La demoiselle d'honneur / The Bridesmaid (2004)

September 7, 2004 (Venice Film Festival), July 28, 2006 (United States), release dates

Directed by Claude Chabrol

Screenplay by Claude Chabrol and Pierre Leccia

Based on The Bridesmaid by Ruth Rendell

Music by Matthieu Chabrol

Edited by Monique Fardoulis

Cinematography by Eduardo Serra

Benoît Magimel as Philippe Tardieu

Laura Smet as Stéphanie Bellange (Senta)

Aurore Clément as Christine

Bernard Le Coq as Gérard Courtois

Suzanne Flon as Madame Crespin

Solène Bouton as Sophie Tardieu

Anna Mihalcea as Patricia Tardieu

Thomas Chabrol as Lieutenant José Laval

Produced by Aliceléo, Canal Diffusion, France 2 Cinéma, Integral Film

Distributed by First Run Features

 La demoiselle d’honneur is definitely a neo-noir: The mood is unsettling from the start and gets more so until the final scene, when the credits are rolling over the shot of that bust named Flora.

The opening sequence is shot from a moving vehicle. The film looks bleached out; the scenes are sometimes distorted by the glass of the window. The credits start to roll, and by the time they’re done, color is restored. The vehicle stops in front of a house where a reporter is giving a news story about a missing young woman. It’s a television news story: The camera pans back to a television screen that Philippe and his sisters are watching. It’s a great opening for a film with an unbalanced female lead, and it’s almost the opposite of what happens to Philippe: Everything seems clear to him at the start, but then he’s in deep and everything is muddled.

(This blog post about La demoiselle d’honneur contains spoilers.)

The light and shadow typical of film noir and neo-noir are not dominant features in La demoiselle d’honneur, but the music and the filming create an uneasy mood that never quits. Senta may have some really odd, even dangerous ideas, but she doesn’t seem to be aware that she’s doing harm to others. Philippe falls in love with Senta and starts a relationship with her, and then realizes that he is in over his head as he gets to know her better. But he has the viewer’s sympathy: The story is told from his point of view, and it’s easy to see how he gets more and more enmeshed in Senta’s unstable world. The use of first-person point-of-view filming later in the film, when Philippe is searching for Senta after realizing what she has done, emphasizes Philippe’s predicament and the viewer’s identification with him.

Senta is a modern, more ambiguous femme fatale: She seduces Philippe, and it’s her idea that they plunge right away into a romantic and sexual relationship. But she doesn’t seem to be quite aware of her power over Philippe, and she is very unsure sometimes of his love for her. Philippe is drawn to her, at least at first, because she reminds him of the bust (which has a name—Flora) that his father gave to his mother. Philippe may seem like the odd one (and he is odd) because of his attachment to Flora, but that bust called Flora is the least of his problems as the movie and his relationship with Senta progresses.

What I love about La demoiselle d’honneur is the way the plot and the filming bring the viewer right into Philippe’s story. He’s strange. He’s involved with an unbalanced young woman who makes me want to warn him that he should run while he can still get out. But Philippe exercising good sense wouldn’t make a neo-noir, for one thing. Another is that the viewer is involved in the story and starts to identify with poor Philippe. That’s quite an accomplishment considering everything he goes through after meeting Senta and the warning signs that he either doesn’t see or chooses to ignore.

From the interview with Claude Chabrol on the DVD, it seems that Philippe makes his decision at the end of the film and there’s no turning back for him. But I wonder about that final scene. Philippe lies about killing someone for Senta; he agrees to fudge his work estimates so that his boss won’t have to pay more taxes; he never tells his mother what he is doing or where he goes after he starts seeing Senta. I wonder, in spite of the interview with Chabrol on the DVD, if maybe Philippe is still lying when Senta asks if he’ll ever leave her.