Chabrol's land : beware of black holes. (3/3)

As the end credits roll, questions rise to mind...

Have we not been tricked ? masterly misled to watch only the film lighter side ? Have we candidly fallen for the charming smiles of Tante Line and Michèle ? François’s aloof good looks ?

What have we truly seen on screen ? An ordinary upper-middle class French family, plagued with recurring bad luck and gossip, to which we have readily identified ? Or something much more sinister : an amiable, modern-day bourgeois version of the Greek Atrides ?

Two families, the Charpins and the Vasseurs, whose irrepressible lust for each other has created an incestuous and murderous clan ?

In its typical understated way, as if by accident, the film has unlocked many doors which we are free to push or not. In good « bourgeois » tradition, much is left unsaid : « you know full well everything here is a secret ».

One has been -supposedly ?- unveiled to us, how many more is it up to us to discover? The film ends ; a new, critical screening starts, in our heads.

When Anne’s husband and Gérard’s wife died in the same accident, how « intimate » was their relationship ? If it were « intimate », for how long had it been ?

Vice versa : at the time of the accident, what was the true relationship of their widow and widower, and future husband and wife ?

Film provides no birth details for François and Michèle, but the timing of their mother’s and father’s deaths as well as their apparent age suggest dark suspicions : whose son and daughter are they really ? Could they be half-brother and -sister, born of the same father ?

Have the Charpin-Vasseurs an uncanny talent to hide their family scandals under the rugs of their beautiful house ? Did their charming manners blind us with the director’s and screenwriters’ active help ?

After Gérard sexually harasses his stepdaughter -if she is nothing more to him-, is his death really one more unfortunate accident ? Is what we think we have witnessed on screen the truth ?

Gérard’s death is too timely and propitious not to be fully investigated : in the course of the film, he has progressively alienated himself from the rest of the family, which seemed ready to reject him by unanimous -if possibly untold- agreement.

Anne had good reason to resent her husband : he opposed her political ambitions and cheated her -though she did not know or pretended not to know.

François confessed to Michèle he had left for Chicago in good part to be rid of his father. He calls him a « salaud » -son of a bitch-, but no rational cause is given for his dislike -hatred ?-.

Long before the harassment scene, Michèle too has admitted to not liking Gérard. Again, no explanation is offered for her feeling : has Gérard harassed her before or is her mistrust purely instinctive and through no fault of his ?

Michèle and François suspect that Gérard has written the unsigned political tract ; again, no hard fact fuels such speculation.

As to Tante Line, she listens and observes in apparent neutrality : she does not badmouth Gérard but never utters a word in his defence.

Back to the original question : is Gérard’s welcome and final removal really accidental ? Here too, no hard fact, but a suspicion : Gérard’s death was less an accident than the performance of one more ritual, in a film replete with them.

Possibly the oldest ritual of all, neither French nor « bourgeois ». According to René Girard, all civilisations were based on it until the advent of Christianity : a human sacrifice, the killing of the scapegoat, whose individual « sins » were believed to be the cause of the community’s misfortunes and whose death would restore the clan, tribe, city, state... to its original order.

Is it ultimately what « La fleur du mal » is about and shows us ? that we cannot see only because we refuse to, as René Girard claims mankind has for ages ?

What is in a title ?

Is « La fleur du mal » a reminiscence of Baudelaire’s nearly eponymous book of poetry : « Les fleurs du mal » ? Of Orson Welles’s « Touch of evil » ?

Is it rather nothing but an abstract reference to the seductive powers of evil and its ability to create poisonous beauty ?

Or shall we look towards the very real and pretty flower-beds which surround the family house and to which lovely Tante Line tends with so much care ?

And, beyond the flower-beds, shall we take a very close look at Tante Line herself, as she confesses to killing her father and hints at an incestuous relationship -acted out or not ?- with her brother ?

Is she the actual « flower of evil », the original black hole from which stemmed all family misfortunes ?

If so, her tender relationship with the younger generation is nothing but evil lovingly and successfully grooming its next incarnation : as Michèle kills Gérard, Tante Line transfers her own « sins », i.e. family « doom », onto her shoulders, with François’s active support.

In such revisionist light, Gérard is only the fall guy ; a petty womaniser and social hypocrite, a self-indulgent picture of bourgeois moral shortcomings, he never has his chance : his small time, small town misdemeanours are not match for true evil.

Sandwiched between the elder and younger ones, the adult generation of Gérard and Anne, fully focused on her political campaign, like us, sees nothing coming, as « the flower of evil » is passed over from Tante Line’s parchment-like face to Michèle’s radiant youth, with the guarantee to bloom again : human sacrifices offer only temporary respite, they need to be endlessly re-enacted ; one day, the family shall expel a new scapegoat.

The film surrealist ending then makes perfect sense as the collective celebration of the immediate short term positive effects of the scapegoat’s killing : Anne is successfully elected and family harmony restored.

What is it, if not a happy end ?