CHAOS []
Feminism made fun. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 109 minutes. Not rated (violence, sex scenes, language). At the Angelika, corner of Houston and Mercer streets, and the Lincoln Plaza, Broadway bet. 62nd and 63rd streets.
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COLINE Serreau’s restless film draws some interesting parallels between the way an upper-class Western family and a poverty-stricken Arab one repress women equally, but the message itself is subjugated by the credibility-stretching medium.
Never mind. This energetic pastiche of social commentary, revenge thriller and broad farce is more intent on its role as an entertaining romp than any serious stab at changing the world.
The film opens with a metaphorical slap in the face: A bourgeois Parisian couple driving to dinner is stopped by a hooker running from her pimps.
The hatefully selfish Paul (Vincent Lindon) locks the doors against her frantic screams and, once the thugs have run off leaving her lying bloodied and beaten, he wipes the blood from his windshield before driving off.
Overcome with remorse his wife, Helene (Catherine Frot) visits the comatose Noemie (the electric newcomer Rachida Brakni, in a role that’s made her a star in her native France) in the hospital.
Soon Helene has all but abandoned her obnoxious husband and equally chauvinistic teenage son (Aurelien Wiik) to spend her days nursing the injured streetwalker back to health, while simultaneously protecting her from the pimps who are still out to get her.
When Noemie regains consciousness, she launches into a long expositional flashback in which we learn her real name is Malika and she was forced into a kind of sex slavery after running away from her strict Algerian family to escape an arranged marriage.
This affecting and horrifying – occasionally implausible – interlude sits uneasily with the antic comic tone of the rest of the film, yet somehow it works.
Soon the two women form an alliance with Paul’s lonely widowed mother (Line Renaud) and, through a jumbled series of events that unfold at breakneck speed, the downtrodden femmes come out on top.
Without exception, the men are painted with broad brush strokes as odious misogynists and, without exception, they get their comeuppance.
There’s a carnivalesque medley of subplots scampering about the screen, but Serreau manages to emerge triumphant with all the threads nimbly stitched together.