Chaos

I saw this movie in Paris last year (2001). It is a delight. It maintains a modicum of comedy around a very violent and wrenching subject. It begins with a young prostitute fleeing for her life after practically being killed from a beating. France has a large Arab population. The young lady happens to be Arabic. This film plays on this clash of cultures and also plays on the clash between the sexes. I highly recommend it.

En route to a party, Paul (Vincent Lindon) and Helene (Catherine Frot) encounter a speed bump when a woman throws herself in front of their car, begging for help. Having learnt not to pick up hitchhikers, they watch helplessly as she is beaten unconscious by several men.

Helene feels responsible for this stranger, whom she comes to know as Noemie, and spends much time with her at the hospital. But when she discovers that Noemie's life may be in danger, Helene sneaks her out of the hospital posing as a nurse.

Taking her to her mother-in-law's country home to recover, she learns of Noemie's tragic story. Brought to France from Algeria by her father, she chooses a life of prostitution after her dad sold her down the river to an Algerian man.

This movie tells me how prostitution works in France and its similarities in the prostitution that's been happening in our country.

This is a funny and fast-paced movie. I would have enjoyed it more if I can only understand the French language.

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.'

This is one of the most accomplished films I've seen from France in a while. French cinema always presents risky situations. Hollywood, in search of ideas, sometimes turns into other films for American consumption under disguises, where the original idea is totally changed, or presented in such an idiotic way, that probably the new film derived has nothing to do with the original one.

Director Coline Serreau presents a story about today's society, where there's always no time to pay attention to things, let alone go to the aid of someone who's being victimized on the street. The Vidals, a bourgeois couple are a typical example of people so preoccupied in their own little game; they have no time to help the young woman who is beaten to a pulp in front of their eyes.

Well, actually, Mme. Vidal has a conscience. She protests to Paul, her husband; he couldn't care less. She goes to the hospital where the victim is under a coma, trying to put things right. She then becomes obsessed with the situation. At least she is a decent, if somehow tardy Samaritan.

Noemi, the woman who's been beaten has her own sad story. Played with conviction by Rashida Brakni, she puts a plan to avenge herself against the people that got her in the present situation and tried to kill her.

The interplay between Noemi and Mme. Vidal, also played earnestly by Catherine Frot, is one of the best combinations of wits in a film.

The film never lets up. Showing a sure hand, Ms Serreau gives us an enjoyable film and a feminist take on the way things are done when a woman decides to say enough to all kinds of abuses she has been put all her life.

It's funny; the two best films I've seen this year (sadly, CHAOS has only just made it to the Midwest United States in 2003), are both from France. Not only that, but none of the American films I've seen thus far even come close to this or Gaspar Noe's IRREVERSIBLE. Maybe we should rethink that stupid freedom fries thing and go seek out some real culture. CHAOS is a great film, a film that wastes no time. It starts with a bang when an Algerian prostitute named Noemie begs for a ride from Paul and his wife Helene as they drive by the scene of her merciless beating at the hands of three pimps. Paul locks the doors and, after the pimps have gone, leaving Noemie unconscious, gets out of the car only to wipe the windshield clean of the inconvenient blood Noemie has spilled upon it. A perfect opening to this film, showing the frailty of women at the hands of dominating men, and the inhumanity and selfishness of said men. As a human of the male persuasion myself, I was surprised to not feel any resentment toward the film's representation of manhood. It does not try to convince the viewer that all men are like this; just all the men in this film. At the same time, many men might feel uncomfortable at the incisiveness of the film's characterizations. At one point Helene says, "Not all men are bastards"; Noemie merely shrugs and smirks ever so slightly. It is more telling than a thousand words.