Chaos
21/06/16 Filed in: Amazon Prime
Back to the exercise bike and another French film, this time Chaos.
I'm not sure how to categorise this film. In parts it's quite brutal, but I think it passes as a comedie noire.
The film opens with a bourgeois couple, Paul and Hélène, he a totally self-absorbed business man, and she the working wife who takes care of everything else. They are dashing off somewhere when a woman runs down the middle of the road towards their car screaming for them to open the door. Paul promptly locks it, and the three men chasing the woman proceed to beat her mercilessly, leaving a bloodstain on the car's windscreen and her in the gutter. Hélène wants to get out and help, but Paul's having nothing of it, his priority being to drive to the nearest carwash.
Hélène is haunted by what has happened and finds out to which hospital the woman was taken, where she pretends to be a friend. The woman, Noémie (aka Malika) is in a coma, suffers a cardiac arrest and the medical staff can't say whether she will be partially paralysed. Hélène talks the hospital staff into allowing her to stay at the hospital, where she devotes herself to helping Noémie recover. It's a slow job, and not helped when the thugs find out that their victim is alive, and make an attempt to abduct her. Hélène, however, turns out to be quite a resourceful protector, and after a second attempt to abduct Noémie, Hélène spirits her off to her mother-in-law's. (The mother-in-law's relationship with her son, Hélène's husband, is another subplot.)
Meanwhile, things aren't going well for Paul. Unable to contact Hélène, and hopeless at doing anything for himself in the apartment, his life is falling apart. Add to this his son, Fabrice, who's seriously upsetting two girlfriends, and Paul's life is becoming unbearable
It turns out that Noémie, having been forced into prostitution, has pulled off an outlandish and very profitable coup against her tormentors, thus the reason for the original assault. She now wants to pay them back for years of abuse by way of an audacious, and quite unbelievable end game. She also deals out some acute embarrassment to Paul, and the son, Fabrice, both of whom get their come-uppance.
An amusing film with a big win for feminism against the excesses of male chauvinism.
It turns out that Noémie, having been forced into prostitution, has pulled off an outlandish and very profitable coup against her tormentors, thus the reason for the original assault. She now wants to pay them back for years of abuse by way of an audacious, and quite unbelievable end game. She also deals out some acute embarrassment to Paul, and the son, Fabrice, both of whom get their come-uppance.
An amusing film with a big win for feminism against the excesses of male chauvinism.