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24 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
Good French Family Drama, 20 July 2004
Author: tommybass from New York, NY

This is a 100% French movie possibly not ever intended for American viewers. However, being the francophile that I am, I dug up "Flower of Evil" at my local library and proceeded to view it with much anticipation. Nathalie Baye is one of my favorite French actresses.

The story moves along a little slow but the mood of the film is enticing and it leads you to believe that something dark is lurking just beneath the surface.

That dark stuff emerges later on in various subplots while the entire plot does thicken up a bit with good tension. I felt a bit let down when it came time for a climax but I wouldn't dismiss this film because of that, I really enjoyed the superb acting, fine character development, and otherwise gripping story, a characteristic of many French dramas. Maybe some of the subtlety was just lost on me, but I liked the fact that you're never sure who's good or bad, but you end up feeling for each character.

"La Fleur du Mal" is a film for serious film watchers and/or students of acting or drama, and not for mindless entertainment.

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12 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Actually the flower is not so evil, 29 January 2006
8/10
Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

This is a pleasant film by Claude Chabrol, nothing like the forbidding title "La Fleur du Mal" would suggest. I say pleasant in that there is nothing gross or ugly about it or really shocking, and it ends in a way that most viewers would find agreeable. There is some dark suggestion of family evil and a kind of playful non-incest and some skeletons in the closet from the Nazi occupation and one dead man at the end, but otherwise this is almost a comedy.

It is not, however, in my opinion his best work, but is very representative. My favorite Chabrol film is Une affaire de femmes (1988) starring Isabelle Huppert and Francois Cluzet. I also liked La Cérémonie (1995) featuring Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert and Jacqueline Bisset. Both of these are much darker works than The Flower of Evil.

As in many Chabrol films this starts slowly but manages to be interesting thanks to some veracious color and characterization blended with a hint of the tension to come. And then, also characteristic of Chabrol, there is a interesting finish.

Nathalie Baye plays Anne Charpin-Vasseur, who in her fifties decides to run for mayor. Her philandering husband Gérard (Bernard Le Coq) is not pleased. Benoit Magimel plays the prodigal son Francois Vasseur, just home after four years in the US, while Melanie Doutey plays his non-biological sister Michele. Francois apparently ran away to the States to cool his growing attraction to Michele (to her disappointment). Now on his return their love blooms.

This is very much approved of by Aunt Line (played wonderfully well with spry energy by Suzanne Flon who was 85 years old when the film was made). Their affair reminds her of her youth, a mixed blessing since she lived through some horrors.

The main plot concerns the opposition that Anne is getting as she runs for mayor. A leaflet accusing the family of collaboration with the Nazis during WWII is distributed that threatens to derail her campaign.

See this for one of France's great ladies of both film and the theater, Suzanne Flon, who died last year after a career than spanned five decades.

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10 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Family Secrets!, 18 May 2005
7/10
Author: lavatch from Twin Cities, Minnesota

"La Fleur du Mal" (Flower of Evil) unfolded like a multi-layered nineteenth-century novel. There was a plot involving politics, a plot involving romance, and the deep family secrets that appear to have afflicted the characters in a multi-generational curse. One of the characters even refers to their lives as the equivalent of a novel by Emile Zola.

I appreciated the rich psychological levels of the characters and the fine performances under the direction of Claude Chabrol. The character of Aunt Line as played by Suzanne Flon was especially moving. There were effective emotional moments involving reverie and interior monologue that conveyed great depth of feeling. In American films, we would have been given generic "flashback" scenes. In the more subtle European film-making style, the performer conveyed the past through emotional expression.

Like so many of the great nineteenth-century novels where everyone seems to be marrying his or her cousin, so too in "La Fleur du Mal" one of the plot lines focuses on a young man and woman deeply in love, who realize that their bloodlines are too close for comfort. Some of the film's most intense scenes are those in which the couple seeks to understand their complex family ties.

Interestingly, this eclectic film is not without dark humor, including a truly bizarre sequence related to an accidental murder. Stylistically, this is a film experience with lush cinematography of the Bordeaux region, filled with sensitive composition choices and careful set-ups. Although the story is set in the present, if the characters would have been outfitted in nineteenth-century costumes, this really could have been a Zola novel.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
A classical Chabrol film about the nature of crime, 24 August 2003
Author: Sukran Yucel from Istanbul, Turkey

This is a classical Chabrol film about the nature of crime. Chabrol gives major importance to the relationships in a family. The family is a normal family at first sight. But as the film proceeds we learn that there were betrayals, crimes and a murder in the family history. The grandfather has collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation and has informed against his son and caused his death. Aunt Line was trialed for killing his father and found not guilty. Now Anne is the candidate for mayor and his husband Gerard is uneasy about his wife's political career and he seems to do everything to prevent her being elected as mayor. Love and crime are both inherits from one generation to the other. The woman characters of La Fleur du Mal are very interesting. They are strong, intelligent and giving. "Sooner or later one must pay for his/her crime" is one of the themes of the movie.

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11 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Another Bourgeois Crime, 11 March 2005
8/10
Author: honeybearrecords from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Incest that isn't incest is also a theme in Chabrol's latest "La Fleur Du Mal". A brother and a sister, who are engaged in a physical relationship, are siblings due to a marriage and not blood. Again, guilt is so far removed that even their parents had always hoped they would become a couple.

The film starts with the brother returning from a four-year stint in the states. He is picked up by his father who seems to be an affable and simple guy. His stepmother is a local politician who comes across as grossly ambitious pushing her family to the side with the characters vaguely implying at some infidelity with her running mate. His sister, it seems, is attracted to him while he rejects her.

But all this is half-truth as slowly unravels in this light mystery about upper middle class decadence and what they think is communication. There is the mystery in the foreground, in public discussion, about the family's relationship to Nazi collaborators in the past. There is a secondary mystery out of the public eye that becomes the most important about the father, his own motives, and how they grow closer and closer to the family.

Chabrol's influence from Baudelaire, well as a fan of both, I don't really get it. I see this movie, like some of Chabrol's other critiques of the petit-bourgeois, more of an alternate reality that I'm not privy to. It's socialism of the privileged, and it's intriguingly perverse. The incest is safe while alluring. The murder is secondary and unresolved by the films end. The film closes with credits running during a party while a corpse waits unacknowledged. What will become of the characters ends up being unimportant.

In many ways, this is Chabrol at his most sophisticated. The need to move between audience-aimed actions is replaced by built-up realism. The dialog is smart and the uneven story progression seems especially real. He's sacrificed his scathing wit to allow for the characters to organically develop at the limitations of their own wisdom.

Part of the original nouvelle vogue and as important historically as Truffaut and Godard, this is just one part of a larger body of work matching that of Eric Rohmer and Stephen Frears.

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8 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Choice Chabrol!, 4 November 2003
Author: chaderek (chaderek@aol.com) from New York City

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Baudelaire wrote about the many flowers of evil that enchant and destroy men and women, but director Chabrol picks only one from this pernicious garden -- the intergenerational betrayal that afflicts an upper-middle class French family. Just as Aunt Line's husband betrayed the French resistance to help the Nazis, so does the present father and husband of this household betray his wife's political ambitions (he's the author of the scurrilous tract that slanders her and her family, and personally betrays her through his adulterous affairs). Yet this tense and elegant thriller is never didactic or judgemental: its wry and sometimes boisterous sense of humor, typically Chabrol and very Gallic, is just one of many tones that this splendid director wields. Acted with great mastery by, especially, Suzanne Flon (as Aunt Line) and Benoit Magimal as her hunky grandson, this is one flower of evil that delights the eye and ear of sentient moviegoers.

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6 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Chabrol treading water, but treading it with style, 3 December 2006
6/10
Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

La Fleur du Mal isn't quite Chabrol on auto-pilot, but he's clearly more interested in the usual bourgeois side issues than the identity of the author of an anonymous leaflet that threatens Natalie Baye's campaign to become mayor of a small town by raking over the coals of the family's history of murder and Nazi collaboration. History is obviously going to repeat itself, but there's no sense of impending dread, merely a feeling that Chabrol has left himself too little time to remember the plot and wrap it up. Thus we get a somewhat hurried finale that feels practically like an afterthought – you can almost imagine him looking at his watch and thinking "Is that the time? I'd better kill someone so we can all go home." It's at its best dealing with local politics and petty ambitions on the campaign trail, and Baye and Suzanne Flon have the best of the film, but Chabrol's reunion with La Ceremonie scripter Caroline Eliacheff seems far more a time-filler than an essential.

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6 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Not a bad movie, not a good movie, 16 October 2003
5/10
Author: peterlopez from Madrid, Spain

I saw "La fleur du mal" at the San Sebastian Film Festival last september. Certainly, this last Chabrol film isn't a great movie, though it's not an awful movie either. One has the feeling while watching it (and after having it watched)that it is all filmed with too much distance, too cold, no emotions whatsoever. Chabrol's study of a french, provincial, upper-bourgeousie family, that is rotten to its roots (they are all a bunch of hypocrites), lacks of passion, interest (you have seen this story many times on film) and, in my opinion, of humor and sarcasm. But I insist, its not a terrible movie(with ticket prices so high nowadays, at least here in spain, sometimes you just have to get mad while watching some movies lately); its just too long, too conventional and too plain.

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1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Family secrets, 19 January 2009
6/10
Author: Bob Taylor (bob998@sympatico.ca) from Canada

I don't know much but I can tell you this: the three films that Chabrol has made with a script by Caroline Eliacheff are some of the most soporific duds you'll ever see. La Cérémonie was pretty incoherent and dull, despite the splatter-fest at the end, Merci pour le chocolat wasted Isabelle Huppert's and Jacques Dutronc's considerable talents, and here is the latest--a mish-mash of incest, wartime collaboration scandals, and political satire (are municipal candidates really this cynical?). Chabrol still can't get away from savagely ripping into a bourgeoisie that gets feebler with every passing year.

I watched Nathalie Baye closely; she never broke out of a tired cynicism displayed with pursed mouth--in other words, she phoned in her performance. Benoit Magimel and Mélanie Doutey were fresh and very appealing as the young lovers, and Bernard Le Coq showed me once more that he is one of France's best actors. Suzanne Flon as Tante Line provided all the touching moments in the picture.

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2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
All About Destiny, 14 November 2005
7/10
Author: Sgt. Schultz from United States

Destiny -- how much of your family bloodline and what they have done before determine what you will be and do? Destiny is a major theme in Chabrol's efficient "La Fleur Du Mal".

It's a straightforward story on the surface, but you always get the feeling something deeper is lurking underneath -- not unlike some David Lynch fare. There is great acting by the entire ensemble -- from Nathalie Baye as a political animal, to Suzanne Flon as Aunt Tile, and especially the step-son and daughter who fall in love.

The end is a bit of a let-down -- after all the buildup, you anticipate something more profound or unexpected. But all in all, there are a lot worse films out there, and worse ways to spend 2 hours.

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