Having kicked off the French New Wave with 1958's Le Beau Serge, 72-year-old Claude Chabrol, the movement's most overtly Hitchcock-influenced director, has worked steadily and prolifically in the decades since. Always a cool touch, Chabrol has lately outgrown even the slightest Hitchcockian impulse to "play the audience like a piano." Instead, he's moved in the opposite direction, intent on making the audience aware of all the notes he's not going to play. Even more perverse than 2000's Merci Pour Le Chocolat, which at least hung on a deeply sinister lead performance by ice queen Isabelle Huppert, Chabrol's new anti-thriller The Flower Of Evil denies all traditional sops to suspense, refusing to play around in its own sensationalist slop. Given an aristocratic family with an ongoing history of murder, incest, betrayal, Nazi sympathy, and political tomfoolery, Chabrol's attention drifts into more leisurely, buttoned-down pursuits like class commentary or the ins and outs of local elections. His determination not to observe the genre rules seems itself a diabolical form of gamesmanship, but the film's offhand character work and digressions are strangely fascinating, provided no one cares about a payoff. On a sprawling estate that brings to mind the isolated hyphenates in The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis, the Charpin-Vasseurs continue to tangle the branches of a rotten family tree. After hiding out in America for a few years, Benoît Magimel returns home to find comely stepsister Mélanie Doutey waiting for them to resume their forbidden romance. When they were children, Doutey's mother Nathalie Baye and Magimel's father Bernard Lecoq remarried after their respective spouses, who were having an affair, died in a car accident. Meanwhile, the aging auntie (Suzanne Flon) still grapples with her father's connection to the Nazis, which casts a pall over Baye's campaign for mayor. As Election Day nears, an anonymous leaflet on the family's dubious past ripples through the community, leaving Baye to seek out her political enemies. The leaflet mystery, a dark ancestral secret, and a key murder scene are all staged as anticlimaxes, no more worthy of emphasis than any other moments in the film. Only in the masterful final shot does Chabrol justify this grand shrug of a movie by suggesting that an amoral clan like the Charpin-Vasseurs doesn't take their sins all that seriously, either. For all its aloof indirectness, The Flower Of Evil wants little more than to sling another arrow at the bourgeoisie, something Chabrol has done with greater flair on many other occasions.
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