit Magimel), the returning prodigal son of Gerard's earlier marriage, make up the third. This bourgeoisie household appears perfectly normal but there is a dark, secret past of betrayal, Nazi collaboration and murder in Claude Chabrol's 50th film, "The Flower of Evil."
Francois is coming home after practicing law in the United States for the past four years. Gerard picks him up at the airport and, except for his father's lucrative pharmacy and medical laboratory, things are pretty much the same in town. The young man learns, much to Gerard's dismay, that his stepmother, Anne, is preparing to run for mayor. When they arrive at Aunt Line's home, the family's residence, Francois is reunited with his stepsister, Michele. He left, he tells her at a private moment, because he was getting too close to her.
Anne, in her campaign, is battling both an indifferent constituency and a scandalous flyer that was circulated to discredit her candidacy with rumors of her mother murdering her Nazi collaborator father many decades ago. The father, it seems, was responsible for the death of his son, a member of the Resistance and Line's beloved brother.
Gerard, who despises his wife's mayoral run, is the prime suspect of Michele and Francois as the source of the malicious flyers. Gerard, it seems, uses his laboratory to engage in extramarital affairs with his female patients but still resents Anne's political extracurricular activities. As election day draws to an end, tragedy strikes in the Charpin-Vasseur home but it turns out to be a newfound freedom for Line. The curtain draws to a close on Anne's victory party.
Chabrol breaks his film up into three parts, with the mayoral campaign, the scandal and the tragedy the pieces of this multi-generational domestic drama. The handsome family, exceedingly normal on the surface, harbors a dark past that has haunted Aunt Line since her father's murder. Line was accused and acquitted of the crime but has kept something locked deep within for these many, many years. This haunting rears its head in the form of the flyer that may have been the work of Gerard.
Helmer Chabrol handles all this intrigue, even the final crime, in an almost airy, even whimsical manner. With the exception of Suzanne Flon (who gives a complex and appealing performance as Aunt Line) all of the characters are two-dimension, likable, but without substance. This keeps "The Flower of Evil" from attaining the sinister undercurrent that he achieved in "Merci pour le chocolat" with Isabelle Huppert. The slightness of Chabrol's latest work, for all its machinations of murder and scandal, keeps it from being much more than an OK effort by the master.
I give it a B-.
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