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THE BRIDESMAID Send This Review to a Friend
The biggest disappointment in the 2005 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series was “The Bridesmaid,” a work by renowned director Claude Chabrol, now getting a commercial release. The passage of time hasn’t made it any better.
Of course, Chabrol knows how to make a movie with the utmost finesse, but the story here, based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, is an unconvincing, contrived one. It involves a young man who becomes involved with an obsessive, psychologically damaged young woman.
Philipe (Benoît Magimel) hasn’t a clue as to what he’s getting into when he is smitten by Senta (Laura Smet). She’s one sick woman. Senta demands that he kill someone, a stranger, to prove his love, which she promises to do in return. (Distorted echoes of Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.")
Senta is so screwed up that, even allowing for men being led around by their sexual drives instead of their brains, it is hard to imagine the extent and rapidity of this guy’s entanglement with such an obvious nut case.
The film is acted well enough by Magimel and Smet, as well as by others in a cast that includes Aurore Clément, Bernard Le Coq, Solène Bouton, Anna Mihalcea and Michel Duchaussoy. But the story gets less and less credible as the plot becomes more and more dire. A First Run Features release.
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