The Bridesmaid (Le Demoiselle d'Honneur)

A smouldering demented femme disrupts a buttoned-up bourgeois existence. Dead bodies pop up. Elegant, yet coolly dispassionate Hitchcockian rhythms with no particular place to go. Yep, it’s a Claude Chabrol movie alright. Never quite as terrible as the rest of the New Wave enfants, The Bridesmaid marks the 75 year old director’s second crack at a Ruth Rendell mystery, but that’s no cause to panic. In common with other mainland European renditions of the Rendell oeuvre (think Live Flesh), Monsieur Chabrol’s virtuoso demi-noir entertainment couldn’t be less suitable for teatime television.
At the butt of this dark oedipal joke is Benoit Magimel‘s Philippe, a hotshot sales executive at a building firm and the breadwinner elect in a fatherless household shared with his chillingly coquettish mother and two sisters. At a family wedding, he meets uninhibited firecracker, Senta (Laura Smet, the sultry 23-year old daughter of parochial popster Johnny Hallyday), who tears off her bridesmaid attire with even more haste than a turquoise garment deserves and declares her undying love.
In common with much of the director’s output, this Strangers On The Train motif is padded out with class frictions and Freudian guff (the crumbling basement practically pulls up its t-shirt and screams ‘id’, while the sight of our young hero fondling a statue that looks like mommy and new girlfriend will have most calling for a nailing to the nearest hillside) but these familiar themes are easily carried by Chabrol’s deft capacity for intrigue.
On occasion, however, you can tell The Bridesmaid is the work of a septuagenarian – teenagers explain radical phraseology like 'tripped out’ for the benefit of their perplexed elders, and during one scene maman’s prospective suitor is scorned as “…not the Kevin Costner you were hoping for.” Yeah, because all us under-'60s gals think Kev’s hot to trot.

Running Time 100mins. Cert IFI Members. Opens May 13th.