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Like such lovable old-timers as Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, Claude Chabrol gets into creaky-clunky mode. A far cry from his recent masterly LA CEREMONIE, MERCI notarizes Isabelle Huppert's status as a latter-day Joan Crawford: bad actress; deeply scary; ravaged beauty; and possessed of a sort of sex-hungriness and envy of youth that's written between every line. Here, she is the heiress to a chocolate fortune who seems to be slipping roofies into her family's cocoa. Some interesting Chabrolian perversity bubbles when a local girl who might be Huppert's husband's daughter appears, and enters into a slightly familial, slightly flirtatious relationship with the husband. Huppert seems to be holding a deep, dark melodramatic secret that will snap like a firecracker in the last reel (as in LA CEREMONIE).Instead, nothing revelatory happens; the sounds of dismay coming from exiting moviegoers was frightening. The patented Chabrol shtik--placid bourgeois surfaces stretched taut over shrieking insanity underneath--is displayed here without a punchline.Chabrol's quiet steadiness (or steady quietness?) is always a pleasure, even in as visually barren a low-budget feature as this one; but he usually gives much more bang for the buck.
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