A dysfunctional family drama with a blossoming sense of suspense, delivered with Claude Chabrol's delicate expertise. The Flower of Evil focuses on a bourgeois family in Bordeaux made up of two divorcees and their two respective adult children. The son has just returned from America and promptly rekindles his romantic relationship with his step-sister. Meanwhile, the mother is running for political office and the elderly aunt has some skeletons in the closet. It's a story of buried family secrets being dredged into the foreground, set against the superficial nature of politics where hiding the truth is of paramount importance. The bulk of the film focuses on the drama around the central characters. The (slightly incestuous) romance between the two step siblings is quite sweet in its own way, while darker things involving the father go on in the background. Most intetesting is the way the film handles the memories of the elderly aunt; laying them out gracefully rather than resorting to cumbersome flashbacks. It's a film where either plenty is going on or nothing much at all is going on, depending on your viewpoint. Chabrol certainly handled this sort of material much better in earlier films, but The Flower of Evil is perpetually captivating in its own way.
