The Flower of Evil

Despite a title that makes it sound like a particularly bad Steven Segal movie, The Flower of Evil is a prickly French melodrama with a social conscience. And though director Claude Chabrol delights in satirising the middle class, he loses interest in developing the trajectory of his own story and allows things to peter out to a rather loose and unsatisfactory conclusion.

The story concerns Gerard (Le Coq) who is married to the ambitious Anne (Nathalie Baye). Her desire to become mayor of their small town is all encompassing, meaning that she routinely neglects other aspects of her life, including her husband and her children. Anne and Gerard's stepchildren are hardly bereft of problems as they've been fighting a losing battle when it comes to their mutual attraction. More bad news arrives in the shape of an anonymous leaflet, outlining the family's array of secrets, and threatens to expose them and destroy any hopes that Anne had of holding office.

A film in which too many intriguing narrative threads are allowed to flounder without making much of an impact, The Flower of Evil purports to be a dissection of the French middle classes but is unable to tie together its points effectively enough to work as an outright satire. This lack of fluency shouldn't detract from the performances - especially that of Suzanne Flon - but its melodramatic excess means that Flower of Evil isn't quite as incisive as its director seems to think it is.