The BridesmaidYou're single, at a wedding, and the magic of romance and fate is in the air, and you spot someone—say, the bridesmaid—and there's something about her and you seem to catch her eye too. During the reception, everyone's a little tipsy, dancing badly, things are winding down, you've got some work to do, you're heading out. You see her sitting alone, looking bored. What the heck, you figure, why not offer her a ride? At worst, you can dish about the wedding. At best, maybe that spark you felt will flame into something more.
But wouldn't you know it? I can get myself home, thanks, she says dismissively. She has kind of a snobby reputation, and now you decide it's probably accurate. A pretty cold fish. You go home. You start up the laptop. You go over some accounts.
And then she shows up at your door. Beautiful. Wet. She couldn't get a taxi and walked there in the rain. You're stunned but try to play it cool. You get her some dry things to change into. But instead, after toweling off, she takes you in her arms and kisses you passionately.
"This is incredible," you say.
And so says Philippe Tardieu (Benoît Magimel), dumbfounded at his amazing good fortune after their love-making. Not at all, counters the young woman, Stéphanie Bellange (Laura Smet), who calls herself Senta after a character in The Flying Dutchman. "You're the one I was waiting for. You're my destiny." Later, when she brings him to her basement apartment in a grand but decrepit home, she says, "Welcome to my realm."
She might as well be speaking for The Bridesmaid's legendary director and co-scripter, Claude Chabrol. For we've been drawn into his realm as surely as Philippe's been lured into Senta's in this understated chiller about obsessive love, taking cues from Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train but translating them into the contemporary setting of a petit-bourgeois family in a small French town.
It's Philippe's sister Sophie's wedding where he meets Senta, after a leisurely first act in which Philippe, Sophie, and their younger sister, Patricia, are introduced by their single hairdresser mom Christine (the radiant Aurore Clément) to her new beau, Gérard. He turns out to be a lout, and the whole episode only emphasizes Philippe's role as man of the house. His job at a home-improvement contracting company weighs on him too. But he bears up well, except for a weird obsession with a family garden statue of Flora, and an overall tension that telegraphs that his cork's in a little tight.
Then Senta gets under his skin. At first, he's tolerantly amused by her dramatic side. She's an actress who poses for erotic photos to make a little money on the side. She can't take a joke or a criticism or sometimes even a question. She tells some pretty hard-to-swallow tales about her childhood—mom died in giving birth to her, dad hit the road, she was raised in this weird mansion by a stepmom who teaches tango lessons on the ground floor. Yeah, right. Senta tells him about hanging out in Morocco for a couple years smoking hash, working at a strip joint in New York, her stage and film roles. (In an amusing bit, she talks about how her scene with John Malkovich in a film was cut because he said she made him nervous. How odd do you have to be to weird out John Malkovich?)
Philippe takes her apparently overactive imagination in stride. So he chalks it up to bad taste when she suggests that they both murder someone to prove their specialness and mutual devotion. And he assumes they're both playing the same deadpan game when he takes credit for the slaying of a man she thinks is the bum who's been living in a cardboard box outside her home.
Ah, but you're in Chabrol country, right? So never assume. The only thing worse than a woman making up tall tales is one who isn't even when those stories sound too peculiar for this world. And the only thing worse than a lover with a commitment problem is one who has no problem committing to just about anything.
All this plays out devilishly and deliciously. Its suspense is in its ordinariness, the way wickedness embeds itself in the routine worries of the day to day, the way that life's unexpected gothic escapes from the mundane soon become that from which we would escape.
Magimel and Smet have just the right toxically fevered chemistry between them. Both are beautiful and weird in believable ways. And the relative dullness of family and work obligations makes their headlong jump into a hypnotic fervor all the more quietly gripping and plausible.
In feeling too much but also never enough part of this world, we are—all of us—always the bridesmaid and never the bride. The alternative, Chabrol suggests here—the chance to be a principal in our own dramas—is irresistible and very dangerous. For we never know just what genre we're entering.
Sure, it could be romance. Then again, it could be horror.
-A.C.K.
PHOTO: Magimel and Smet as Philippe and Senta
