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Politics has a habit of dragging skeletons out of the closet, but in Claude Chabrol's The Flower Of Evil, a whole graveyard of bones tumble into the open after rich Bordeaux matriarch Anne Charpin-Vasseur (Nathalie Baye) decides to run for mayor. After Anne receives a copy of a pamphlet accusing her family of collaborating with the Nazis, murder and all manner of despicable crimes against decency and democracy, the family begins to feel the pinch and Chabrol dissects upper middle class mores under stress.

"TICKS ALONG WITH THE PRECISION OF HITCHCOCK"

Back in the days when Chabrol was a journalist for French New Wave organ Cahiers du Cinéma, he once tackled the theme of guilt in Hitchcock's movies. Judging by Flower Of Evil, it's something he's still fascinated by. This simmering thriller ticks along with the precision (though, deliberately, none of the clarity) of Hitch as it slings mud at its bourgeois protagonists and then waits, hoping to see it stick.

The dirty secrets of the Charpin-Vasseur family are revealed at a leisurely pace as Chabrol proves more interested in focusing on the clan's youngest members François (Benoît Magimel), who's just back from three years in America, and his "sister"-turned-sweetheart Michèle (Mélanie Doutey, France's answer to Kate Beckinsale). Fortunately, incest isn't one of the family's sins - these two are more like cousins than siblings - and as the kids fall in love, events go into motion that will have disastrous consequences for the rest of the dynasty.

Following his silver-spoon chomping characters as they go about their daily lives, Chabrol does what he does best: charting the rhythms and rituals of upper middle class French life with a detached yet detailed eye. It never works as a thriller, but as a film about guilt, family history, and the sins of the father, it builds to an impressive, brooding story of everyday deception and deceit.

In French with English subtitles.