Chaos

Synopsis: Hélène (Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon) are a successful bourgeois Parisian professional couple whose lives are forever changed when they witness the savage beating of a prostitute (Rachida Brakni).

With Chaos, Coline Serrau has served up an unusual dish - a largely satisfying mélange of comedy, social criticism and revenge movie served in a light but biting feminist marinade.

Utilizing a complex but well-structured script Serrau has crafted a story which starts off looking like a Veber-style comedy of middle class manners with the main couple squabbling in their chic apartment over day-to-day minutiae whilst their gorgeously good-looking only son bed-hops between a couple of doting girlfriends. The father is self-centred and lazy, the son a chip off the old block. The wife, a long-suffering maidservant to a couple of spoilt brats. Slowly, the witnessed beating, that intrudes into the comedy of the beginning of the film, assumes more importance as Hélène takes it upon herself to look after the victim, whom her husband so callously ignored, lying in a coma. This eventually leads us to Noémie’s story, one of horrific brutalisation that is all the more terrible because it presumably has a good deal of basis in real life.

The lives of the two women by this time have become thoroughly entwined and Serrau takes us through a plot of twists and turns as both women trump their male oppressors, each according to their own (there are also two more women, one younger, one older to round out the mythic dimension). This is done, not with the crude inversion of the much-vaunted but vastly over-rated Baise-Moi, but with such good humour in its exaggeration that the tendentiousness of the inescapable men-are-swine, women-are-angels opposition works, even if one belongs to the herd of swine, serving to uplift at the same time as effectively chasten. Like the film’s Noémie, Serrrau has achieved a rare feat – making her anger work for, not against, her. Sometimes she underlines a point too heavily by repetition and the deletion of these moments would have resulted in a slightly shorter and better film.

I’ve not previously seen any of Serrau’s films (I believe she did the original Three Men and a Baby, as well as another war-of-the-sexes comedy, Romuald and Juliette) but she is evidently a skilled and experienced filmmaker who knows her self-appointed turf well.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?