''The Flower of Evil'' (original title: ''La fleur du mal'') is a 2003 French suspense drama film by

Claude Chabrol Claude Henri Jean Chabrol (; 24 June 1930 – 12 September 2010) was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave (''nouvelle vague'') group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues an ...

. It tells of an outwardly perfect family in

Bordeaux Bordeaux ( , ; Gascon oc, Bordèu ; eu, Bordele; it, Bordò; es, Burdeos) is a port city on the river Garonne in the Gironde department, Southwestern France. It is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the prefectur ...

, whose seeming perfection begins to unravel when the wife involves herself in politics. A corpse surfaces just before the local election and the spectre of past family indiscretion resurfaces in mysterious deaths and other scandals.

Plot

In a grand house at

lives Gérard, owner of a pharmaceutical business. A drinker and fornicator, he disgusts his son François, recently returned from the USA. To Gérard's disgust, his second wife Anne is a candidate in the municipal election. Her daughter by her first marriage, Michèle, is excited by the return of François and the two go off for a weekend at , where they become lovers. Anne's old aunt Line encourages the pair. Anne's campaign takes a jolt when she and her family are smeared in an anonymous tract. The family suspect that Gérard is the author. Not everybody believes the slanders and the outgoing mayor, impressed by Anne's qualities, promises her his job if she wins a seat. On the night of the count everybody is at the town hall except Michèle, who has to finish an assignment for her university course. Gérard sneaks home drunk and tries to rape her, but in the struggle falls and dies. Line then confesses to Michèle that she had loved her brother too closely, until he was executed in the Second World War as a member of the

French Resistance The French Resistance (french: La Résistance) was a collection of organisations that fought the German occupation of France during World War II, Nazi occupation of France and the Collaborationism, collaborationist Vichy France, Vichy régim ...

. The man who ordered the execution was their father, a Nazi collaborator, so Line killed him. She says she will now take the blame for killing Gérard. A cavalcade of hooting cars then sweeps into the drive and Anne's supporters throng into the house to toast her victory in champagne.

Cast

Nathalie Baye Nathalie Marie Andrée Baye (born 6 July 1948) is a French film, television and stage actress. She began her career in 1970 and has appeared in more than 80 films. A ten-time César Award nominee, her four wins were for '' Every Man for Himself' ...

: Anne / Wife *

Benoît Magimel Benoît Magimel (; born 11 May 1974) is a French actor. He was 14 when he appeared in his first film, and has starred in a variety of roles in French cinema. At age 16, Magimel left school to pursue acting as a career. In 2001, he won the Best Ac ...

: François / Gerard's son *

Suzanne Flon Suzanne Flon (28 January 1918 – 15 June 2005) was a French stage, film, and television actress. She won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for her performance in the 1961 film '' Thou Shalt Not Kill''. Flon also received two César Awards and two ...

: Aunt Line *

Bernard Le Coq Bernard Le Coq (born 25 September 1950) is a French actor. He has appeared in more than one hundred and fifty films since 1967. His first big role Bernard Le Coq has played as Annie Girardot's son and Claude Jade's brother in the family dra ...

: Gérard / Husband *

Mélanie Doutey Mélanie Doutey is a French actress. Life and career She is the daughter of filmmaker Alain Doutey and actress Arielle Séménoff. She appeared in Claude Chabrol's ''La Fleur du Mal'' and ''El Lobo'', the true story of a mole within the Basque ...

: Michèle / Anne's daughter *

Thomas Chabrol Thomas Chabrol (born 24 April 1963) is a French actor, director and screenwriter. Filmography On stage References External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Chabrol, Thomas 1963 births 20th-century French male actors 21st-century French male a ...

: Matthieu Lartigue *

Henri Attal Henri Attal (1936 in Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populat ...

: Fanny's Father-in-law *

Françoise Bertin Françoise Bertin (23 September 1925 – 26 October 2014) was a French actress. She appeared in over 125 films since 1961. Among these were five films directed by Alain Resnais: ''Last Year at Marienbad'', '' Muriel'', '' The War Is Over'', '' ...

: Thérèse

Reception

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

the film holds an approval rating 64% based on 61 reviews. ''Detroit Free Press'' said: "The strength of this movie is how it starts as a standard whodunit only to become something else: a cunning Chabrol study of incest and old money peppered with a wicked sense of humor." ''SFGate'' remarked "Chabrol's examination of intergenerational guilt takes awhile to arrive at the station, but the characters and dialogue... are sophisticated and properly witty." Wesley Morris in ''The Boston Globe'' said: "If it's not vintage Claude Chabrol, it's at least vintage mediocre Claude Chabrol. His umpteenth housebound suspicion-fest is one of his more inexplicable adventures in secrets and scandal." ''Slant Magazine'' called it "a disappointment", and added "Chabrol has always been hung-up on bourgeois rituals, hypocrisies, and idiosyncrasies, but every observation here is mundane or simply inconsequential to the film’s larger and severely undervalued dialectic of a so-called "perpetual present."

Awards and nominations

Entry

Berlin International Film Festival The Berlin International Film Festival (german: Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin), usually called the Berlinale (), is a major international film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 1951 and originally run in June, the festi ...

Official Selection

Nominated

Goya Awards The Goya Awards ( es, Premios Goya) are Spain's main national annual film awards, commonly referred to as the Academy Awards of Spain. The awards were established in 1987, a year after the founding of the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sc ...

* Best European Film (lost to ''Good Bye Lenin!'')

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Flower of Evil, The 2003 films 2003 drama films Films about families Films set in Bordeaux 2000s French-language films Films directed by Claude Chabrol Films produced by Marin Karmitz French drama films 2000s French films