Chaos | AccessAtlanta

Chaos

Rachida Brakni (left) and Catherine Frot nurture a relationship born of violence.

FILM FACTS

Starring: Rachida Brakni, Vincent Lindon and Catherine Frot
Director: Coline Serreau
Rating: Not rated, but there are sexual situations and violence
Genre: Drama, Foreign, Thriller

Discuss this film | Official movie site

See showtimes (Not rated) 118 minutes

Grade: B+

Verdict: This savvy French film is part Pedro Almodovar, part Count of Monte Cristo.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It's evening in Paris and a well-heeled couple named Helene (Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon) are headed for a dinner engagement. Suddenly, a young woman (Rachida Brakni), bloodied and desperate, runs in front of their car. The two men pursuing her grab her and slam her head repeatedly against the windshield. Paul immediately locks the car doors. Helene is too stunned to do anything. As soon as the thugs are gone, Paul jumps out of the car, grabs a tissue and wipes the blood off . . . his windshield. Then, leaving the victim crumpled in the gutter, he drives off, despite Helene's protests.

Thus, within "Chaos' " first five minutes, director Coline Serreau has established the moral compass of these two characters. We will learn much more as the film unfolds.

Guilt-stricken, Helene searches the hospitals and locates the woman, who's in a deep coma. She learns her name -- Malika -- and her occupation, streetwalker. Nevertheless, Helene stays, as her nurse and, when the thugs return, her dedicated protector.

Helene's devotion creates, well, chaos. On the lighter side, Paul and the couple's spoiled, like-father-like-son son, Fabrice (Aurelien Wiik), don't know who's going to cook their meals and clean their clothes.

On a more serious level, Helene plunges into a chaotic and often dangerous existence she couldn't have imagined just days earlier. Ultimately, the movie takes an even darker turn when the now-recovered Malika reveals her past -- a horrific tale of rape, violence, crime and utter dehumanization. She emerges from her personal hell angry, cold and resolute -- an avenging angel, dispensing mercy and justice as she sees it, just like Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo. Her principal mission is to rescue her younger sister, who's about to be sent down the same path she was.

The men-are-swine message is inescapable, but that's not what Serreau is really after. As she proved in her 1985 hit, "Three Men and a Cradle" -- remade as the infinitely stupid "Three Men and a Baby" -- Serreau isn't a simplistic filmmaker. Her larger point has as much to do with class as anything else. In many ways, Paul and Fabrice are little more than better-dressed, less physically violent versions of the pimps who turned Malika from a human into a cash cow.

The filmmaker also recognizes the sea change in gender relations since the '70s. Men have been forced into the role of reactionaries because they represent the status quo. Even the most liberal males face a kind of litmus test, justly or not.

Brakni, who won a Cesar (the French Oscar), has the lithe body and seductive mane of Jennifer Beals in "Flashdance." The movie draws on her ruthless energy and Helene's incipient liberation to replenish its spark.

Part comedy, part revenge fantasy, part social commentary, "Chaos" can be as hard-edged as a feminist tract and as bizarrely playful as a Pedro Almodovar film. Further, it's a real eye-opener. After we've become emotionally invested in Helene and Malika, it's especially jarring to hear how a couple of cops view Helene's very public and courageous rescue of Malika, who's been kidnapped by the same thugs. Trying to decide if they should do anything, they shrug, "It's just an old bag and a hooker."

For some, male or female, that's what it will always be. Anything else would be chaos.