Horror lingers in tale of love and madness

September 22, 2006|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

At the age of 74, Claude Chabrol has been making creepy little tales of violence among the French bourgeoisie for so long that he could probably turn them out in his sleep. "The Bridesmaid" doesn't suggest he's dozing at the switch, but it's deceptively minor Chabrol: a horror show whose subtleties at first appear merely sedate and that ends before you expect it to. The film lingers, though, like police tape at a crime scene.

Benoit Magimel (Isabelle Huppert's object of desire in "The Piano Teacher") plays Philip, a handsome, rather diffident young man living in the Loire Valley. He seems like quite the catch until you look closely and notice he's still living with his mother (French film legend Aurore Clement) and two sisters and that he's oddly attached to the bust of a beautiful woman in the family garden. When Mama casually gives the statue to Gerard (Bernard le Coq), a man she's dating, Philip sneaks it back to his room, where the one-sided relationship grows more unsettling.

Around this time, Philip meets Senta (Laura Smet), a bridesmaid in his older sister's wedding party, and it's love, lust, and l'amour fou all at first sight. Most men would look at Senta, sensual and crazy-eyed, and walk briskly in the opposite direction, especially when she says ``You're my destiny and I'm yours . . . Does that scare you?" Philip, trusting lad, believes he has found his soul mate.

If that sounds like ``Fatal Attraction" strained through ``Wedding Crashers," understand that Chabrol is playing the psychological long game here. The film has been adapted from the 1987 Ruth Rendell novel of the same name, but it's the spirit of Patricia Highsmith (``The Talented Mr. Ripley") that hangs over the proceedings: beautiful, damaged people hinting at unspeakable things.

``The Bridesmaid" throws an audience increasingly off-balance as the hero joins Senta for sex and head games in the basement bedroom of her decaying mansion (with her stepmother and a boyfriend locked in an eternal tango upstairs). There are four things a person must do to fully live life, she tells Philip: Plant a tree, write a poem, make love to a member of your own sex, and kill somebody. No word on how many of these she has crossed off her own to-do list.