dromasca
'Chaos' is a very surprising movie from many points of view. Director Coline Serreau drives a quite complex story, changes pace and uses different techniques all along the film, and so succeeds to keep the interest at pick for the whole duration of the movie.It starts like a bourgeois drama - a couple in Paris refuses to help a young girl attacked by a gang of criminals. He is a total jerk, as are the majority of the male characters in the movie, but the wife followed by remorse searches for the young girl in the hospital and basically saves her life and supports her in the recovery process. The psychological drama in the first part of the film turns into a sordid gang story later with almost Terentinesque touches when we learn that the young prostitute is followed by her employers who are ready to bring her back at any price and not only for her services.Well filmed and acted, with a remarkable performance from Rachida Brakni in the principal role the film succeeds to be convincing despite its very sharp and maybe too explicit social stands. The main character is a victim of sexual exploitation by men, as well as of oppression as a young woman in her family of Algerian origin and the authors make no secret where the guilt lies. The cinema qualities of the film avoid turning it into a manifest on screen and by providing an enjoyable and interesting film experience the message makes it better to the viewers.
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It has been said that satire should be like a very sharp razor blade: you don't know you've been cut until you see the blood. The same thing can be said of movies with a social agenda: it's better if you don't see it coming, which makes it all the more effective when it's over. If only filmmakers that preach their social or political views had a better sense of knowing when to stop `preaching', and let the audience draw their own conclusions, we'd have more movies with positive social messages.Case in point is the film, `Chaos', by Coline Serreau, who presents a fairy tail story that celebrates, glorifies and idolizes the strength and perseverance of women in a male-dominated society. The main plot revolves around two women: Helene, an upper-middle class French woman, and Malika, a young prostitute. The two meet when Helene and her husband accidentally encounter Malika being violently attacked by a group of men. The couple witness this from inside their car, but the husband doesn't want to help or have anything to do with the girl, who's been left for dead. Helene, overwhelmed with guilt, decides to visits Malika in the hospital, against her husband's strict instructions. As Malika slowly regains consciousness, and her physical strength returns, the women grow closer, and the story behind the mysterious heroine unfolds. And, like a blooming flower, so does the magnitude of the story line, which becomes far too complicated to summarize here. (It's also far more involved than it needed to be for the plot or social commentary.)Suffice to say, the story is all about Malika's and all the female characters' struggles to find individuality and freedom from under the thumb of the men in their lives. But the film doesn't stop there - it also makes observations (and hence, commentary) about French society, Muslim cultures, and a variety of other aspects of modern life. Attempting to serve all these objectives, the film tends to meander from one character to another, and one political statement to another, so it can squeeze it all in. This ends up overcomplicating things to a minor degree, but in the end, the movie is really all about women and their plight, and the movie makes no excuses or apologies about that.For Helene, it's as simple as her leaving her good-for-nothing, ego-centric husband. For Malika, though, her first barrier is her patriarchic Muslim family, who stymied her attempts to educate herself or make a better life. Then it's her father, who tried to sell her to a man in Algeria for marriage. When she ran away just before her scheduled departure, she found herself under the influence of a pimp, who forced her into prostitution, drugged and raped her, and beat her relentlessly, over and over. Things get worse and worse for all the women in the film, major and minor characters alike, until things come to a head, when (surprise) all women come together and win, and all the men lose in a big, big way.The film's use of satire is exaggeration and extremes, but you don't necessarily see that in one character alone, but all the characters as a collective. All the men are evil, and all the women are glorified. This use of two-dimensional character portrayal gives away the otherwise obvious moral agenda of the film; it also draws attention to the unsophisticated satirical vehicles normally employed by much less experienced filmmakers. It's almost as though Serreau gets so lost in her own agenda that she forgets the true nature of cutting satire. When events develop so transparently and obviously, you can't help but know that this film is only trying to preach to the converted.Effective satire is about making acute and keen observations of real people, subtly leading us to the filmmaker's desired conclusions, all the while letting us think we got there on our own. We need to see at least one of the heroines lose because the sad reality is that not all women leave the men that subjugate them--we need to be reminded of that not just for the dose of reality for credibility's sake, but it accentuates the emotional impact of the victories of the women that do overcome their barriers. Similarly, one of the bad guys should be portrayed as changing his ways so as to draw more attention to those who don't. Serreau's problem is that she can't accept a character losing. This, in itself, compromises credibility. As Shakespeare once said, `thou doest protest too loudly.'There's no question that `Chaos' will win the hearts and minds of women who feel victimized, or who seek the camaraderie of seeing strong women win on screen. But it's almost sad to see them rally around what is essentially a vacuous film that doesn't carry the more cogent message it could have been so much more effective at giving. I guess it's my way of saying, `preaching to the converted isn't hard. Leave that to the amateurs.'
Ralph Michael Stein
"Chaos" has been described by some reviewers as a French "Thelma and Louise." Not so. "Chaos" is that rare film seamlessly and believably meshing extreme violence and brutality with wry comedy. Its two female protagonists are winners in the great Game of Life (Thelma and Louise lost out on that score, big time).Helene (Catherine Frot) has a successful career and is married to a business-obsessed, vacuous, philandering fool, Paul (Vincent Landon). Their twenty year or so marriage has produced ample material comforts and a son, Fabrice (Aurelian Wiile), who's living proof that a kid can turn out to have less sensitivity and intelligence than your average Parisian poodle. If my son turned out like Fabrice...well, I can't even contemplate the possibility.On an evening out, Paul and Helene encounter a young woman desperately fleeing from three rabid pursuers. Paul locks the car doors leaving the hapless victim to endure a horrific beating, shown in all its gory. Paul's prime concern is to get his vehicle into a car wash (a pretty spiffy one at that) so the spattered blood on his windshield won't be noticed by police). A great citizen is he.Deeply disturbed by Paul's detached callousness, Helene seeks out the woman who is near death in an intensive care unit. Noemie (Rachida Brakni) is a prostitute who tried to run away from the gang of thugs who pimped her first on the street and then to high-income but low-class businessmen. Brakni's portrayal as a determined woman fighting death and the threat of lifelong disability is intense, involving and believable. She isn't The Happy Hooker - she's the surviving woman, her strength coming from a deep interior that even drug addiction can not erase.Helene plays an increasingly important role in helping Noemie to recover from her grievous wounds. It's neither a spoiler nor a surprise that they form a bond of trust and friendship and embark on a mission of ...what? Justice? Vengeance? Reparations? Director Coline Serreau unfolds the story in a well-filmed series of scenes that never lose the viewer's attention (at least I couldn't take my eyes off the screen).Paul and Fabrice could be seen as stereotypes of fatuous, self-indulgent, essentially helpless-without-women men except that they are soooo real. Helene is no victim - she understands her menfolk's foibles and her decisions are her own, not the product of male manipulation and dominance. Ms. Frot plays her role beautifully with slight facial expressions telling much.Yes, this is a film where most of the women (including Paul's neglected mom) are the Good Gals and the male characters start at jerks and work their way down the food chain to abusers and rapists. But the interplay between the domestic and romantic comedy and the abyss of forced prostitution and exploitation comes across as simply different sides of women's life experience. In that regard "Chaos" is quietly compelling.Noemi is from an Algerian family and the film swats at Islamic customs that demean women and control their destinies. I don't expect this movie to be a hit in Islamic countries. "Chaos" pulls few punches in depicting the reality of the bleak futures in store for girls raised in the ultra-materialistic and wholly bigoted families exemplified by Noemi's family.
8/10.
