A MIXED BUNCH

Reviewed- Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal): Now 74 and on his 50th film since his assured 1958 début Le Beau Serge, Claude Chabrol relentlessly continues to pursue his preoccupation with the indiscreet malice of the bourgeoisie in La Fleur du Mal, writes Michael Dwyer

Film critics with Cahiers du Cinema before they turned to making their own movies, Chabrol and Eric Rohmer co-authored a landmark 1957 study of Alfred Hitchcock's work, and the influence of Hitchcock on Chabrol remains profound.

The title of Chabrol's latest film is a nod to the 19th century poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire, whose admiration for another horror story master, Edgar Allan Poe, was to provide him with much of his life's income, as the French translator of Poe's writings. In Chabrol's film, which is set in the present, the roots of the flower of evil are traced back to a dark period of Nazi collaboration that has tainted a wealthy Bordeaux family ever since.

The movie opens in classical thriller style as a camera glides gracefully through the stairs and rooms of an imposing house, pausing to observe a corpse on a bedroom floor. The identity of the murder victim is withheld as the movie goes into flashback over the days leading up to this crime.

Gérard (Bernard Le Coq) is a pharmacist with a penchant for adultery and whisky. He resents the fact that his wife, Anne (Nathalie Baye), is politically ambitious and a candidate in the imminent local elections.

Gérard's son François (Benoît Magimel) returns home after four years in the US and immediately resumes his incestuous affair with his stepsister and cousin, Michèle (Mélanie Doutey), Anne's daughter. Sharing their home is Anne's elderly aunt, Line (Suzanne Flon), whose alleged involvement in a 1940s murder is dredged up in an anonymous pamphlet circulated to damage Anne's election prospects.

Chabrol nimbly connects the overlapping elements of this slyly-structured narrative as family tensions mount in the run-up to polling day. It is no coincidence that the youngest member, Michèle, a psychology student, is working on an essay dealing with "the morbid power of guilt".

More a caustic character study than a conventional thriller, Chabrol's film is elegantly shaped and played with conviction by a cast in which the 86-year-old Flon is outstanding, but its denouement proves disappointingly pedestrian in comparison with Chabrol's finest work in Le Boucher, La Femme Infidèle, Story of Women and La Cérémonie.

Coincidentally, this dissection of a bourgeois family features several members of the director's own family on either side of the camera. Thomas Chabrol - one of his sons from his first marriage to actress Stéphane Audran - plays Anne's election agent, while another, Matthieu, composed the score, and Chabrol's second wife Aurore acted as script supervisor on the film.