Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle
d’Honneur), which came out in 2004 but is only now finding a
release in the U.S., is a classic Chabrol-type study of the point
where passion and madness intersect with ordinary life. Passion is
represented by Senta (Laura Smet), who has changed her name from
Stephanie to adopt that of the heroine of Wagner’s Flying
Dutchman — the girl whose faithfulness unto death redeems the
cursed hero as well as herself. Ordinary life is represented by
Philippe (Benoit Magimel), who meets her when she serves as a
bridesmaid at his sister’s wedding and falls hopelessly, fatally in
love, as she does with him.
Philippe is firmly anchored in an everyday reality by his job,
working for a builder called Nadeau (Pierre-Francois Dumeniaud),
which involves meeting and pacifying cranky customers, and by his
mother, Christine (Aurore Clement) and younger sister, Patricia
(Anna Mihalcea), with whom he still lives. As a dutiful son, he
naturally also assumes a quasi-paternal role towards Patricia whose
wildness and fast living are constantly getting her into trouble.
“Virtue sucks,” she says. “I wasn’t born to have a bad time.” This
is not Philippe’s view. His own father deserted the family long
since, and he had to grow up early.
Now, to add to his worries, the new man in his mother’s life,
Gerard Courtois (Bernard Le Coq), appears to be trifling with her
affections. Christine herself, accustomed to being disappointed by
men, accepts Gerard’s abandonment philosophically and redoubles her
affection for her son, whom she says is “as handsome as an angel.”
So far we have familiar and unremarkable slice of bourgeois life in
provincial France today, but the mysterious Senta is clearly
something much more extraordinary. She lives alone in the basement
of a big old house she shares with her mother, who lives
on the upper floors and has little if anything to do with her
daughter, preferring to spend all her time practicing the tango
with a boyfriend.
Senta decides at the very outset of her relationship with
Philippe that “You’re the one I was waiting for. You’re my destiny,
and I am yours.” Instead of running away from such a disturbingly
precipitate claim upon him, the formerly earnest young striver and
dutiful son embraces it and adopts Senta’s view of the relationship
as fated. But she’s not going to make it easy for him. She has
decided, she says, that there are four things they must do to prove
their love for each other: plant a tree, write a poem, sleep with
someone of their own sex, and kill someone. Perhaps fortunately we
never get around to the first three items on the agenda, but the
fourth proves to be, not too surprisingly, a bit of a sticking
point for poor old Philippe. At first he has the strength flatly to
refuse to kill anyone, and she throws him out of her home. But when
Senta reappears at Philippe’s mother’s door to reclaim the
bridesmaid’s dress that she couldn’t wait to get out of on visiting
Philippe there, their affair resumes.
Philippe sees an item about a tramp who has been murdered and,
thinking it to be the tramp (Michel Duchaussoy) who to her
annoyance has been camping in the yard of Senta’s house, claims to
have killed him. Senta is overjoyed at this proof, as she sees it,
of his love and proceeds to do the same for Philippe by killing
Gerard Courtois. Philippe is worried when she tells him about her
murder — with a Venetian glass dagger to the heart while her
victim was taking a speck of dirt out of her eye. But after driving
out to Gerard’s new house and finding him alive and well, he
assumes that she has made it all up just as he did. This makes him
happy. The match may be fated but it won’t, after all, be
fatal.
Little does he know! The film in effect poses the question: Is
it better to be in love with a liar and a fantasist who can give
you a satisfying but boring bourgeois existence or with someone
much more exciting who is completely truthful but who may do
horrible things? When Philippe thinks Senta has merely fantasized
about the killing of Gerard, he is immensely relieved and so in
love that he’s happy to play what he now imagines to be her little
fantasy game. Life can go on in the ordinary way. But then comes
the moment of shock and surprise when fantasy unexpectedly seems to
morph into reality and he is forced to make a decision. If she’s
not a fantasist, does he repudiate her for not being one or love
her all the more for being true to her own bizarre vision of their
destined love?
It’s not a question whose answer is self-evident to him, and we
can just about see why. The trick of the film, for which Chabrol
deserves a lot of credit, is that its heroine’s obvious mental
derangement is never allowed to descend into mere pathography.
Senta is a disturbing figure in all kinds of ways, but she raises
an important question about love and destiny that is designed to
appeal to the French romantic imagination as shaped by its post-war
and highly politicized romance with madness and criminality. That’s
all very well and good, of course, if you’re a French romantic, and
just about worth sitting through if you’re a romantic of any
description. But Americans trained in Hollywood’s merely
sentimental version romanticism are not likely to find much to like
about this film.
